Benedict XVI helped run the Roman Catholic Church long before his election as pope.
For much of the decades-long papacy of his predecessor and mentor, John Paul II, Benedict — who was then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger of Germany — served as the Vatican’s chief doctrinal official. “God’s Rottweiler,” his critics called him, or “the German shepherd.”
From his powerful perch as prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith — once the Holy Office responsible for the Inquisition — the conservative cleric acted as an enforcer and as a traditionalist compass.
He veered the church away from what he ultimately came to consider the liberal overreach of the reforms of the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s, which he held responsible for a drift away from the truth maintained by tradition. He crushed dissent. He helped promote clerics in his and John Paul II’s mold in the Roman curia, the bureaucracy that runs the church, as well as in dioceses and orders around the world.
After John Paul II’s death in 2005, Benedict gave a powerful and defining speech against the temptation of relativism, delivered before the conclave to choose the next pope. It was considered so persuasive that the College of Cardinals chose him to continue John Paul’s legacy and essentially encourage the traditional church to make a last-ditch effort against the growing forces of secularism.
As pope, however, Benedict — a soft-spoken theologian who loved cats and playing Mozart on the piano — lacked the charisma and media savvy of John Paul.
Almost immediately, he gave a speech that offended many Muslims. And the sexual abuse scandals that festered under John Paul — at times despite the warnings of Benedict as a cardinal — exploded on his watch. His efforts to rid the church of what he called “filth” went much further than John Paul II, but his reluctance to hold bishops accountable for moving abusive priests around fell far short of the hopes of victims and critics.
Whatever grand ambitions Benedict may have harbored often seemed overmatched by missteps and moments he failed to meet.
Benedict’s greatest impact on the papacy may have been how he left it.
His unexpected resignation, the first by a pope in more than 500 years, stunned the church. It also opened the door to Pope Francis, a progressive reformer with whom he shared an awkward, if decorous, cohabitation in a Vatican with two popes.
It also set a precedent and broke a taboo. Francis himself has repeatedly said that his own retirement is on the table.
