"The Pope's admiration for the U.S. has deep roots. Unlike John Paul II, who was intellectually and theologically fully formed when he met his first Americans, Ratzinger first observed them when he was 18. As a defeated German soldier, he spent three months in a pow camp but was then allowed to return home and witness one of the great modern acts of charity, the rebuilding of Germany by an occupying force that could just as easily have exacted revenge. Cardinal William Levada, the Californian whom Benedict tapped as his successor at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), says, "He's of a generation that remembers, gratefully." "