Benedict XVI, the former pope who has died at the age of 95, was fated from the day of his election in April 2005 to labour under the long shadow of John Paul II, his celebrated predecessor.
But the German-born theologian, who inherited the throne three days after his 78th birthday, created a piece of history in his own right by making the remarkable decision to abdicate in February 2013, on the grounds that the job had become too onerous in his old age. No pope since Celestine V in 1294 had stepped down for personal reasons, although Gregory XII left office in 1415 under a deal among rival factions to end a 40-year schism in the Roman Catholic Church.
In his reign, Benedict put his distinctive stamp on the papacy, displaying compassionate, pastoral qualities that contrasted with the rigorous didacticism for which he had been known earlier in his career. Yet this bookish and somewhat bashful individual never fully got to grips with the problems of poor governance and internal power struggles in the Curia, the Vatican’s bureaucracy. “Government wasn’t his strong point,” observed Cardinal George Pell, Australia’s most senior Catholic, on the eve of Benedict’s abdication.
Some of the pope’s most severe challenges, such as confronting a mass of child abuse scandals at Catholic institutions in the US, Europe and elsewhere in the world, were made more acute by the Church’s failure to tackle them effectively during John Paul’s 26-year reign. In that era, the future pope was known as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, a talented scholar who for almost a quarter of a century served as the intellectual architect of John Paul’s papacy.
As head of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican’s agency for the enforcement of theological orthodoxy among bishops, priests and the faithful worldwide, he oversaw a crackdown on Catholic dissenters that had John Paul’s full support. This campaign appealed to Church conservatives critical of reforms introduced after the 1962-1965 Second Vatican Council. But it alienated progressives, who complained of an authoritarianism at the top of the Vatican that widened the Church’s divisions around the world.
Controversy pursued Benedict throughout his papacy, partly because of his own actions and statements. Upon his election as the 265th Bishop of Rome, he described himself as “a simple and humble worker in the vineyard of the Lord” — giving the lie to those who had nicknamed him “God’s Rottweiler”. The cardinals who had chosen him praised him as witty, serene, tactful and open to consultation, even if none could recall him yielding an inch in theological discussion.
An early example of his self-inflicted troubles arose in 2006, when he gave a lecture in the German city of Regensburg that enraged Muslims because he appeared to imply that Islam relied on violence and hatred to promote its objectives. He swiftly offered a qualified apology and stressed his belief in interfaith dialogue. Like John Paul, however, he tended to place less emphasis on improving relations with Islam and other religions than on winning the Church’s battle to reverse the decline of organised Christianity, especially in Europe.
Another uproar erupted in 2009 when Benedict readmitted four rebel ultraconservative bishops to the Church after a decades-long schism, only to discover that one — the British-born Richard Williamson — had denied the full extent of the Holocaust. An embarrassed Benedict explained that no Curia official had done an internet search to check on Williamson’s opinions.
For some Vatican-watchers, these missteps stemmed in part from Benedict’s appointment in 2006 of Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone as secretary of state, the Holy See’s number two job. When a flood of confidential Vatican documents leaked to the media in early 2012 in the so-called “Vatileaks” scandal, Bertone was revealed as the main figure in a cluster of policy disputes and personality clashes focusing on his rivals’ efforts to increase the transparency of the Vatican’s financial operations and comply with international standards on money-laundering.
Paolo Gabriele, the pope’s butler who had stolen the documents in a self-proclaimed campaign to fight “evil and corruption” in the Holy See, was put on trial by Vatican magistrates, found guilty and sentenced to 18 months in prison. Benedict visited Gabriele in prison just before Christmas 2012 and pardoned him, in a gesture that recalled John Paul’s forgiveness of Mehmet Ali Ağca, the Turk who had tried in 1981 to assassinate him.
“Vatileaks” underlined how far Benedict had fallen short of his stated goal of ridding the Curia of its centuries-old inefficiencies. Ostensibly keen to modernise the Vatican’s system of government and image — he opened a Twitter account, @pontifex, just two months before his abdication — Benedict lacked genuine enthusiasm for bureaucratic reform.
However, one of his last acts as pope was an attempt to restore order at the Vatican bank by appointing Ernst von Freyberg, a German lawyer and financier, as its new head. Ettore Gotti Tedeschi, the previous bank chief who was under investigation by Italian police in a money-laundering inquiry, was sacked after the bank’s board denounced him in May 2012 for dereliction of duty.
After his abdication, Benedict lived quietly in the Mater Ecclesiae monastery in the Vatican gardens, but he did not fulfil to the letter his promise to remain “hidden from the world” as the reign of Pope Francis, his Argentine-born successor, took shape. Benedict took the title of Pope emeritus and became a symbol of resistance for conservative Catholics to certain initiatives of Francis, such as a decision to reimpose restrictions on celebrating the old Latin mass that Benedict himself had lifted.
In 2019, Benedict published an essay in which he blamed sex-abuse scandals in the worldwide Church partly on what he called the total collapse of sexual norms between 1960 and 1980. The following year, as his physical frailties became more acute, he joked in an interview with Bavarian television: “I used to have a big mouth, now it doesn’t work any more.”
Under Benedict, the most serious threat to the Vatican’s reputation arose from the scandal over paedophile priests and the Church’s alleged role in concealing their crimes in various countries. The Irish government was so infuriated with what it regarded as the Vatican’s obstruction of justice that in 2011 it closed its embassy to the Holy See, only reopening it in 2014.
Most child abuse cases dated to before Benedict’s reign, but this did not prevent German critics from raising questions about why, when he was archbishop of Munich from 1977 to 1981, he failed to take firm action against a local priest who was a known child abuser. Benedict’s supporters asserted that he had gone further than John Paul in facing up to the scandal’s global dimensions and in acknowledging that paedophile priests were guilty of a crime, not a sin that required nothing more than the application of internal Church disciplinary procedures. But public outrage was intense in many Catholic countries, and the scandal cast a shadow over the Church that continues to hang over it to the present day.
The son of a rural policeman, Joseph Alois Ratzinger was born on April 16, 1927, in Marktl am Inn, a small settlement in the southern German state of Bavaria. His adolescent experience of the climate of Nazi intimidation led him to conclude that, for Catholics, a firm belief in an absolute moral system was the best response to totalitarian terror.
Like all German teenagers, Benedict was required to join the Hitler Youth, and he served in an anti-aircraft unit that guarded a factory outside Munich. As the fighting drew to a close in 1945, US forces briefly held him as a prisoner of war. Few historians attach much importance to his wartime record: he had no pro-Nazi or anti-Semitic sympathies. In 2004, he affirmed the Church’s by then official view that “a certain insufficient resistance” by Christians to the Nazi persecution of Jews had been caused by “the anti-Judaism present in the souls of more than a few Christians”.
A student of philosophy and theology, Ratzinger taught at various German universities from 1959 onwards. John Paul summoned him to Rome in 1981, where he made a deep impression with statements attacking homosexuality and “radical feminism” and with a treatise, “Dominus Iesus”, which denied that other world religions could offer salvation independent of Catholicism.
The author of numerous works on theology, liturgy and culture, Benedict enjoyed the company of his pet cats and relaxed by playing Mozart piano sonatas. He chose his papal name partly in honour of St Benedict, the 5th-century founder of the Benedictine order of monks that helped spread the Christian message across Europe.
He devoted much of his papacy to his intellectual interests, writing a three-volume history entitled “Jesus of Nazareth”. He wrote three encyclicals on spiritual and social themes, including one, “Deus Caritas Est”, that sternly condemned the reduction of erotic love in the modern age to “a commodity, a mere ‘thing’ to be bought and sold”. Another encyclical, “Caritas in Veritate”, called for the establishment of a “world political authority” to manage the global economy and attacked “grave deviations and failures” in unregulated capitalism.
Whether, as pope, Benedict achieved his aim of generating a fresh evangelical spirit in the Church will be for future historians to judge. What is clear is that the controversies that simmered in John Paul’s reign and became more intense under Benedict have continued to beset the Church under Francis and show every sign of raging on in the future.
