Modest, musical and concerned with Christian love, this pope is nobody's Rottweiler

It's remarkable what a year, and a change of name, can do for a man. The transformation of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger into Pope Benedict XVI has confounded expectations. When, on 19 April 2005, the Chilean cardinal Jorge Estévez emerged over the big central doors of St Peter's to declare "Habemus papam" and pronounced the word "Josephum", an elderly bishop next to one of the TV reporters burst into tears. David Willey, the BBC's Rome correspondent, could hardly contain his indignation. Ratzinger, dubbed the Grand Inquisitor by the dissident German theologian Hans Küng, was the nightmare choice as far as Catholic liberals were concerned. He was the head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and a strict enforcer of doctrinal orthodoxy. If your tastes ran to liberation theology, women priests and the moral equivalence of the major religions (pace Cherie Blair telling the Saudi ambassador "we're all the same"), his appointment was bad news.

A year on and it's hard to find anyone with a bad word to say against the Pope, apart from the sort of people who will detest any pope on principle and American Catholic conservatives whose hopes of a crackdown on liberals have been confounded. Gerald O'Collins, a Jesuit theologian who had a difficult brush with the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith when the Pope was in his old job, recalls Morris West's story The Devil's Advocate, in which the hero undergoes a benign transformation in the last months of his life. "I don't believe that the leopard can't change his spots," he says cheerfully. John Wilkins, a former editor of the liberal Catholic weekly the Tablet, says: "It's still possible to breathe freely." Hans Küng himself has been to visit the Pope, and their meeting was both friendly and open. That staggered everyone.

The most notable changes in the nature of the papacy have been in terms of style - though you should never underestimate the importance of style for this institution. The demeanour of this pope has been as different as possible from his predecessor, who was, to his bones, a showman. Pope Benedict is, by contrast, instinctively modest. He has, as Fidel Castro remarked, the "face of a good angel" but it's not what you'd call a photogenic face, not with the heavy shadows under the eyes. It has taken time for him even to work on his papal wave. The Rome correspondent of the Tablet, Robert Mickens, observes that Benedict keeps referring in his sermons to "our beloved Pope, John Paul", on one occasion even describing his predecessor as "the Pope". As Mickens says: "You want to say to him, you know, you are the Pope."

He has dropped some papal trappings - the triple crown from his coat of arms and his title of "Patriarch of the West" (a gesture which unfortunately didn't cut much ice with the Orthodox churches). Indeed he rarely describes himself by the Pope's customary title of the Vicar of Christ. Perhaps the single most significant change has been in the Church's approach to Islam. He has had amicable meetings with imams, but he has taken a new direction by insisting that the freedoms Muslims enjoy in the west should be reciprocated; that there should be religious liberty for Christians in Islamic countries, too. And while he remains opposed to female priests, he has been cautiously positive about giving women "more space, more positions of responsibility" within the Church.

His personal habits remain modest: he still has his cats, and plays Mozart or Bach on the piano every evening. He occasionally revisits his old flat, above a souvenir shop just outside the Vatican. And although he is the first pope in history to own an iPod, he drinks lemonade or Orangina, or perhaps a little beer, rather than anything grander. He doesn't grant extra access to privileged visitors as his predecessor did.

It may be that Pope Benedict, who will turn 79 on Easter Sunday, is simply biding his time. Robert Mickens recalls a story that when he was a young professor at Tübingen University, he was advised by his mentor not to make great changes during his first year in a new post, but to listen and allow himself to be known.

None the less, he has marked himself out from his predecessor. His encyclical Deus Caritas Est (God is Love) was remarkable as a celebration of divine love reflected in spiritual and bodily human love, and in the love of neighbour that finds expression in acts of charity. There were no strictures, no harangues. The same was true of his address to the World Youth Day meeting in Cologne. He didn't wag his finger; he didn't bang on about abortion. He talked about the love of Christ.

The transformation of Joseph Ratzinger into Pope Benedict XVI has taken everyone by surprise, but in a good way.

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