The emeritus pope Benedict XVIthe German Joseph Ratzingerdied this Saturday in the Vatican at the age of 95, almost a decade after his resignation in 2013 from a brief pontificate and not without controversy, a gesture with which he revolutionized the Church and opened the doors to the election that year of the Argentinian Jorge bergoglio like the dad Francisco.
“After repeatedly examining my conscience before God, I have come to the certainty that my strength, due to my advanced age, is no longer adequate for the exercise of my Ministry. I freely declare that I renounce the ministry of Bishop of Rome and Successor of Peter”Ratzinger announced, in Latin, to a group of cardinals who were listening to him on a Monday holiday in the Vatican, February 11, 2013. The pope thus announced his resignation from office as of the 28th of that month and thus began one of the most important transitions in 2,000 years of Catholicism.
Hit by internal disputes that had their highest peak in the first scandal Vatileaks who revealed the theft of secret documents from his butler, Ratzinger survived less than eight years in office for which he had been elected on April 19, 2005.
The surprise was such that even the Holy See did not know what verb to use for the act and even what Ratzinger would be called once his resignation became effective on February 28 of that year: finally they opted for the “pope emeritus” with whom it was mentioned until today. It was the first voluntary resignation of a Pope since that of Celestine V in 1294.
Ratzinger, born in the Bavarian town of Marktl on April 16, 1927, never regretted his resignation. “It was a difficult decision. I made it in full conscience and I think I did the right thing,” said 93-year-old German Benedict XVI in an interview with the Corriere della Sera newspaper in March 2021. “Some of my friends are a bit fanatical they are still angry, they did not want to accept my choice”, Ratzinger acknowledged then and from his confinement in the Mater Ecclesiae monastery in the Vatican Gardens, he added: “I think about the conspiracy theories that followed him: who said it was the fault of the scandal of Vatileaks, some from a gay lobby conspiracy, some from the case of conservative Lefebvrian theologian Richard Williamson. They don’t want to believe in conscious choice. But my conscience is fine.”
After a cinematographic farewell to the Vatican, Benedict XVI secluded himself for a time in Castel Gandolfo, the then papal summer residence, which he arrived by helicopter, and it was from there that he continued the conclave that on March 13 of that year elected Bergoglio as the 266th pontiff in history.
In 2016, at a press conference with journalists upon his return from Armenia, Francis denied that Ratzinger’s presence could mean the existence of “two popes” and called him a “wise grandfather.” “Benedict is pope emeritus. He clearly said on February 11 that he was giving his resignation as of February 28, that he was retiring to help the Church with prayer. And Benedict is in the monastery praying. I have gone to visit him many times or I speak to him on the phone,” Bergoglio said then.
One of the great controversies in Ratzinger’s life was his time, which he himself recognized, through the Hitler Youth. In “Salt of the Earth”, from dialogues with the journalist Peter Seewald, the then Cardinal Ratzinger acknowledged that he had been enrolled in the group, although he implied that he had not been a volunteer. When asked if he had been a member of that group, he said: “At first no, but when the Hitler Youth were forced into it in 1941, my brother was forced to join. I was still very young, but later, as a seminarian, I was registered with the JH. As soon as I finished the seminar, I never came back.” In the book, he also commented that he served in anti-aircraft units and that he was enlisted in the German infantry shortly after during the war.
Earlier this year, Benedict XVI had been involved in one last controversy, after a report on abuses in the German Church at the time when Ratzinger was Archbishop of Munich, between 1977 and 1982. In a letter released by the Vatican, Ratzinger showed in February his “sincere request for forgiveness” as well as his “deep shame” to the victims of abuse by members of the Church after reports of pedophilia in Germany. “To all the victims of sexual abuse my deep shame, my great pain and my sincere request for forgiveness. I have had a great responsibility in the Catholic Church. My pain is all the greater for the abuses and mistakes that have occurred over time of my term in the respective places,” he added.
Two years ago, in the midst of the pandemic and at the age of 93, Benedict XVI left Italy for the last time on a trip to Germany to visit his sick brother, Georg, who died days later. During his 7 and a half years as Pope, Benedict XVI made 24 official trips, including one to Brazil in 2007 for the V Conference of the Latin American Bishops, one of the two he made to the region along with one in 2012 to Mexico and Cuba.
Ratzinger was born in Marktl am Inn, diocese of Passau (Germany), on April 16, 1927. His father, a commissioner of the gendarmerie, came from an old family of farmers from Lower Bavaria, of rather modest economic conditions, while that his mother was the daughter of artisans from Rimsting, on Lake Chiem, as reported by the Vatican at the time of his election as pontiff. He spent his childhood and adolescence in Traunstein, a small town near the Austrian border. In this framework, which he himself has defined as “Mozartian”, he received his Christian, human and cultural formation. With a marked academic profile that accompanied him throughout his life, he was a professor at several universities and creator with Hans Urs von Balthasar, and other great theologians, of the theological magazine “Communio”.
In 1977, the then Pope Paul VI created him a cardinal and named him Archbishop of Munich and Freising and with the red cap he participated in the elections, in 1978, of John Paul I and John Paul II. it was just Karol Wojtila who named him prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the body in charge of guarding Catholic doctrine and which he presided over for 24 years, which accentuated his conservative profile.
Ratzinger was “emeritus” longer than “regent”: elected in 2005, he resigned in 2013. Eight years against almost ten. And while he remained on the side of the Throne of Saint Peter, he always tried to reiterate that “the Pope is only one”, facilitating the pontificate of his successor.
In 2020 Francis had described Benedict XVI as “a revolutionary”, casting aside the looks that since the beginning of the Argentine Pope’s pontificate sought to oppose them, despite Bergoglio’s recurring visits to the Matter Ecclesia monastery to greet his predecessor. “I get angry when they say that Benedict is a conservative, Benedict was a revolutionary! In so many things he did, in so many things he said, he was a revolutionary. Then he got old and could not continue, but he was a true revolutionary,” Francisco said in a passage from the interview book “Terrafutura”in one of his last public appreciations about the Pope emeritus who died on the last day of 2022.
