Benedict’s critics are more likely to remember him as a crusher of dissent who did far too little to address sexual abuse in the church, stumbled in some of his public declarations and lacked the charisma of his predecessor, John Paul II.
Francis fired or demoted many of Benedict’s appointees, redirected the church’s priorities and adjusted its emphasis from setting and keeping boundaries to pastoral inclusivity.
Still, in some regards, Francis has built on Benedict’s legacy, especially in addressing the child sexual abuse crisis. Benedict was the first pope to meet with victims, and he apologized for the abuse that was allowed to fester under John Paul II. He excoriated the “filth” in the church and excommunicated some offending priests.
But abuse survivors and their advocates accused Benedict of not going far enough in punishing several priests as a bishop in Germany, and in his handling of accusations against some priests as head of the Vatican’s doctrinal office. He was also criticized as doing little to hold the hierarchy accountable for shielding — and so facilitating — child sexual abuse.
Pope Benedict Early Life And Ordination Explored
Benedict, born Joseph Alois Ratzinger, was ordained a priest in 1951 and named archbishop of Munich and Freising in 1977, the same year that he became a cardinal. Four years later, Pope John Paul II summoned Cardinal Ratzinger to Rome, where he became the head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the office responsible for defending church orthodoxy, one of the Vatican’s most important positions. He led the office for nearly 25 years.
After John Paul II died in 2005, Cardinal Ratzinger was chosen as his successor. He took the name of a sixth-century monk, Benedict of Nurcia, who had founded monasteries and the Benedictine order, helping spread Christianity in Europe. The new pope, as Benedict XVI, would seek to re-evangelize a Europe that was struggling to maintain its faith.
Pope Benedict Controversy Explored
Ultimately, Pope Benedict bowed out during a period of scandals and immense pressure. He cited his declining health, both “of mind and body.” He had said that he had resigned freely, and “for the good of the church.”
That resignation — the first by a pontiff since 1415 — is likely to be remembered as his most defining act.
He lived in retirement in a monastery on the Vatican grounds, mostly stepping back from public life and dedicating himself to prayer and meditation. Francis visited him and called him “a wise grandfather in the home,” even as his supporters sought — and failed — to make him an alternative power center.
ROME — When Queen Elizabeth II of Britain died in September, a meticulously choreographed process known as Operation London Bridge was set in motion for the hours and days to follow. Papal deaths also follow a strict protocol: The pope’s study and bedroom are closed off, the pope’s Fisherman’s Ring — the seal used for papal documents — is destroyed, and various funeral rites are enacted.
But with the death of Benedict, who resigned from the papacy in 2013 and since then held the title of pope emeritus, it was unclear until his death was announced on Saturday what protocol the Vatican would use.
The Vatican said that his funeral would be held on Thursday at 9:30 a.m. in St. Peter’s Square, presided over by Pope Francis. The Vatican also said that Benedict’s body would be in St. Peter’s Basilica on Monday “to be greeted by the faithful.”
Matteo Bruni, a Vatican spokesman, said that the rite on Thursday would be a “solemn but sober funeral.”
Because there are no precedents in modern time, said Agostino Paravicini Bagliani, a historian of the papacy, “the question is complicated.” Benedict was not the first pope to retire, he noted, but he chose to retain some trappings tied to the papacy, including dressing in white.
By contrast, Celestine V, who resigned in 1294, sought to live like a monk. He was instead imprisoned by Pope Boniface VIII and was not given the funeral of a pope when he died in 1296.
Gregory XII, the last pope to resign before Benedict, reverted to being a cardinal when he stepped down in 1415. When he died two years later, his funeral followed the rite used for cardinals, Mr. Paravicini Bagliani said.
Normally, cardinals gather for papal funerals to mourn, but also to participate in the election of a successor. Their presence in Rome is a “sign that even though a pope has died, the church continues,” Mr. Paravicini Bagliani explained.
“Clearly that’s not an issue in this case,” he said, but added that cardinals would likely be present “as mourners.”
It is likely that Benedict will be buried alongside his 148 predecessors who lie in the crypt beneath St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City, but the Vatican had not specified the burial site.
A pope’s funeral Mass is usually celebrated by the dean of the College of Cardinals. As such, Benedict celebrated the funeral of John Paul II in 2005.
A spotty legacy in dealing with clerical sex abuse
The clerical sex abuse scandal festered and then broke open under Pope John Paul II in the years that Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger — who would later become Pope Benedict XVI — headed the Vatican’s doctrinal office, which handled the cases of priests accused of abusing children.
Presented with case files, Cardinal Ratzinger sometimes set disciplinary measures in motion, even having accused priests defrocked. But other times, the record shows, he took the side of the accused priests and failed to listen to the victims or their warnings that an abuser could violate more children.
When Cardinal Ratzinger became pope, the scandal exploded publicly throughout the global church.
During his time as pope, his efforts to rid the church of what he called “filth” went further than those of John Paul II, but his reluctance to hold bishops accountable for shuffling abusive priests from assignment to assignment fell far short of the demands of survivors and advocates.
Benedict himself was swept up in the scandal after the release of a report in January 2022 that had been commissioned by the Roman Catholic Church in Munich to investigate the archdiocese’s handling of sexual abuse from 1945 to 2019.
The report claimed that Benedict had mishandled four cases decades earlier involving the sexual abuse of minors while he was an archbishop in Germany. It also accused him of having misled investigators in his written answers.
Two weeks after the report was released, Benedict acknowledged that “abuses and errors” had been made. He asked for forgiveness but denied any misconduct.
Survivors and victims groups had mixed feelings about his legacy.
Obituary: Pope Benedict XVI Dies- Pope Francis to Preside Over Benedict’s Funeral
“Ratzinger was less communicative than Francis but he moved” in the right direction, when it came to confronting the clerical abuse scandal, the first pope to really do so, said Francesco Zanardi, the founder of Rete l’Abuso, the largest victims group in Italy. That said, “the real challenge is changing the culture of individual bishops, and that can be enormous.”
Anne Barrett Doyle, a co-director of BishopAccountability.org, a victims advocacy and research group, said in a statement that Benedict would be “remembered chiefly for his failure to achieve what should have been his job one: to rectify the incalculable harm done to the hundreds of thousands of children sexually abused by Catholic priests.”
When he resigned, Benedict “left hundreds of culpable bishops in power and a culture of secrecy intact,” she said.
“Instead of remedies, he gave us words,” Ms. Barrett Doyle said. “His failure to enact real change in the church’s handling of sexually abusive priests will be his significant and shameful legacy.”
The Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, known as SNAP, was harsh in its assessment of how Benedict dealt with clerical abuse.
“In our view, the death of Pope Benedict XVI is a reminder that, much like John Paul II, Benedict was more concerned about the church’s deteriorating image and financial flow to the hierarchy versus grasping the concept of true apologies followed by true amends to victims of abuse,” SNAP said in a statement on Saturday.
“It is past time,” the group said, “for the Vatican to refocus on change: tell the truth about known abusive clergy, protect children and adults, and allow justice to those who have been hurt.”
“Honoring Pope Benedict XVI now is not only wrong. It is shameful,” SNAP said.
‘End of an era’: Mourners gather at St. Peter’s Square.
In St. Peter’s Square on Saturday, some faithful made their way through a crowd of tourists to cross themselves in front of the basilica, an act mourning the death of Benedict XVI.
“There is a huge void,” said Caterina Walis, 61, a housewife who had walked to the square to say her goodbyes to Benedict with teary eyes. “We loved him so much.”
She had been praying for him that morning before hearing that he had died, as she had prayed in the past days since learning that he was unwell.
Like many other conservative Roman Catholics, Ms. Walis said that Benedict had been a reference point for her, a custodian of the church’s aims amid the threats of modernity. She shared fond memories of kissing Benedict’s hands in St. Sabina basilica in Rome in the first years of his papacy, and of reading some of his writings and thinking, “Mamma Mia.” She said, “It was almost a miracle.”
Her daughter, Maria Teresa Walis, 31, a practicing lawyer, said she felt sad that the church now had only one living pope after a decade in which the retired Benedict remained on the sidelines while Pope Francis served as pope.
“We had two of them and it was an extra richness,” Ms. Walis said. “It is the end of an era.”
Others in Rome wondered how that dynamic would affect the mourning of Benedict.
Chiara Darida, 73, a retired schoolteacher who was outside St. Peter’s Square, recalled the death of Pope John Paul II in 2005. On that occasion, she noted, the city of Rome was “blocked,” and her work appointments postponed, as mourners from his native Poland and heads of state from around the world came for the funeral.
“I hope they will come this time, too,” she said.
Pope Benedict Resignation in 2023
ROME — When Benedict XVI resigned in 2013, he was the first pope to do so in six centuries, and the move sent shock waves around the world.
Benedict announced the decision in Latin during a routine gathering of cardinals, telling them that after much thought, “I have come to the certainty that my strengths, due to an advanced age, are no longer suited to an adequate exercise” of leading the world’s one billion Roman Catholics.
He told the cardinals that, at age 85, he did not have the strength, either of mind or body, to “adequately fulfill the ministry entrusted to me.”
Benedict had been showing signs of age, often appeared tired and used a wheeled platform to move around.
His papacy had also been roiled by fresh revelations of clerical abuse of minors in various dioceses around the world, and Benedict had struggled to respond to growing criticism.
After Benedict’s resignation, he moved into the Mater Ecclesiae Monastery on the grounds of Vatican City, where he said he would devote his life to meditation and prayer. He was cared for by four laywomen who had taken vows in the Catholic movement known as Communion and Liberation, as well as by Archbishop Georg Gänswein, the German monsignor who was his private secretary throughout his pontificate.
With two living popes for the first time in the modern era, the Vatican was forced to navigate a series of unknowns, including where to house two popes at the Vatican and what to call Benedict. The decision was made for Benedict to adopt the title of “pope emeritus” and continue to wear white.
Obituary: Pope Benedict XVI Dies- Pope Francis to Preside Over Benedict’s Funeral
The previous pope to resign, Pope Gregory XII, stepped down in 1415, in an attempt to quell a leadership crisis in the church known as the Great Western Schism, during which three men vied to be pope.
An unusual coexistence of two popes worked out, mostly.
When he resigned in 2013, Benedict pledged that he would live “hidden to the world,” retiring, he said, “to a life of prayer” and meditation.
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He moved into a monastery with a view of St. Peter’s dome, and for the most part adhered to that promise, spending his days secluded not far from Pope Francis’s own residence on the Vatican’s grounds.
Benedict’s public appearances were rare. In 2015, with Pope Francis, he marked the opening of a Jubilee, or Holy Year, and at least in the early years of his retirement he attended the occasional special Mass or ceremony for elevating a cardinal.
In an interview in April, on the occasion of Benedict’s 95th birthday, Archbishop Georg Gänswein, his longtime personal secretary, told Vatican News, a Vatican-controlled outlet, that the retired pope was in “good spirits.”
Although he was “physically relatively weak and frail,” Benedict remained “lucid,” the archbishop said, describing a life of reading, dealing with correspondence and meeting with visitors. The retired pope also went out into the Vatican gardens, reciting the rosary, “but seated,” the archbishop said.
But even though he remained out of the public eye, more than once Benedict found himself at the center of media maelstroms and was often regarded as a foil against Francis by the sitting pope’s detractors.
In 2019, Benedict broke his post-papacy silence, issuing a 6,000-word letter that seemed at odds with his successor’s view of the church’s sexual abuse scandals. Benedict attributed the crisis to the sexual revolution of the 1960s, secularization and an erosion of morality that he pinned on liberal theology. Francis, by contrast, saw its origins in the exaltation of authority and abuse of power in the church hierarchy.
Given Benedict’s frail health at the time, however, many church watchers questioned whether he had indeed written the letter or had been manipulated to issue it as a way to undercut Francis.
And as Francis appeared to be mulling whether to lift the restriction on married priests in remote areas, as had been proposed by his bishops, Benedict firmly defended the church’s teachings on priestly celibacy in a 2020 book. Francis ended up rejecting the proposal, a decision welcomed by conservatives.
At times, Benedict also scolded the cardinals who invoked his name as they criticized Francis. In private letters published in 2018 by the German newspaper Bild, Benedict wrote that the “anger” expressed by some of his staunchest defenders risked tarnishing his own pontificate.
“I can well understand the deep-seated pain that the end of my pontificate caused you and many others,” he wrote in a November 2017 letter to Cardinal Walter Brandmüller of Germany. “But for some — and it seems to me for you as well — the pain has turned to anger, which no longer just affects the abdication but my person and the entirety of my pontificate.”
Benedict added, “In this way the pontificate itself is being devalued and conflated with the sadness about the situation of the church today.”
American conservative Catholics mourn Benedict as an unofficial figurehead.
The death of Pope Benedict XVI sent a broad wave of mourning through the American church. But it held special meaning for the conservative wing of American Catholicism: His death represented the loss of their unofficial figurehead, a shadow presence whose influence they followed even after he resigned in 2013 and Pope Francis became the church’s global leader.
While Benedict had largely faded from public life since his unexpected retirement, the former pope remained a hero to many theological conservatives, who viewed him as a standard-bearer for a kind of doctrinal commitment and rigor they saw lacking in the church under Francis.
In recent years, the conservative wing of American church leadership has been gaining power, and has clashed openly and often with the country’s second Catholic president, Joseph R. Biden, and the speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, over the issue of abortion.
Benedict’s promotion of Catholic leaders, including Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan of New York, helped shape the character of church hierarchy in the United States at its highest levels.
Parts of the American church, including the younger generation of priests, have long held Benedict “in an awe bordering on reverence,” said George Weigel, a conservative Catholic commentator and author of “To Sanctify the World: The Vital Legacy of Vatican II.”
Mourning bells ring across Germany, but some of the tributes come with caveats.
Church bells rang across Germany on Saturday as leaders around the country paid their respects to Benedict XVI — the first German to be pope in decades, but whose legacy in his country of birth is contested.
“As a ‘German’ pope, Benedict XVI was a special church leader for many, not only in this country,” Chancellor Olaf Scholz said in a statement on Twitter. “The world loses a formative figure of the Catholic Church, a combative personality and a wise theologian. My thoughts are with Pope Francis.”
In Munich, the archbishop, Cardinal Reinhard Marx, offered a prayer in Benedict’s honor. “Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI is dead and we mourn him: He put his trust in You, he lived with You, he sought You. Lead him now to eternal life and grant him the joy of the resurrection.”
Obituary: Pope Benedict XVI Dies- Pope Francis to Preside Over Benedict’s Funeral
Born in 1927 as Josef Ratzinger, in the Bavarian village of Marktl am Inn, the future Benedict XVI grew up during World War II and was enrolled in the Hitler Youth as a teenager, as was compulsory at the time. But it was not his years under Nazi rule — which took a course largely common to German men of his generation — so much as his role in handling sexual abuse scandals in the church that has dogged his legacy in Germany.
Early in 2022, the retired pope, who resigned as the leader of the global Catholic Church in 2013, admitted to providing false information to a German inquiry into clerical sexual abuse, while strongly denying any misconduct or intent to mislead on his part.
In a written statement to the inquiry, he said he did not recall attending a meeting with local officials in 1980 to discuss a priest suspected of pedophilia. Yet Benedict changed that position days after reports came out accusing him during his time as archbishop of Munich, from 1977 to 1982, of mishandling the cases of four priests accused of child sexual abuse. The reports said his denial of being at the meeting lacked credibility.
In response, Benedict asked forgiveness for “abuses and errors” under his watch, but said that the discrepancy in his testimony was an honest mistake introduced during editing.
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