Church says goodbye to polarizing former leader
Legacy one of influence, shock over resignation
Benedict XVI, the pope emeritus, a quiet scholar of diamondhard intellect who spent much of his life enforcing church doctrine and defending tradition before shocking the Roman Catholic world by becoming the first pope in six centuries to resign, died Saturday. He was 95.
Benedict’s death was announced by the Vatican. No cause was given. This past week, the Vatican said that Benedict’s health had taken a turn for the worse “due to advancing age.”
On Wednesday, Pope Francis asked those present at his weekly audience at the Vatican to pray for Benedict, who he said was “very ill.” He later visited him at the monastery on the Vatican City grounds where Benedict had lived since announcing his resignation in February 2013.
In that announcement, citing a loss of stamina and his “advanced age” at 85, Benedict said he was stepping down freely and “for the good of the church.” The decision, surprising the faithful and the world at large, capped a papacy of almost eight years in which his efforts to reenergize the Roman Catholic Church were often overshadowed by the unresolved sexual abuse scandal in the clergy.
After the selection of his successor that March — Pope Francis, the former Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Buenos Aires — and a temporary stay at Castel Gandolfo, the papal summer residence, Benedict moved to a convent in Vatican City. It was the first time that two pontiffs had shared the same grounds.
The two men were reportedly on good terms, but it was at times an awkward arrangement, and Francis moved to reshape the papacy, firing or demoting many of Benedict’s traditionalist appointees and elevating the virtue of mercy over rules that Benedict had spent decades refining and enforcing.
Benedict was soon eclipsed by Francis, an unexpectedly popular successor who immediately sought to widen Catholicism’s appeal and to make the Vatican newly relevant in world affairs. But as Francis’ traditionalistminded critics raised their voices in the later 2010s, they made Benedict a rallying point of their opposition, fueling fears that his resignation could promote a schism.
In 2019, Benedict broke his post-papacy silence, issuing a letter that seemed at odds with his successor’s view of the sexual abuse scandals. Benedict attributed the crisis to the sexual revolution of the 1960s, secularization, and an erosion of morality that he pinned on liberal theology. Francis, by contrast, saw its origins in the exaltation of authority and abuse of power in the church hierarchy.
Given his frail health at the time, many church watchers questioned whether Benedict had indeed written the letter or had been manipulated to issue it as a way to undercut Francis.
Benedict himself was swept up in the scandal after a January 2022 report that had been commissioned by the Catholic Church in Munich to investigate how the church had handled cases of sexual abuse between 1945 and 2019. The report contended that Benedict had mishandled four cases involving the sexual abuse of minors decades ago, while he was an archbishop in Germany, and that he had misled investigators in his written answers.
After the report was made public, Benedict acknowledged that “abuses and errors” had taken place under his watch and asked for forgiveness. But he denied any misconduct.
It was a painful paradox to his supporters that the longgathering sexual abuse crisis should finally hit the Vatican with a vengeance under Benedict, in 2010. As Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, charged with leading the powerful Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican office responsible for defending church orthodoxy, he had been ahead of many peers in recognizing how deeply the church had been damaged by disclosures that priests around the world had sexually abused youths for decades.
Elected pope on April 19, 2005, after the death of John Paul II, Benedict went on to apologize for the abuse and met with victims, a first for the papacy. But he could not escape the reality that the church had shielded priests accused of molestation, minimized behavior that it would otherwise have deemed immoral, and kept all of it secret from the civil authorities, forestalling criminal prosecutions.
The reckoning clouded the widely held view that Benedict was the most influential intellectual force in the church in a generation.
John Paul II had won hearts, but it was Ratzinger who defined the corrective to what he and John Paul saw as an alarming liberal shift within the church, set in motion by the reforms of the Second Vatican Council in the early 1960s.
The church’s 265th pope, Benedict was the first German to hold the title in a half-millennium, and his election was a milestone toward Germany’s spiritual renewal 60 years after World War II and the Holocaust. At 78, he was also the oldest man to become pope since 1730.
Benedict was difficult to label ideologically. Though conservative in his religious and social views, he took what many considered to be liberal stands: promoting environmental protection; condemning the American war in Iraq; and, perhaps most baffling to conservatives, criticizing capitalism, notably during the financial crisis that erupted in 2008.
He also had an unpredictable streak, as his surprise resignation made clear. In 2010, he addressed the church’s strict ban on condoms, which had been particularly criticized during the AIDS crisis that gripped Africa. While condoms were not “a real or moral solution” to the AIDS epidemic, he said, “there may be a basis in the case of some individuals, as perhaps when a male prostitute uses a condom, where this can be a first step in the direction of a moralization, a first assumption of responsibility.”
From the outset, Benedict was prone to making provocative statements alienating one ethnic or religious group or another. These were then followed by clarifications or apologies.
In January 2009, he lifted the excommunications of four breakaway bishops who belonged to the far-right Society of Saint Pius X. One of them, Richard Williamson, had roused outrage when he said in an interview days earlier that Nazi gas chambers had never existed and that only several hundred thousand Jews had died in the Holocaust, and not as a deliberate Nazi policy.
The pope cast his decision as an effort to heal a schism in the church. His critics said it was an extreme example of his willingness to cater to the far-right Catholic fringe.
Liberals in the church had made the same complaint two years earlier, when Benedict loosened restrictions on use of the old Latin Mass. That decision angered Jewish groups as well, because it allowed the use of a Good Friday prayer that calls for the conversion of Jews.
The controversies distracted from Benedict’s accomplishments. His pastoral letters, or encyclicals, on love, hope, and charity were acclaimed as wise and eloquent. His promoting of what his biographer John L. Allen Jr. called “affirmative orthodoxy” emphasized the good that Catholic life could bring rather than the actions that the church forbade — a theme that stood in contrast to his laying down the law for the faithful when he was a cardinal overseeing church doctrine, drawing complaints that he was divisive.
Joseph Alois Ratzinger was born April 16, 1927, in the Bavarian village of Marktl am Inn to Joseph and his wife, Maria, a cook for small inns, who had two other children: Maria, born in 1921, and Georg, born in 1924.
In the same way that any understanding of John Paul has to begin with his roots in Communist Poland as Karol Jozef Wojtyla, any insight into Benedict must take into account his coming-of-age in conservative and religious Bavaria during the maelstrom of World War II. Along with the rest of the students at his school, Ratzinger was automatically enrolled in the Hitler Youth, in 1941. Two years later, as a seminarian, he was drafted into the military, first assigned to an anti-aircraft unit and later to the infantry. He was never sent to the front.
There is no evidence that he had Nazi sympathies, as some insinuated after he became pope. He deserted the army near the end of the war and spent months in an American prisoner-of-war camp before his release in June 1945.
Later, as the archbishop of Munich from 1977 to 1982, he said little about the Holocaust or Germany’s guilt, though he had an important role in John Paul’s efforts to repair the rift between Jews and Christians.
After the war, Ratzinger and his brother resumed their studies for the priesthood and were ordained on the same day, June 29, 1951. Ratzinger earned his doctorate with a dissertation on St. Augustine and his professorship with a treatise on St. Bonaventure, the medieval Italian philosopher, theologian and priest who gave the church many of its intellectual underpinnings.
In 1977, Pope Paul VI named Ratzinger archbishop of Munich and Freising. Later that year, he was named a cardinal, the top cadre of the church from which popes are selected.
More than a year later, another conservative, Wojtyla, became Pope John Paul II. In 1981, John Paul summoned Ratzinger to Rome to take up one of the church’s most important jobs: prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the defender of church orthodoxy. Ratzinger assumed the post full time the next year.
He went on to become the Vatican’s point man in 2001 in the priesthood’s mounting sexual abuse crisis. His office became flooded with case files from bishops seeking church trials for priests accused of pedophilia, and every Friday he would read a stack of them, a routine he called “our Friday penance,” his associates said.
In the days after John Paul’s death, in April 2005, no cardinal had more stature than Ratzinger, and as the dean of the College of Cardinals, he was at the center of the transition to the election of a successor.
Just over two weeks later, on April 19, 2005, in one of the shortest conclaves in modern history, puffs of white smoke rose in St. Peter’s Square, signaling that a pope had been elected. Within an hour, he appeared before hundreds of thousands of onlookers and announced his name, Benedict XVI.
In April 2008, he made his first trip to the United States, home to 65 million Catholics. Part of the trip’s goal, said Archbishop Pietro Sambi, the papal nuncio to the United States, was to dispel the idea among Americans that Benedict was “this tough, this inhuman, person.”
The pope aimed to address the sexual abuse scandal that had forced the resignation of Cardinal Bernard F. Law in Boston, the scandal’s epicenter. He went far beyond expectations, apologizing several times and meeting with victims.
Benedict’s last act as pope, resigning, was by most reckonings his most radical; it was something no pope had done since 1415, when Gregory XII stepped down amid a leadership crisis in the church known as the Western Schism.
Benedict formally left the public eye on Feb. 28, 2013, when he was taken by helicopter to Castel Gandolfo. There he appeared at a window, a grandfatherly figure with snowy white hair, and wished the faithful good night, saying, “I am simply a pilgrim beginning the last leg of his pilgrimage on this earth.”