Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, known most recently because the pontiff who renounced the papacy, but who was situated squarely on the centers of power during five many years of epochal change and unprecedented scandal in the worldwide Catholic Church, died on Dec. 31 within the apartment he kept inside a Vatican monastery.
A person whose very name conjured images of a return to the theological repression of the sixteenth century for a lot of, he first appeared on the church’s international stage as Joseph Ratzinger, a young German priest-theologian advocating for progressive reforms on the 1962-65 Second Vatican Council.
He was a bishop and cardinal who exalted the position of Catholic clergy, considering them privileged and other than lay faithful. But he would eventually, following many years of delay, act against sexually abusive priests, after spending hours each week reading through the briefs of the worldwide scandal when he was head of the Vatican’s doctrinal office.
For seven years and 10 months, he led the church because the 264th successor of St. Peter, writing documents noted for his or her spiritual depth and attempting reform of the Vatican bureaucracy.
But he also oversaw a period of general malaise within the church. It had been buffeted by stories of scandal that spread across continents and by a general perception that it had disengaged from the trendy world, causing some to even wonder if the millennia-old institution may be past its expiration date.
Then he did something no pope had done of his own free will in greater than 700 years: resign. In a single humble, surprising act, he made way for a predecessor almost immediately seen as more able to the office and more capable of plot a course for Catholicism’s future.
Ultimately, perhaps Benedict didn’t a lot tower over his times as he attempted to steadily shape them, fashioning theological arguments and critiques in hopes they might find root eventually, if not win immediate acclamation.
News of the previous pope’s death got here on the morning of Dec. 31, after Pope Francis, during his Dec. 28 weekly general audience asked for prayers for Benedict, saying he’s “very sick.”
The ex-pontiff was known to be in frail health for several years. His only visit outside Italy during his post-papacy was to go to his now-deceased brother Georg in Bavaria in June 2020. He looked frail and was in a wheelchair when he greeted Francis on the Mater Ecclesiae monastery after a consistory for the creation of 20 latest cardinals in St. Peter’s Basilica Aug. 27.
The Vatican said that his time of death on Dec. 31 was 9:34 a.m., Central European Time. Starting on Jan. 2, 2023, his body will probably be placed in St. Peter’s Basilica for mourners to go to. The funeral will probably be held on Jan. 5.
Benedict, who led the church from 2005 after the dynamic and commanding Pope John Paul II and before the widely endearing Pope Francis, may not ultimately be most remembered for his public persona or for any single decision he made as pope.
Yet, he will certainly be recalled for his long, persistent struggle — first because the cardinal who headed the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith for greater than twenty years, after which as pope — to implement a narrow interpretation of the wide reforms introduced at Vatican II.
Cardinal Donald Wuerl, whom Benedict moved to Washington, D.C., in his first major U.S. bishop appointment in 2006, said the deceased pope highlighted the necessity for theological cohesion by connecting the council’s changes with the church’s past traditions.
“He was the pope of continuity,” Wuerl, who resigned as archbishop of Washington in 2018, said in an NCR interview. “His great contribution, I feel, was advancing the direction called for by the Second Vatican Council but doing so by reconnecting the advances of today with the council and the nice tradition of the church.”
German Cardinal Walter Kasper, a renowned theologian who headed the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity under Benedict, said the previous pope “left an ideal heritage to the church as a pope-theologian.”
“He has deepened the doctrine of the council,” Kasper told NCR. “In his writing, in his homilies, he has deepened our faith, our spirituality.”
U.S. theologian Bradford Hinze said Benedict will “be each criticized and hailed as a staunch defender of a classical Roman and European-centered understanding of the Catholic Church, a position related to the minority of bishops on the council, though not Ratzinger’s own position on the time.”
“He will even be remembered, together with Pope John Paul II, for implementing a restrictive view of collegiality and synodality, and of the role of the faithful within the church’s mission,” said Hinze, the Karl Rahner Professor of Theology at Fordham University and a past president of the Catholic Theological Society of America.
“The death of Pope Benedict may symbolize an end of an era of centralization and clericalism, and mark the brand new starting of a polycentric global church and with it a richer understanding of its catholicity promised by Vatican II,” he said.
John Thavis, a U.S. journalist who spent nearly three many years in Rome covering the Vatican for Catholic News Service, said that Benedict could also be remembered most as someone who strained under the load of the papacy and will not control the Vatican bureaucracy.
“I feel the broader world will remember Benedict as a pope who struggled under the burden of Roman Curia mismanagement and corruption, unable to manage the facility struggles that weakened the Vatican’s prestige and his own pontificate,” said Thavis, who worked for CNS from 1983 to 2012, the last 16 years of those as Vatican bureau chief.
“Above all, [Benedict] will probably be remembered because the pope who resigned,” he said. “It was probably the most courageous decision of his papacy. In a single act, this most traditional of popes reminded Catholics that the papacy isn’t a sacred status, but an office that may, and sometimes should, be put aside.”
For a lot of, Benedict may remain something of a conundrum.
An enthusiastic theological adviser to a German cardinal in any respect 4 sessions of the Second Vatican Council, Benedict would later spend three many years delimiting its reforms. A theologian accustomed to the necessity for tutorial freedom, he would implement latest bounds of debate and silence academics all over the world.
And a pope seen by many because the expression of the centralized, high-office papacy, he would, in a historic first-in-a-millennia act, resign the chair of St. Peter.
The implications and historic import of that final decision proceed to resound.
With Benedict’s death, the world will witness in coming days something never before documented: a pope’s funeral, held with high pomp amid the backdrop of the Baroque facade of St. Peter’s Basilica, celebrated and led by his successor, who is almost 10 years into his own papacy.
Fighting a ‘dictatorship of relativism’
Elected as pope on April 19, 2005, following the April 2 death of John Paul II, who reigned for nearly 27 years, the German Cardinal Ratzinger immediately struck a much different chord than had Polish Cardinal Karol Wojtyla.
Publicly shy and reserved where Wojtyla had been gregarious, outgoing and even commanding, Ratzinger was also 78 on the time of his election and didn’t bring the sense of energy that John Paul, age 58 upon his own election in 1978, had dropped at his.
Ratzinger began his papacy with a simple, two-pronged goal. Explaining his selection of papal name to journalists in April 2005, he said he desired to honor Pope Benedict XV, who pleaded with European leaders for peace through the gruesome First World War, and fifth-century St. Benedict of Nursia, whose life “evokes the Christian roots of Europe.”
Within the footsteps of his Twentieth-century predecessor, he said, “I place my ministry within the service of reconciliation and harmony between peoples.”
He asked the traditional saint, founding father of Benedictine monasticism, to “help us all to carry firm to the centrality of Christ in our Christian life.”
Yet, the difficulties that may face him in achieving each goals were obvious even before the start of his pontificate. Benedict often took a scholarly tone that seemed disengaged, and sometimes presented the situations of the world in stark and unforgiving ways.
He sharply outlined the challenge he saw the church facing in a homily for the Mass Pro Eligendo Romano Pontifice — “for the election of the Roman pontiff” — following John Paul II’s death.
“Each day latest sects spring up, and what St. Paul says about human deception and the trickery that strives to entice people into error comes true,” he said.
Then, using a blunt term that offered insight into his wider mindset, he added: “We’re constructing a dictatorship of relativism that doesn’t recognize anything as definitive and whose ultimate goal consists solely of 1’s own ego and desires.”
One in all the pope’s former students in Germany referred to Benedict’s use of that phrase — “dictatorship of relativism” — as key to understanding how he saw the role of the church after the council.
‘We’re constructing a dictatorship of relativism that doesn’t recognize anything as definitive and whose ultimate goal consists solely of 1’s own ego and desires.’
—Pope Benedict XVI
Francis Schüssler Fiorenza, a U.S. theologian who attended the University of Münster while Ratzinger was a professor there 1963-66, said his former teacher had initially supported the council’s call for more decentralization of church structures within the notion of the collegiality of bishops.
“But when he went to Rome, he favored way more the importance of the central leadership,” said Fiorenza, who recalled Ratzinger as normally biking to the university from his residence and as “by far one of the best and hottest lecturer” at the college.
“I feel the problem of pluralism or relativism — as he might see it — got here increasingly to the forefront of his concerns,” said Fiorenza, a professor at Harvard Divinity School. “This shift to the problem of relativism or pluralism reinforced his shift to the importance of the central organization of the church.”
Benedict’s ability to serve peace was also tested early in his papacy, when he delivered a lecture during a visit to Germany that controversially touched on Islam’s role in Europe. He quoted and commented on 14th-century remarks by a Byzantine emperor who said that Islam brought “only evil and inhuman” things to the continent.
The pope apologized for the Sept. 12, 2006, speech and made a degree of visiting mostly Muslim Turkey just two months later, but street protests were reported on the time there and in India, Pakistan and Palestine.
By the top of his papacy, some were even questioning the firmness of the Christian roots of the Vatican itself.
In January 2012, a television series called “The Untouchables” aired in Italy that alleged massive levels of corruption and deceit contained in the church’s central command, revealing documents that purportedly pointed to blackmailing of closeted homosexual Vatican clergy.
Eventually, the scandal would unfold with a Vatican trial, where Benedict’s personal butler, Paolo Gabriele, admitted leaking information to an Italian journalist in hopes of helping the pope root out the troublemakers.
Gabriele was found guilty in October 2012, but Benedict pardoned him that December.
In March 2012, Benedict had appointed three cardinals to place together a report on the leaks and their aftermath. He received the cardinals’ report that December, only to surprise the world with the announcement of his resignation the next February.
Speaking in Latin during a gathering with cardinals on the Vatican Feb. 11, 2013, Benedict said he had a “lack of strength of will and body” on account of his advanced age and would abdicate the papal throne as of 8 p.m. in Rome that Feb. 28.
Amongst those shocked were the cardinals within the meeting with the pope, lots of whom couldn’t speak Latin and had not understood the gravity of his announcement.
Destined for church leadership
Born Joseph Aloisius Ratzinger on April 16, 1927 — Holy Saturday that 12 months — Benedict was the second son and third child of Joseph Ratzinger Sr., a police officer, and Maria Peintner. They lived mostly within the small town of Marktl within the southeastern German state of Bavaria near Austria.
Seemingly destined for top church office from a young age, German language accounts speak of Ratzinger meeting Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber, then archbishop of Munich and Freising, during a college event at age 5 and coming home to inform his parents that he desired to be a cardinal in the future.
The long run pope would later be ordained a priest by von Faulhaber in 1951 and could be appointed to serve because the archbishop of the identical diocese in 1977.
Growing up under Germany’s Nazi regime, he enrolled within the Hitler Youth in 1941 when membership was mandatory, and in 1943 was drafted into military service. He later deserted.
After the war in Europe ended, Ratzinger entered the seminary at age 18 in 1945 alongside brother Georg, who most notably served for nearly 4 many years because the musical director of the famous cathedral choir in Regensburg.
He earned his doctorate with a thesis on fourth-century St. Augustine and later earned a European teaching credential often called a habilitation with a thesis on St. Bonaventure, certainly one of the primary successors of Thirteenth-century St. Francis of Assisi in leadership of the saint’s burgeoning order.
Within the Sixties and ’70s, Ratzinger taught on the University of Bonn, the University of Münster, the University of Tubingen and the University of Regensburg before his 1977 appointment as archbishop.
Throughout the Second Vatican Council, he served as a theological consultant, or peritus, to Cardinal Josef Frings of Cologne, Germany.
After Ratzinger led the archdiocese of Munich and Freising for about 4 years, John Paul II appointed him as head of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, where the German would function a key adviser to the Polish pope until John Paul’s death.
Once elected pontiff, Benedict focused his academic acumen in writing three encyclicals, considered the very best type of teaching for a pope, and three apostolic exhortations.
The encyclicals — Deus Caritas Est (“God is Love”) in 2005, Spe Salvi (“In Hope We Are Saved”) in 2007, and Caritas in Veritate (“Charity in Truth”) in 2009 — focused mainly on basic Christian virtues, with the last finding Benedict also widely commenting on the church’s long history of social teaching.
In actual fact, lots of the points made in that last document would find an echo in Francis’ later teachings. Benedict sounded an alarm for “unregulated exploitation” of the environment, and roundly rejected laissez-faire capitalism, calling it “thoroughly destructive.”
One U.S. canon lawyer who worked on the Vatican for twenty years during Ratzinger’s leadership highlighted the link between Benedict’s writings and people of his successor.
“There isn’t any doubt that Pope Benedict was a scholar; one who gave up a scholarly retirement to just accept the decision of the church,” said Immaculate Heart of Mary Sr. Sharon Holland, who worked as a staff member on the Vatican’s religious congregation from 1988 to 2009. “His documents are usually not easy reading and, in consequence, probably weren’t widely read.”
“But, as Pope Francis quotes him in documents similar to Laudato Si’, there is larger awareness and welcome of his teachings,” said Holland, who later served because the president of the U.S. Leadership Conference of Women Religious from 2014 to 2015.
Cardinal Wuerl expressed similar sentiments. While Francis is “getting people’s attention” in talking about social issues, he said, “Benedict was already addressing them.”
Benedict likewise drew praise from several quarters for his actions to confront sexual abuse by clergy within the church. In 2001, while head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, he convinced John Paul II to make his office the church’s global control center to analyze accused clergy and draft policies against abuse.
Under his watch as doctrinal prefect and as pope, a whole bunch of abusive priests were faraway from the priesthood.
He can also be credited with pursuing the investigation of Mexican Fr. Marcial Maciel Degollado, a serial child abuser and rapist who founded the powerful and well-connected Legionaries of Christ order. As head of the doctrinal congregation, Ratzinger investigated Maciel, and as pope removed him from ministry in 2006.
Benedict put the order itself right into a form of receivership, appointing a papal delegate to look at its structure and way of functioning.
In July 2010, the Vatican also announced substantial revisions to canon law geared toward fighting sexual abuse. Benedict prolonged the church’s statute of limitations for sexual abuse cases, made it easier to remove priests from the priesthood, and made possession of kid pornography a “grave crime” under church law.
Earlier that 12 months, he had also instructed bishops all over the world to follow the norms of civil law, not only church law, when reporting crimes against children.
Thavis, the previous Catholic News Service correspondent, said Benedict “took essential steps within the Vatican’s response to clerical sexual abuse.”
“On this rating, I feel history will probably be kinder to this pope than contemporary critics,” he said.
The bounds of theological debate
Under Ratzinger’s leadership from 1981 to 2005, the Vatican’s doctrinal congregation took a decidedly proactive stance in defining church teaching and in criticizing or warning theologians after they took positions seen as too progressive or outside the bounds.
Under the German prefect, the congregation took particular interest in stemming advancement of liberation theology, a field of theological inquiry that examines Christ’s concern for liberation of the world’s people from each sin and unjust economic or social conditions.
The congregation issued two so-called “instructions” on liberation theology, in 1984 and 1986, condemning certain elements of study, particularly use of methods of Marxist evaluation to look at how the worldwide market system treats the world’s poorest.
The congregation under Ratzinger also issued a Occupation of Faith and Oath of Fidelity in 1988. Required of all diocesan vicars, seminary rectors, pastors and theologians all over the world, it committed those taking it to “hold fast to the deposit of religion in its entirety” and shun “any teachings contrary to it.”
Many theologians have criticized Ratzinger for his tenure on the doctrinal congregation, saying he played a very restrictive role in determining the bounds of theological discussion and unfairly prosecuted theologians he found outside those bounds.
Under Ratzinger, questioning of the church’s teaching on sexual conduct, contraception, same-sex relationships, women’s ordination and episcopal authority was out of bounds.
Fordham’s Hinze pointed to Ratzinger’s actions on liberation theology, the oath of fidelity and his encouragement of national bishops’ conferences to watch theologians. Many academics saw such measures “as restrictive and damaging to the contribution of theologians to the lifetime of the church,” Hinze said.
“The investigations and disciplining of a big variety of theologians during this era merit comparison with the actions undertaken at the peak of the theological controversy described as Modernism,” said Hinze, referencing Pope Pius X’s early-Twentieth-century crusade that saw sweeping condemnations of theologians and introduction of an anti-Modernist oath for bishops, priests, and theologians.
During Ratzinger’s tenure, the congregation contacted many global theologians to make inquiries concerning the legitimacy of their work. While most of those proceedings were undertaken in secrecy, several resulted in Vatican publication of notifications or condemnations against individual theologians.
A number of the most well-known include:
U.S. and Asian moral theologians attempting to adapt theology to their cultural contexts appeared most targeted.
From 2001 to 2005, Ratzinger also quietly raised objections to the Jesuit order regarding its U.S. publication America magazine. At the top of his time as head of the doctrinal office, he called for the resignation of America’s editor, Jesuit Fr. Thomas Reese, which took place inside a month of Ratzinger’s election as pope.
Wuerl, who earned a doctorate in theology before becoming a bishop and has served as a member of the doctrinal congregation since 2012, said that while Ratzinger headed the congregation, he “encouraged theological discussion” and “exercised the responsibilities of that office of the doctrine of the religion with great prudence.”
“I think that he was convinced that because he was a theologian … that the church needs to learn from theological discussion, theological deepening of our understanding of the religion,” Wuerl said.
“But he was very conscious that the health of theological debate within the Catholic Church and its progress is dependent upon the flexibility of the church, through the doctrine of the religion congregation, to be sure that individuals don’t step outside the boundaries of the continuity of the religion,” he said.
“You’ll be able to’t have a great football game if there is no such thing as a one to say you stepped out of the bounds,” he said. “You just cannot. There is not any way you may play that game, or any game, and not using a referee. That is why we’ve got them.”
Wuerl added, “I assumed Cardinal Ratzinger exercised [that role] very judiciously, giving the best freedom but at the identical time calling for responsible recognition that there are limits to what constitutes continuity.”
Christopher Bellitto, who has written extensively on the history of the papacy, said an “unlucky” a part of Benedict’s legacy will probably be “the notion that this was a person who was not comfortable with open discussion of questions that he thought were closed but others considered open.”
Bellitto, a professor of history at Kean University in Recent Jersey, said that every one the church’s major councils — from Nicea, to Trent, to Vatican II — “were messy and it’s out of the mess that you simply get good theology.”
“If you repress elements, if you don’t allow a full discussion, what you find yourself with is strict but bad theology,” he said.
“Which will have simply been his persona, his personality,” Bellitto said of Ratzinger. “There are some individuals who want things black and white because they cannot take care of the grey. That is wonderful, however it doesn’t suggest the grey goes away.”
Bellitto also mentioned a typical saying that it normally takes the worldwide church 50-100 years to totally understand and accept changes made at councils, or to synthesize them with earlier teachings.
“Ratzinger couldn’t be the engine for the synthesis, because he was too personally invested … as a father of the council,” Bellitto said.
‘A papal act of courage and humility’
After announcing his resignation in February 2013, Benedict said he intended to live the remainder of his life quietly in prayer, not wanting to cause confusion or step on the toes of whoever his successor could be.
In the primary years following that call, Benedict indeed led a really quiet life, removed from the general public eye, appearing only once in a while at major Vatican events when invited by Francis.
By the third anniversary of his resignation, nonetheless, Benedict was taking up a bit more of an energetic role in his post-papacy.
First got here a March 2016 interview with a Belgian theologian that focused on the query of God’s mercy, just as Francis was within the midst of celebrating an Extraordinary Jubilee Yr, also focused on mercy.
In November 2016 got here a book-length interview with German journalist Peter Seewald, where Benedict defended his own eight-year papacy against criticism.
“I don’t see myself as a failure,” he said within the book, titled Last Testament: In His Own Words. “For eight years I carried out my work.”
‘Above all, [Benedict] will probably be remembered because the pope who resigned.’
—John Thavis
Perhaps Benedict’s most striking intervention from retirement got here in January 2020, when he was initially listed because the co-author of a book with Cardinal Robert Sarah, the pinnacle of the Vatican’s Congregation for Divine Worship.
The amount sharply defended clerical celibacy and was issued as Francis was known to be considering a proposal from the October 2019 Synod of Bishops to permit married priests on a limited basis within the Amazon region.
Announcement of the book’s publication shocked theologians, who fearful that the previous pope’s intervention on the topic could tie Francis’ hands.
But two days after news of the quantity’s release, Benedict’s longtime secretary, Archbishop Georg Gänswein, told news agencies that the ex-pontiff, by then quite frail, had only thought he was preparing an essay for the quantity, and didn’t intend to be listed as a co-author.
Benedict had also waded into sensitive territory in April 2019, when he published an unexpected letter wherein he blamed the clergy sexual abuse crisis widely on the sexual revolution and developments in theology following the Second Vatican Council.
The letter, a lengthy text published initially by several right-wing Catholic web sites, immediately drew criticism from theologians, who said it didn’t address structural issues that abetted abuse cover-up, or Benedict’s own contested 24-year role as head of the Vatican’s powerful doctrinal office.
Theologians and church historians also expressed concerns that Benedict’s selection to interact in such public motion played into narratives splitting Catholics between two popes, one officially in power, and the opposite wielding influence as he wrote from a small monastery within the Vatican Gardens.
Richard Gaillardetz, a theologian who focuses on the church’s structures of authority, told NCR on the time that the precedent being set by Benedict’s latest letter was “troubling.”
The previous pontiff, said the theologian, was offering “a controversial evaluation of a pressing pastoral and theological crisis, and a set of concrete pastoral remedies.”
“These are actions only appropriate for one who actually holds a pastoral office,” said Gaillardetz, a professor at Boston College and former president of the Catholic Theological Society of America.
After 32 years in the very best offices of the church as head of the doctrinal congregation and as pope, after 54 years as a theologian, and after 62 years as a priest, Benedict left the Vatican via helicopter Feb. 28, 2013, for the nearby papal retreat of Castel Gandolfo.
Because the helicopter flew over St. Peter’s Square, pilgrims and admirers waved goodbye, some seen wiping away tears. Because the bells of St. Peter’s — the identical bells that may announce Francis’ election 11 days later — slowly ceased ringing, people in the group lingered well past dusk.
At 8 p.m. that night, the doors of the papal apartment were sealed as Benedict’s papacy got here to an end, as per his own order.
The day before, in his last public audience, the German theologian told crowds that the seven years, 10 months, and nine days of the papacy had been a “great weight” on his shoulders.
“I felt like St. Peter and the apostles within the boat on the Sea of Galilee,” said Benedict.
“The Lord has given us many days of sunshine and a light-weight breeze, the times when the fishing is plentiful,” he said. “But there have been also times when the water was rough … and the Lord gave the impression to be sleeping.”
Holland, the U.S. sister and canonist, said “every pope brings his own gifts to the papacy; each is exclusive.”
“The generosity, intelligence and integrity of Pope Benedict were crowned by his last papal act of courage and humility,” she said. “His resignation.”
Yet, in his post-papacy Benedict never publicly criticized or spoke directly against Francis. In actual fact, within the March 2016 interview the previous pontiff praised his successor as responding to the “signs of the times” along with his deal with God’s mercy.
Chicago Cardinal Blase Cupich, who was appointed to his current post by Francis but had previously served as bishop of Spokane, Washington, on Benedict’s appointment, said the previous pope’s fidelity to his successor was praiseworthy.
“Even within the face of increasing great personal cost and continual suffering, Pope Benedict grew ever taller in his abiding service to the church,” Cupich said.
Wuerl spoke of visiting Benedict once after the resignation and said he saw a side of the retired pope rarely seen in public: his humor and his sense of kindness.
The cardinal said Benedict asked him how he was able to write down a lot despite having such a busy travel and appointments schedule.
Wuerl said he responded that he often finds time to write down on plane flights after which asked in return, “Holy Father, are you planning on writing anything now?”
Wuerl recounted the pope — by then almost entirely hidden from the world, living away from the highlight in a Vatican cloister — joking back: “No, I do not have plane flights.”
“It is a side of him that I do not think we experience. … He really had a chilled and peaceful manner about him,” Wuerl said.
Like many, Wuerl said Benedict could also be remembered most for his final act as pope, after which what he didn’t do afterward.
“He did what he said he was going to do,” said Wuerl, remembering greeting Benedict before he departed the Vatican for the last time as leader of the Roman Catholic Church. “He simply stepped off the stage.”
“We were going to have a latest pope,” said the cardinal. “The church only has one pope. And Pope Emeritus Benedict made it very clear — in his actions, his conversations, or lack of public conversations — that Pope Francis is pope and that he, Benedict, goes into retirement and praying.”
“That is going to be the historic model and remembrance of this unique moment in modern history, when a pope actually resigned after which went into seclusion,” Wuerl said.