Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI dies, the first to resign in 6 centuries

Benedict XVI, the pope emeritus, died at the age of 95, the Vatican announced. Joseph Ratzinger, as is his original name, led the Catholic Church from 2005 to 2013, when he announced his retirement.

“It is with sadness that I inform you that Pope Emeritus, Benedict XVI, passed away today at 9:34 a.m. at the Mater Ecclesiae Monastery in the Vatican,” the Vatican said in a statement early Saturday. The cause of death was not provided. “Further information will be provided as soon as possible,” the text said.

Ratzinger will go down in history precisely for that extraordinary decision to resign as head of the Catholic Church and that when he made it public, on February 11, 2013, he justified it by “lack of strength” due to his advanced age. It was something unprecedented in 600 years.

As of September 2020, Ratzinger was the oldest pontiff in history. He had surpassed Leo XIII, who died in 1903 at the age of 93.

He spoke ten languages, but was most fluent in German, Italian, French, Latin, English and Spanish. He was a member of several scientific academies in Europe and received eight honorary doctorates from different academic centers, such as the University of Navarra and the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru.

He came from a modest farming family

He was born in Marktl am Inn, Germany, on April 16, 1927, and was baptized on the same day. His father, a gendarmerie commissioner, came from an old farming family in Lower Bavaria, with modest economic conditions, according to a biography published on the Vatican website.

His mother was the daughter of artisans and before her marriage worked as a cook in several hotels.

She spent her childhood and adolescence in Traunstein, a small town near the Austrian border, 30 kilometers from Salzburg, where she received her Christian, human and cultural formation.

In the last months of the Second World War, at the age of 16, he was called up to enlist in the auxiliary anti-aircraft services of the German Army, the phase of his life that caused the most criticism and controversy. In March 1939 (three years before Ratzinger enlisted), the Nazi regime had decreed that all Germans over the age of 14 were compulsorily enrolled in the Hitler Youth.

In 2008, he told a gathering of thousands of young people that his adolescence had been ruined by what he called a “baleful regime” whose “influence grew, seeping into schools and civilian bodies, as well as politics and even religion, before it could be perceived that it was a monster.”

In any case, in 1945, with the war lost, he deserted from the army and was briefly taken prisoner.

From 1946 to 1951, he studied philosophy and theology at the University of Freising and at the University of Munich. He was ordained to the priesthood on June 29, 1951. A year later, he began his teaching activity at the Freising College and then continued his teaching activity in Bonn, in Münster and in Tübingen from 1959 to 1969.

His career before becoming Pope

On March 25, 1977, Pope Paul VI appointed him Archbishop of Munich and Freising. In the same year, Paul VI made him a cardinal.

In August 1978, he participated in the Conclave that elected John Paul I. In October of the same year, he was also in the Conclave that elected John Paul II, who appointed him prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and president of the Pontifical Biblical Commission and of the International Theological Commission on November 25, 1981.

Since November 13, 2000, he has been an honorary member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.

Before becoming pope, Ratzinger served as dean of the College of Cardinals from 2002 until his election in March 2005. From there he was a confidant of John Paul II, making him his predecessor’s most important influence in Vatican City.

When he was appointed prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in 1981, Joseph Aloisius Ratzinger took charge of one of the most influential offices in the Vatican, considered a stepping stone in the aspirations of any cardinal who aspires to have the necessary qualifications to be elected by his peers as head of the Catholic Church.

The controversies that surrounded him

One of the latest controversies surrounding the pope emeritus was the publication of a report on alleged sexual abuse in the German archdiocese of Munich that attributed to him the failure to act on at least four known cases that occurred during his tenure.

The document, commissioned by the archdiocese from a team of lawyers and submitted in late January 2022, covers cases of sexual abuse within the Church in that archdiocese from the post-war period to the present.

Ratzinger was archbishop of Munich from 1977 to 1982, before becoming prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (formerly the Holy Office) at the Vatican. The report documents hundreds of cases committed over decades and holds successive church hierarchies responsible for failing to act or even covering them up.

According to the document, Ratzinger “forcefully” denied these accusations.

The investigators are also convinced that Ratzinger had knowledge of the case of the parish priest identified as Peter H., who in 1980 was transferred from the bishopric of Essen to that of Munich after being accused of being a pedophile and who in his new assignment continued to commit abuse.

Another case was that of Vatileaks, a leak of secret Vatican documents, which revealed acts of corruption, mismanagement of the Vatican’s financial resources and diversion of public resources.

The document pointed out that it all happened when the then Cardinal Ratzinger was one of the most influential figures in the Catholic Church. The publication led to the arrest of Paolo Gabriele, then Pope Benedict XVI’s butler.

Based on the interrogations made to Paolo, it would be assured that Benedict XVI was a “manipulable” person and misinformed.

Faced with the obvious intrigues and power struggles within the Vatican, Ratzinger declared himself powerless and stepped aside. And so he spent his last years in a spiritual retreat that meant that for a decade, the Catholic world had two popes.

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