Perhaps I misunderstood your statement. I understood that “inflammatory” meant “passionate” or “irate”. If you mean “upsetting for liberals”, then probably yes, Ratzinger’s discourse is “inflammatory”… but for liberals, not himself, who is quite moderate and restrained in expression, or for his audience. Actually few Popes have been emotionally colder than Benedict XVI in the last decades (even Paul VI seems lively in comparison).

OTOH, the Catholic Church is much more, and much more complex, than the Pope or the Vatican itself, so whoever the Pope is, most Catholics, including many parish priests, monks and nuns, and even some bishops, do not pay much attention anyway.

I do not know what the bottom line is for Christians. The Christian religion does not seem to have been born from Jesus’s teachings and parables, but from the empty tomb and the tales of people who had seen him alive, which gave new meaning to his life in retrospect. Liberals tend to focus on the ethical message (and even then, a selective message centered upon the so-called “wisdom sayings” and generally ignoring the messianic/apocalyptic connotations of that ethics), which is a way of choosing one possible Jesus and rejecting other possible Jesuses. I plan to write on that in my blog one of these days (when I have some time, which is not frequent lately).