Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI dies at 95

Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, the conservative Roman Catholic Bavarian-born theologian who earned the nickname “God’s Rottweiler” and who shocked his congregation by suddenly stepping down from the papacy after eight years, died on Saturday, the Vatican said.

He is 95 years old.

“It is with great sadness that I inform you that Pope Emeritus, Benedict XVI, died today at 9:34 a.m. at the Mater Ecclesiae Monastery in the Vatican,” the statement said. No cause of death was given.

Benedict is the longest-lived pope, surpassing Pope Leo XIII in September 2020.

Benedict, the first pope to voluntarily relinquish the papacy in nearly 600 years, is spending his twilight years at the Vatican in a converted monastery, rarely seen in public with his successor, Pope Francis.

But he continued to advise his more liberal successors privately. His influence was felt in August 2016, when Francis, who has been trying to reach out to the LGBTQ community, took an unexpectedly hard line against teaching children in schools to choose their gender.

“We have to think about what Pope Benedict said – ‘This is an age of sin against God the creator,'” Francis told a meeting of Polish bishops.

Joseph Aloisius Ratzinger was born on April 16, 1927, in Marktl, Germany, Benedict, the son of policeman Josef and Maria, grew up in a Germany infected by Nazism.. Like his father, Benedict opposed Hitler. But at the age of 14, he was forced to join the Hitler Youth. And two years later, while still in the seminary, the future Pope was conscripted into the German army and sent to the front.

With the Allies on the brink of victory, Benedict left and went home. After some time in a POW camp, he returned to the seminary and, together with his brother Georg, was ordained a priest on June 29, 1951.

Unlike most priests, Benedict does not attend parishes. Instead, he began his academic career and found himself moving to the conservative right as German campuses moved to the liberal left in the 1960s.

Unlike the highly popular John Paul II, Benedict is a stern and forbidding figure with the charisma of a Polish patriarch. He is seen more as a transitional pontiff – a keeper of John Paul’s spirit.

Like John Paul, Benedict was a witness to the Holocaust and made it his mission to reach out to Jews and fight antisemitism. In 2008, Benedict became the first pope to visit a Jewish house of worship in the United States when he prayed at Park East Synagogue in New York City.

Benedict also made a historic pilgrimage to ground zero in New York City, where he prayed with the families of the victims of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Benedict was considered the dominant intellectual figure in Roman Catholicism when he moved to a more conservative position in the 40 years before he became pope. In 1981, he became the prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the council – known in the 16th century as the Spanish Inquisition – which promotes and enforces church doctrine.

His fierce opposition to what he saw as a campaign to secularize the church, promote women as priests, “normalize” homosexuality and promote a strain of liberal Latin American Catholicism known as liberation theology led to his characterization as the “Rottweiler of God.”

Among his more significant actions as prefect was the issuance of an official letter in May 2001 that was widely interpreted as stating that the investigation into allegations of clerical sex abuse was a confidential church matter not reviewed by civil law enforcement agencies. Critics — and lawyers for victims of the abuse — often point to the letter as evidence that the church is trying to cover up the growing scandal.

The fallout plagued Benedict from the start of his papacy. In 2005, his first year as pope, he was accused in a lawsuit of covering up a priest’s abuse of three boys in Texas. He avoided the lawsuit by seeking and receiving diplomatic immunity from the State Department.

“He can go around and serve the victims, which he does, and I think that’s a brave and important thing, but he can’t change the definitive elements of the Catholic Church that enable abuse,” said Michael D’Antonio. , author of “Mortal Sin: Sex, Crime, and the Era of Catholic Scandal.”

Benedict apologized in February for “gross mistakes” in his handling of clergy sex abuse cases, but denied any personal or specific blame after an independent report from a German law firm criticized his actions in four cases during his time as archbishop of Munich.

Benedict’s conservatism extends beyond the public face of the church. In addition to his native German, he speaks Italian, French, English and Latin – the latter of which he tries to revive in church ceremonies.

In 2007, they published an official document allowing the performance of the Tridentine Mass, also known as the Traditional Latin Mass, in European and North African countries whose history was shaped by the Latin language. The traditional Mass was one of the main casualties of the Second Vatican Council in the early 1960s, when Pope John XXIII liberalized its practice, liturgy and relations with other denominations.

Benedict, who is often quoted in the rebuking of other liberal theologians who supported the renewal of the Council as a rejection of the previous church practices, reinstituted many dormant symbols of the power of the church – he wore fur-lined vestments and jeweled rings, and he revived the papal tradition of wearing bright red leather shoes , symbolizing the bleeding feet of Jesus when he was sent to the crucifixion.

These symbols are akin to the enormous visual statement the church makes through its magnificent churches and cathedrals and its unparalleled collection of works of art, Benedict said.

“All great works of art, cathedrals – Gothic cathedrals and magnificent Baroque churches – are a sign of God’s light, and thus a manifestation, an epiphany of God,” he said in 2008.

Benedict was 78 and frail when he became pope in 2005 – the oldest pope elected in nearly three centuries – and on February 11, 2013, then 85, he had had enough.

“After repeatedly examining my conscience before God, I am convinced that my strength due to old age is no longer suitable for the exercise of an adequate Petrine ministry,” he said at a Vatican meeting with cardinals, referring to the Catholic doctrine of papal primacy. “The strength that in the last few months has diminished to the point where I have to recognize my shortcomings in order to fulfill the ministry entrusted to me.”

And with that, Benedict gave three weeks’ notice that he would resign at the end of the month.

Benedict took the title of pope emeritus and continued to wear the papal white. But he recovered the Ring of the Fisherman, which was traditionally broken with a blow from a hammer after the whale had died. And he asked that he be called Father Benedict.

The former Pope also maintains a close relationship with Francis. The two beamed as they embraced on December 8, 2015, before opening the Holy Door at the Basilica of St. Peter to mark the beginning of the Catholic Holy Year, or Jubilee. In June 2016, Francis kissed Benedict on both cheeks to help celebrate the 65th anniversary of his papal consecration.

Their relationship was fictionalized in the 2019 film “The Two Popes,” an adaptation of Anthony McCarten’s play “The Pope.” The film depicts Benedict summoning Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the liberal archbishop of Buenos Aires, Argentina, who would become Pope Francis, to the Vatican in secret to announce his resignation.

During several conversations, Benedict, played by Anthony Hopkins, admits that he can no longer listen to the word of God and is convinced that Bergoglio should replace him as the only person who can destroy the Vatican bureaucracy and transform the institution.

Change is needed, Benedict said, but “change is compromise,” and he cannot compromise. “All my life, I’ve been alone, but I’ve never been lonely, until now,” he said.