“It is with great pain that I have to announce that Benedict XVI, Pope Emeritus, died at 9.34 a.m. today in the Mater Ecclesiae Monastery in the Vatican,” said the spokesman for the Holy See, Matteo Bruni, on Saturday morning. The state of health of the Bavarian, who was head of the Catholic Church from 2005 until his resignation in 2013, had recently deteriorated further.
First resignation since the 13th century
“As for myself, I want to continue to serve the holy Church of God with all my heart through a life of prayer.” With these words Benedict XVI concluded. In 2013, he announced his resignation, surprising the whole world.
His spectacular resignation almost went unnoticed. Ironically, during a consistory for the beatification of two martyrs, Benedict announced that he wanted to give up the throne of Peter – in Latin. It was the Italian journalist Giovanna Chirri who first caught the pope’s announcement. “I understood that he was resigning, but I didn’t want to believe it,” Chirri said at the time. Thanks to her knowledge of Latin, the news went around the world shortly afterwards.
Benedict XVI wrote church history. He had repeatedly “examined his conscience before God” and had come to the certainty “that, due to my advanced age, my strength is no longer suitable to carry out the ministry of Peter in an appropriate manner,” the Pope said in justification for his withdrawal. Only one pope had previously resigned, Celestine V, who was elected in 1294 and resigned from office a few months later for reasons of conscience.
After his successor Pope Francis took office, Benedict withdrew from public life, but continued to wear papal robes and was addressed as “Holy Father”. His health no longer allowed him to take part in large events. On his 90th birthday, he received guests in the Vatican and thanked God: “There were also trials in difficult times, in everything he always led me further, brought me out so that I could go on and am filled with thanks.”
scandals and affairs
The “trials” were particularly challenging during the pontificate of the churchman, who was born Joseph Ratzinger in Bavaria. Although he always gave health and aging as the reason for his resignation, many rumors circulated about the supposedly true background. The withdrawal was attributed to power intrigues in the Curia, which had become unbearable for the pope after the VatiLeaks affair over stolen documents, Vatican insiders reported at the time. The papal valet Paolo Gabriele had confidential files from Benedict XVI’s desk. stolen and passed on to the Italian journalist Gianluigi Nuzzi, who published them. Gabriele was sentenced to one and a half years in prison in October 2012, but was pardoned by Ratzinger three days before Christmas.
Other scandals also fell in Benedict’s era, most notably a wave of revelations about sexual abuse in the church broke out during his tenure. He himself was also accused of “covering up” and “delaying” the investigation. Although Ratzinger was committed to investigating the abuse cases during his time as Cardinal of the Curia, the topic haunted him to the end. A report recently presented in Munich accused Benedict of making serious mistakes in dealing with a pedophile priest during his time as Archbishop of Munich. Benedikt expressed “shock and shame” about the results and apologized about three weeks after the report was published. Allegations that he covered up abuse were rejected by his lawyers.
Also conflicts within the church
Benedict also received a lot of criticism for his approach to the arch-conservative Pius Brothers with Holocaust denier Richard Williamson. Benedict had the excommunication of their bishops lifted. On the other hand, he put the rod in the window of other, more liberal forces in the church. For example, he demanded obedience from the Austrian “priests’ initiative” around Helmut Schüller, which had called for disobedience in the church. The initiative called for the admission of women and married men to the priesthood – a red rag for Benedict.
Benedikt’s speech in Regensburg in 2006, in which he discussed the relationship between religion and violence during a visit to Bavaria, also caused a stir. In it, the pontiff quoted from a dialogue between the Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Palaiologos and a Persian scholar, probably conducted in Ankara in 1391. Anyone who wants to “convince a reasonable soul” and lead them to believe “needs the ability to speak well and think correctly, but not violence and threats,” said the emperor. “Show me what new things Muhammad brought, and you will only find bad and inhumane things like this, that he prescribed spreading the faith that he preached by the sword.” This was followed by riots in the Islamic world, in Somalia a nun was murdered.
Reach out to other faith communities
Despite many negative headlines in Benedict’s term of office, he also set strong, lasting accents in the church. He also promoted relations with other faith communities, especially the Orthodox and Judaism. He was the first pope to enter a synagogue in Germany and spoke at the former Auschwitz concentration camp and at Jerusalem’s Holocaust memorial. He was met with great enthusiasm on his travels, whether in Latin America, Africa or Europe.
But Benedict XVI. was not a “Pope you can touch” like his successor Francis. He was a theologian at heart and always had an academic approach – not least because of his career. Born on April 16, 1927 in Marktl am Inn, Ratzinger was the youngest child of parents Josef and Maria. Brother Georg also became a cleric, and the family was strongly influenced by faith. As a teenager he was forcibly drafted into the Hitler Youth and later into the Wehrmacht. After his ordination in 1951, Ratzinger taught at various colleges and universities for almost 25 years.
The “Panzercardinal”
In 1977 Pope Paul VI appointed him. to the Archbishop of Munich and Freising. In the same year he was ordained a bishop and shortly thereafter made a cardinal. From 1981 he worked as prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in Rome and dealt with major internal church controversies such as liberation theology, ecumenical issues such as the position of the Catholic Church in relation to other Christian communities, but also with issues of modern society such as artificial insemination and homosexual partnerships.
It was the work of a hardliner in the church, a job that earned him nicknames like “Panzercardinal” and “God’s Rottweiler” in the media. This picture changed only slowly after his papal election in 2005, which he described as a “guillotine that would fall on me”. He thought he had already fulfilled his life’s work and now “can hope for a peaceful end to his days,” he said at the time.
Well-regarded writings
It is also through his writings that believers will remember Benedict, most notably through the three-volume book Jesus of Nazareth. His three encyclicals Deus caritas est (God is love, 2005), Spe salvi (Saved in hope, 2007) and Caritas in veritate (Love in truth, 2009) were also well received.
fuss about late lyrics
However, writings that were created much later also caused a stir. In April 2019, the Pope Emeritus’ thoughts on the abuse scandal caused a stir. He saw the ’68s as a cause of child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church. “Part of the physiognomy of the 1968 revolution was that pedophilia was now also permitted and diagnosed as appropriate,” wrote Benedikt in an essay.
After consultation with his successor Francis, he wrote the text for the Bavarian “Klerusblatt”, it is said. It says: In the years from 1960 to 1980 “the previously applicable standards in questions of sexuality completely collapsed” and “a lack of norms emerged, which efforts have now been made to intercept”. A number of commentators suspected that the text, which was disseminated by the media critical of Francis, was a criticism of the incumbent head of the church and problematized the fundamental relationship between the incumbent and the pope emeritus.
“Humble Laborer in the Lord’s Vineyard”
Similar voices were raised in 2020 when arch-conservative Cardinal Robert Sarah named the former pope as a co-author of his book “Des profondeurs de nos coeurs” (Eng: “From the bottom of our hearts”). The work warns against a relaxation of celibacy for Catholic priests. Priests are also “confused” by the “constant questioning” of celibacy. However, Ratzinger’s private secretary Georg Gänswein said that Benedikt never agreed to co-authorship and asked for his name to be removed from the book’s cover. The same applies to Benedikt’s signature under the introduction and conclusion.
Now the Vatican and the Catholic Church have lost a retired pontiff. Pope Francis had Benedict XVI. once described as a “revolutionary” because “his resignation exposed all the problems of the church”. Benedict himself saw himself differently, as he called out to the faithful on St. Peter’s Square after his papal election: he only wanted to be “a humble worker in the Lord’s vineyard”.
At the latest after the death of his brother Georg, with whom Benedict always had a close relationship, the retired Pope seemed to be increasingly concerned with his own death. When the Austrian religious and church historian Gerhard Winkler died in early October 2021, Benedict XVI wrote. in a letter of condolence: “Now he has reached the afterlife, where many friends are sure to be waiting for him. I hope to be able to join them soon.”
