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Interesting. But OTOH I didn't know membership was mandatory either. I always found it ironic that Cardinal Ratzinger and JPII, given the polar opposites of their positions in life during the war, felt so much in common, until I read this from The Tablet.

JOSEPH RATZINGER was born in Marktl am Inn, Bavaria, in 1927, and grew up under Hitler’s shadow in the Thirties. His family was anti-Nazi, but not involved in resistance; his father, a policeman, accepted assignments in progressively smaller towns in order to stay clear of politics. The young Ratzinger drew inward, immersing himself in the florid Bavarian piety of the era. In later reflection on the war and Nazism, many German theologians of Ratzinger’s generation, such as the famed moralist Bernard Häring, saw the dangers of blind obedience as its central lesson, fuelling a reform streak in German Catholicism. Ratzinger, however, drew a different conclusion. Only a Church with a strong central authority and rock-solid doctrinal verities, he concluded, can withstand a hostile state or culture. This conviction – one he shares with Pope John Paul II – has informed much of his later Vatican career.