Pope Benedict XVI, Previously Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, Dies at 95

It's always a big deal when a pope dies, former pope or not.

IBenedict was decidedly preferable to Pope Francis, by far.

At the New York Times, "Benedict XVI, First Modern Pope to Resign, Dies at 95":

He defined a conservative course for the Roman Catholic Church, but his papacy was noted for his struggle with the clergy sexual abuse scandal and for his unexpected resignation.

Benedict XVI, the pope emeritus, a quiet scholar of diamond-hard intellect who spent much of his life enforcing church doctrine and defending tradition before shocking the Roman Catholic world by becoming the first pope in six centuries to resign, died on Saturday. He was 95.

Benedict’s death was announced by the Vatican. No cause was given. This past week, the Vatican said that Benedict’s health had taken a turn for the worse “due to advancing age.”

On Wednesday, Pope Francis asked those present at his weekly audience at the Vatican to pray for Benedict, who he said was “very ill.” He later visited him at the monastery on the Vatican City grounds where Benedict had lived since announcing his resignation in February 2013.

In that announcement, citing a loss of stamina and his “advanced age” at 85, Benedict said he was stepping down freely and “for the good of the church.” The decision, surprising the faithful and the world at large, capped a papacy of almost eight years in which his efforts to re-energize the Roman Catholic Church were often overshadowed by the unresolved sexual abuse scandal in the clergy. After the selection of his successor that March — Pope Francis, the former Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Buenos Aires — and a temporary stay at Castel Gandolfo, the papal summer residence, Benedict moved to a convent in Vatican City. It was the first time that two pontiffs had shared the same grounds. The two men were reportedly on good terms personally, but it was at times an awkward arrangement, and Francis moved decisively to reshape the papacy, firing or demoting many of Benedict’s traditionalist appointees and elevating the virtue of mercy over rules that Benedict had spent decades refining and enforcing.

Benedict, the uncharismatic intellectual who had largely preached to the church’s most fervent believers, was soon eclipsed by Francis, an unexpectedly popular successor who immediately sought to widen Catholicism’s appeal and to make the Vatican newly relevant in world affairs. But as Francis’ traditionalist-minded critics raised their voices in the later 2010s, they made Benedict a rallying point of their opposition, fueling fears that his resignation could promote a schism.

In early 2019, Benedict broke his post-papacy silence, issuing a 6,000-word letter that seemed at odds with his successor’s view of the 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 his frail health at the time, however, many church watchers questioned whether Benedict had indeed written the letter or had been manipulated to issue it as a way to undercut Francis.

Benedict himself was swept up in the scandal after a January 2022 report that had been commissioned by the Roman Catholic Church in Munich to investigate how the church had handled cases of sexual abuse between 1945 and 2019. The report contended that Benedict had mishandled four cases involving the sexual abuse of minors decades ago, while he was an archbishop in Germany, and that he had misled investigators in his written answers.

Two weeks after the report was made public, Benedict acknowledged in a letter that “abuses and errors” had taken place under his watch and asked for forgiveness. But he denied any misconduct.

At the time of his resignation, his decision to step down humbled and humanized a pope whose papacy had become associated with tempests. There were tangles with Jews, Muslims and Anglicans, and with progressive Catholics, who were distressed by his overtures to the most traditionalist fringes of the Catholic world.

It was a painful paradox to his supporters that the long-gathering sexual abuse crisis should finally hit the Vatican with a vengeance under Benedict, in 2010. As Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, charged with leading the powerful Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican office responsible for defending church orthodoxy, he had been ahead of many peers in recognizing how deeply the church had been damaged by disclosures that priests around the world had sexually abused youths for decades and even longer. As early as 2005, he referred to the abuse as “filth in the church.”

Elected pope on April 19, 2005, after the death of John Paul II, Benedict went on to apologize for the abuse and met with victims, a first for the papacy. But he could not escape the reality that the church had shielded priests accused of molestation, minimized behavior that it would otherwise have deemed immoral, and kept all of it secret from the civil authorities, forestalling criminal prosecutions.

The reckoning clouded the widely held view that Benedict was the most influential intellectual force in the church in a generation.

“It’s worth stepping back for a moment and remembering that Benedict is probably the greatest scholar to rule the church since Innocent III, the brilliant jurist who served from 1198 to 1216,” the Princeton historian Anthony Grafton wrote in The New York Review of Books in 2010.

John Paul II had won hearts, but it was Cardinal Ratzinger who defined the corrective to what he and John Paul saw as an alarming liberal shift within the church, set in motion by the reforms of the Second Vatican Council in the early 1960s.

The church’s 265th pope, Benedict was the first German to hold the title in a half-millennium, and his election was a milestone toward Germany’s spiritual renewal 60 years after World War II and the Holocaust. At 78, he was also the oldest man to become pope since 1730.

The church he inherited was in crisis, the sexual abuse scandal being its most vivid manifestation. It was an institution run by a mainly European hierarchy overseeing a faithful — numbering one billion — largely residing in the developing world. And it was being torn between its ancient, insular ways and the modern world...