Pope Benedict XVI pictured on February 28, 2013 in Rome, Italy.
Franco Origlia | Getty Images News | Getty Images
Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, the Bavarian-born theologian whose conservative Roman Catholicism earned him the nickname “God’s Rottweiler” and who shocked his flock by suddenly resigning the papacy after just eight years, died Saturday, the Vatican said.
He was 95.
“With sorrow I inform you that the Pope Emeritus, Benedict XVI, passed away today at 9:34 within the Mater Ecclesiae Monastery within the Vatican,” the statement said. No reason for death was provided.
Benedict was the longest-living pope, having surpassed Pope Leo XIII in September 2020.
Benedict, the primary pope to voluntarily quit the pontifical reins in nearly 600 years, spent his twilight years living on the Vatican in a refurbished monastery, rarely appearing in public with the person who replaced him, Pope Francis.
But he continued to advise his much more liberal-minded successor in private. His influence was felt in August 2016, when Francis, who had made attempts to achieve out to the LGBTQ community, took an unexpectedly hard line against schools’ teaching children that they may select their gender.
“We must take into consideration what Pope Benedict said — ‘It is the epoch of sin against God the Creator,'” Francis said at a gathering of Polish bishops.
Born Joseph Aloisius Ratzinger on April 16, 1927, in Marktl, in Germany, Benedict, the son of police officer Josef and Maria, grew up in a Germany infected by Nazism. Like his father, Benedict opposed Hitler. But at age 14, he was forced to affix the Hitler Youth. And two years later, while still within the seminary, the long run pope was conscripted into the German army and sent to the front.
With the Allies on the verge of victory, Benedict deserted and went home. After a temporary stint in a POW camp, he returned to the seminary and, along along with his brother Georg, was ordained a priest on June 29, 1951.
Unlike most priests, Benedict logged little time in parishes. As an alternative, he launched into an instructional profession and located himself moving to the conservative right as German campuses moved to the liberal left within the Nineteen Sixties.
Unlike the wildly popular John Paul II, Benedict was a stern and forbidding figure with little of his Polish predecessor’s charisma. He was seen more as a transitional pope — a keeper of John Paul’s flame.
Like John Paul, Benedict was a witness to the Holocaust and made it his mission to achieve out to Jews and to fight antisemitism. In 2008, Benedict became the primary pope to go to a Jewish house of worship in the US when he prayed on the Park East Synagogue in Recent York City.
Benedict also made a historic pilgrimage to ground zero in Recent York City, where he prayed with the families of the victims of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
Benedict was considered a dominant mental figure in Roman Catholicism as he moved toward more conservative positions within the 40 years before he assumed the papacy. By 1981, he had turn into the prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the council — known through the sixteenth century because the Spanish Inquisition — that promotes and enforces church doctrine.
His fierce resistance to what he saw as campaigns to secularize the church, promote women as priests, “normalize” homosexuality and encourage a liberal Latin American strain of Catholicism often known as liberation theology led to his characterization as “God’s Rottweiler.”
Amongst his more consequential actions as prefect was to issue a proper letter in May 2001 that was widely interpreted as declaring that investigations into allegations of clergy sex abuse were confidential church matters not subject to review by civil law enforcement agencies. Critics — and attorneys for victims of such abuse — often pointed to the letter as proof that the church was looking for to cover up the burgeoning scandal.
The fallout dogged Benedict from the start of his papacy. In 2005, his first 12 months as pope, he was accused in a lawsuit of getting personally covered up a priest’s abuse of three boys in Texas. He avoided the lawsuit by requesting and receiving diplomatic immunity from the State Department.
“He could go around and minister to victims, which he did, and I feel that was a brave and profound thing to do, but he couldn’t change the definitive elements of the Catholic Church that enable abuse,” said Michael D’Antonio, creator of “Mortal Sins: Sex, Crime, and the Era of Catholic Scandal.”
Benedict asked for forgiveness in February for any “grievous faults” in his handling of clergy sex abuse cases, but denied any personal or specific wrongdoing after an independent report from a German law firm criticized his actions in 4 cases while he was archbishop of Munich.
Benedict’s conservatism prolonged to the church’s public face. Along with his native German, he was fluent in Italian, French, English and Latin — the last of which he sought to revive in church ceremony.
Former Pope Benedict XVI presiding over a weekly audience in St. Peter’s Square on the Vatican.
Alessandra Benedetti – Corbis | Corbis Historical | Getty Images
In 2007, he issued an official document allowing performance of the Tridentine Mass, also often known as the Traditional Latin Mass, within the European and North African countries whose histories had been shaped by Latin. The standard Mass had been certainly one of the outstanding casualties of the Second Vatican Council of the early Nineteen Sixties, when Pope John XXIII liberalized the church’s practices, liturgy and relations with other denominations.
Benedict, who was often quoted rebuking more liberal theologians who argued that the reforms of the council were a rejection of the church’s previous practices, reinstituted lots of the dormant symbols of the church’s power — he wore fur-lined vestments and jewel-laden rings, and he revived the papal tradition of wearing shiny red leather shoes, symbolizing Jesus’ bloodied feet as he was sent to his crucifixion.
Such symbols were on par with the large visual statement the church made through its majestic churches and cathedrals and its unequaled collection of great artworks, Benedict contended.
“All the nice artworks, the cathedrals — the Gothic cathedrals and the sumptuous Baroque churches — are a luminous sign of God, and thus are truly a manifestation, an epiphany of God,” he said in 2008.
Benedict was 78 and already frail in 2005 when he became pope — the oldest pope elected in almost three centuries — and by Feb. 11, 2013, then 85, he had had enough.
“After having repeatedly examined my conscience before God, I actually have come to the knowledge that my strengths because of a sophisticated age aren’t any longer suited to an adequate exercise of the Petrine ministry,” he said at a Vatican meeting along with his cardinals, referring to the Catholic doctrine of papal primacy. “Strength which in the previous few months has deteriorated in me to the extent that I actually have had to acknowledge my incapacity to adequately fulfill the ministry entrusted to me.”
And with that, Benedict gave three weeks’ notice that he was stepping down at the tip of the month.
Benedict took the title pope emeritus and continued to wear the papal white. But he returned the Ring of the Fisherman, which traditionally is ceremonially destroyed with a blow from a hammer after a pope dies. And he asked that he be addressed as Father Benedict.
The previous pope also maintained a cordial relationship with Francis. Each men were beaming once they embraced Dec. 8, 2015, before opening the Holy Door at St. Peter’s Basilica to mark the beginning of the Catholic Holy Yr, or Jubilee. In June 2016, Francis kissed Benedict on each cheeks to assist rejoice the sixty fifth anniversary of the previous pope’s ordination.
Their relationship was fictionalized within the 2019 movie “The Two Popes,” an adaptation of Anthony McCarten’s play “The Pope.” The movie depicts Benedict summoning Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the liberal archbishop of Buenos Aires, Argentina, who would turn into Pope Francis, to the Vatican in secret to reveal that he intended to resign.
Over a series of conversations, Benedict, played by Anthony Hopkins, confesses that he can now not hear God’s words and his belief that perhaps Bergoglio should succeed him because the only man who might have the option to shatter the Vatican bureaucracy and reform the institution.
Change is required, Benedict says, but “change is compromising,” and he’s incapable of compromising. “For my entire life, I actually have been alone, but never lonely, until now,” he says.
