By Catherine Pepinster
Pope Benedict XVI, whose papacy was mired in controversy and who dramatically resigned in 2013, died on 31 December 2022 at the age of 95. He was the 265th pope of the Roman Catholic Church
Why was it so shocking that Pope Benedict resigned?
Being pope is considered a role that ends only on death. Benedict XVI was the first pope to resign in 600 years and although his papacy was very troubled, with considerable controversies over corruption and financial mismanagement in the Vatican, and growing reports of child sexual abuse by Roman Catholic priests, it was still deeply shocking when he unexpectedly quit. His reason was “loss of stamina” and advancing age and he suffered ill health for the remaining years of his life.
How did he come to be pope in the first place?
Pope Benedict succeeded Pope John Paul II who died in 2005 after 26 years in office. John Paul II had succeeded John Paul I who died after only 33 days in office, and perhaps in reaction to that a fit, middle-aged man — Cardinal Karol Wojtyla, 58, of Kraków in Poland — was chosen. But John Paul II’s papacy lasted so long that when Benedict XVI was picked, it was thought it was better to have a shorter papacy — a matter of a few years, and they picked an older man.
Who picked him?
Popes are elected by what is called the College of Cardinals — men, aged under 80, appointed to the rank of cardinal by popes. Expert commentators said that John Paul II had packed the College of Cardinals with men who would pick someone with similar thinking to his own — a theologically conservative candidate.
Did they?
The man they elected in April 2005 was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who became Benedict XVI. For years had been John Paul II’s right-hand man. He held the office of Prefect of the Congregation of the Faith (CDF) — in effect running the office that succeeded the Catholic Church’s inquisition — for 23 years, having been chosen by John Paul II for the post. Ratzinger became notorious for pursuing progressive theologians, blocking some from working.
He was also in a prime position to be elected because he was well-known to many cardinals through his work at the CDF and played a highly prominent role in the lead-up to the election of a new pope — what is known as the conclave — through his role, as Dean of the College of Cardinals, in the funeral of John Paul II and other ceremonies.
Did he want to be pope?
You would think so, given that he appeared on the balcony of St Peter’s Basilica in Rome, after his election, and clenched his hands above his head in what looked like a gesture of triumph. But Ratzinger had started out in life as a theologian, not a church administrator, and Peter Seewald, in his recent two-volume biography of Benedict XVI, recalled an email exchange when he asked him if first leaving academia to be appointed as Archbishop of Munich was “the end of your personal happiness and all your dreams”. He answered: “You could say that. Yes.”
What about his family background?
Ratzinger was born in Bavaria, Germany, in 1927 to a deeply devout couple, Joseph and Mary Ratzinger. His father was a policeman and he had a brother, Georg, who also became a priest and was a renowned choirmaster. His sister, Maria, ran Cardinal Ratzinger’s household until she died in 1991. Joseph and George entered a Catholic seminary together in 1945 and were ordained in 1951. While most newly ordained Roman Catholic priests join parishes, Joseph Ratzinger spent his entire time as a priest in academia, working as a theologian.
There have been times when he was called a Nazi by detractors. Is that fair?
Joseph Ratzinger Sr was deeply opposed to Nazism, which affected his police career and caused the family to be harassed and to move from town to town in Bavaria. When he was 14, the future pope joined the Hitler Youth — which all teenage boys were conscripted to do at that time. He was also conscripted into the German army from which he deserted in 1945. Later he was interned in a prisoner-of-war camp.
How did he come to the notice of the Vatican and hold high office in Rome?
Ratzinger made a name for himself early on, becoming a peritus, or theological adviser, to Cardinal Frings of Cologne during the Second Vatican Council. At that stage, he was also for progress and change in the church and was associated with prominent progressive thinkers, such as Hans Kung. He was also making a name for himself with his books, particularly his highly regarded Introduction to Christianity. But by the late 1960s, when many universities were in turmoil with students leaning towards Marxism, he became alarmed, and was concerned that their radicalism was a threat to traditional church teaching. He finally left his university post in 1977 when he was appointed Archbishop of Munich by Pope Paul VI, who made him a cardinal just a few months later. It was his increasingly conservative thinking that attracted John Paul II, elected pope in 1978, to appoint him as head of the CDF, but they also shared an antipathy to Marxism and Soviet Russia as threats to Christianity.
Once in the Vatican as head of the CDF, he became quite the tough guy?
During his years at the CDF, Ratzinger became a notorious hardliner, cracking down on progressive theologians, especially those from Latin America linked to the liberation theology movement, by having them suspended from their teaching roles.
In 2000 he published a document, Dominus Iesus, in which he declared that salvation is to be found only in the Catholic Church and nowhere else and dismissively called other churches “ecclesial communities”. This deeply distressed Protestant churches, including the Church of England, which had been striving for years to have better ecumenical relations with the Roman Catholic Church.
Was Ratzinger a hardliner as Pope Benedict, or did he change tack?
In some ways he was a surprising figure. He remained very much the studious, thoughtful figure that he had always been and produced some outstanding encyclicals — papal teaching documents — on love and on the economy that won praise from many quarters, including those who had often been critical of him. He also wrote and spoke about the environment and the risks to God’s creation from environmental damage and climate change, in many ways paving the way for Pope Francis, who has been outspoken on green issues.
But Benedict also caused controversy with his pronouncements on the liturgy, alienated Muslims and Jews, and also the Church of England.
What were the main controversies?
Benedict’s combative and controversial side came to the fore with his most notorious speech: the Regensburg address.
In 2006, during a visit home to Germany, he gave an address at the University of Regensburg, where he had been a professor. It was mostly a powerful argument in favour of reason but it also included a reference to Islam, with a quote from a 14th-century Byzantine emperor who accused the Prophet Muhammad of bringing to the world things that were evil and inhuman and spreading his faith by the sword.
Benedict’s words came at a time when there was grave tension between West and East after the 9/11 attacks of 2001 and later conflicts in Iraq. Within a few days anger at Benedict’s speech had spread throughout the Arab world. By the time he said that he was “deeply sorry for the reactions” towards passages in his address that “were considered offensive to the sensibility of Muslims”, mobs were burning his effigy in the streets of several cities. The affair also showed that the new Pope had not realised that it is one thing for an academic to speak controversially in an intellectual setting but quite another for one of the world’s most prominent religious leaders.
Benedict was at least even-handed. After deeply alienating Muslims, he then went on to alienate Jews when, a year later, he relaxed restrictions on the saying of the Mass — the main Roman Catholic church service — in the old Tridentine Rite, which had been put to one side since the 1960s for not only being in Latin but for its archaic ideas about liturgy and the church. As well as the Mass, there was a Tridentine Rite for a Good Friday liturgy which had in effect been forbidden for years, but Benedict brought it back. Although he himself rewrote an antisemitic prayer about “Jewish blindness”, he left in prayers for the conversion of Jews — something that many Jewish people found deeply offensive.
Then in 2009 he went even further in offending Jews when he reinstated into the Roman Catholic Church four bishops who had been excommunicated after being illicitly ordained by the notorious arch-conservative Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre. One of the four, Richard Williamson, was a Holocaust denier, and in protest the Chief Rabbinate of Israel broke off diplomatic relations with the Vatican.
Was he any more tactful with the Church of England?
As Cardinal Ratzinger, he had alienated Anglicans with his dismissal of the Church of England as an “ecclesial community” rather than a church. There was some hope, however, that fences could be mended because his papacy coincided with Rowan Williams, a similarly cerebral theologian, holding the office of Archbishop of Canterbury. The pair had several meetings and appeared to get on well.
However, in November 2009, he published a document creating a “personal ordinariate” allowing disaffected Anglicans to enter into communion with the Roman Catholic Church without fully shedding their Anglican identity, or patrimony. Benedict, despite regular diplomatic contact between Rome and Canterbury, and despite his good relations with Dr Williams, went ahead without the courtesy of informing the archbishop or his officials, and chose instead to keep them in the dark.
What about Catholics? How did they react?
Benedict’s papacy highlighted the extent to which there are two camps in the Roman Catholic Church. The more progressive camp — those keen on interfaith dialogue, ecumenical relations with other Christians, and preferring the liturgical reforms of the 1960s — were dismayed by this pontificate. Traditionalists, who were not deeply committed to dialogue and had loathed the restrictions placed on the Tridentine Rite, adored Benedict.
Child abuse by Catholic priests: how did he deal with that?
Throughout his pontificate, there were arguments over whether the CDF under his watch had done enough to deal with abuse, given that it had never offered training, or guidelines for best practice or sponsored research, and it must have learnt of what was going on across the world and the extent to which it was being covered up.
Some idea of how shocking the abuse was came only days before John Paul II’s death when Ratzinger spoke of the need to get rid of “the filth” in the church. And once he was Pope, he did what John Paul had never done: he took action against Fr Marcial Maciel Degollado, founder of the arch-conservative Legionaries of Christ, and a notorious abuser.
Then, in 2009, after two reports revealed disturbing levels of sexual abuse of children by priests in Ireland and the cover-up of the abuse, Benedict summoned the entire hierarchy of the Catholic Church in Ireland to Rome and publicly rebuked them. Abuse of minors was, said the Pope, “a heinous crime and grave sin”. But Benedict was criticised for not making an apology and for failing to sack any bishops.
It sounds relentlessly difficult. Did Benedict XVI have any easier times?
For a man who was studious, quiet and shy, he was surprisingly successful at visits abroad. These would often be spoken of in advance in ominous tones but he frequently won over people during his trips, especially in Poland, Spain, the United States and the UK.
When did he visit the UK?
In 2010 he travelled to Britain, the second time that a Pope had done so (the first was John Paul II in 1982, but that was a pastoral visit) and the first state visit. He landed in Edinburgh, where he met Queen Elizabeth II and the Duke of Edinburgh and then travelled south to London and later to Birmingham. The highlights of his visit were the beatification of the Victorian English convert, Cardinal John Henry Newman, and his address to parliament at Westminster Hall. There had been talk of huge protests against his visit, mostly by people who did not want a religious leader honoured with a state visit and by others who blamed him for the child abuse scandal. But the protests were small and instead huge crowds turned out for his visit, including an outdoor night-time gathering by candlelight in Hyde Park.
Was that his greatest impact on people in Britain?
Yes — unless you count The Two Popes, a biopic released by Netflix in 2019, when he was played by Anthony Hopkins. The film focused on Benedict having conversations with Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Buenos Aires, as he then was, who wants to resign and the Pope persuades him not to. The film suggested the pair, though completely different — Benedict, the intellectual, conservative, and Bergoglio, the ebullient yet troubled progressive — found a way to get on, not least through watching the 2014 World Cup final together, when their national teams of Argentina and Germany fought for the trophy. By then, it was not Bergoglio who had resigned but Benedict, with Bergoglio succeeding him as Pope Francis in 2013.
What was the final straw that caused Benedict to quit?
He suggested that he did not have the physical strength to continue, although he lasted almost another decade after resigning. There were also scandals surrounding financial corruption and mismanagement in the Vatican, leaks from his own household and the theft of personal documents. He increasingly distrusted people around him. One of his greatest concerns throughout his time at the Vatican, and especially when he was Pope, was the decline of Christianity in the West and the growth of relativism. He seemed to yearn all his adulthood for the devout Catholic way of life that he knew in Bavaria in his childhood.
He was particularly disturbed by social change, especially the popularity of divorce and the acceptance of homosexuality. In person, he lacked the charisma of his predecessor and the genius for soundbite of his successor. He was the pope of the study, much more than the pope of the global stage. His legacy is his books, from his most esoteric during his university years to his three-volume popular biography of Jesus of Nazareth, written during his years in office.
