Almost 10 years after he retired due to health problems, the former Pope Benedict XVI, who served as the head of the Catholic Church from 2005 until 2013, when he became the first pope in six centuries to step down, has died. He was 95.
“With sorrow I inform you that the Pope Emeritus, Benedict XVI, passed away today at 9:34 in the Mater Ecclesiae Monastery in the Vatican,” the Vatican said in a statement on Saturday. No cause of death was announced.
His death comes after current Pope Francis said at a prayer gathering on Wednesday, Dec. 28 that Benedict was “very ill.” A Vatican spokesperson added at the time, that Benedict’s health had “deteriorated in recent hours due to advancing age” and that he was being “constantly monitored by doctors.”
The Vatican announced that Pope Francis will lead Benedict’s funeral in St Peter’s Square on Jan. 5. His body will lie at St Peter’s Basilica to allow visitors to pay respects starting Monday.
Benedict cited his health concerns and age when he announced his resignation in February 2013. At the time, he said, “After having repeatedly examined my conscience before God, I have come to the certainty that my strengths, due to an advanced age, are no longer suited to an adequate exercise of the Petrine ministry.”
But Benedict’s papal tenure was also tumultuous. Just months before before his retirement, Benedict’s former butler was convicted in a Vatican court of stealing and leaking confidential documents that had exposed corruption, cronyism, and infighting throughout the Vatican. Additionally, Benedict was heavily criticized for not doing enough to address the sex abuse crisis in the Catholic Church during his papacy.
Pope Benedict XVI was born Joseph Aloisius Ratzinger on April 16, 1927 in Bavaria, Germany. Coming of age in Germany as the Nazi Party seized power, Benedict’s past often garnered heavy scrutiny: He was drafted into an antiaircraft unit during World War II, and joined the Hitler Youth as a teenager, when enrollment was compulsory. However, it’s widely believed that his involvement with the Nazis was more a result of time and place, as opposed to any ideological sympathies. Neither Benedict, nor his family, were Nazi Party members, and his father, a policeman, was reportedly demoted for his anti-Nazi stances.
After WWII, Benedict enrolled in the seminary, studying philosophy and theology, and he was ordained as a priest (alongside his brother Georg) in 1951. Benedict continued his studies for several more years, and after producing a doctoral thesis, started working as a professor. He went on to teach, and serve as an administrator, at various universities throughout Germany during the Fifties, Sixties, and Seventies. Between 1962 and 1965, he worked closely with Cardinal Josef Frings, the Archbishop of Cologne, during the Second Vatican Council, a pivotal gathering as the Catholic Church tried to figure out its place in the 20th century.
Despite not having much experience as an actual priest, Benedict was appointed Archbishop of Munich and Freising, and named a cardinal, in 1977. Over the next several decades, prior to his appointment as pope, Benedict became a major player at the Vatican and was a close confidant of Pope John Paul II. Following John Paul’ II’s death, Benedict was elected as the next pope and assumed the papacy on April 19, 2005.
The day before Benedict was nominated, he gave a speech that called for a return to fundamental Catholic values, setting the tone for his conservative, deeply traditional papacy. “We are moving towards a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as definitive and has as its highest value one’s own ego and one’s own desires,” he said, adding: “The small boat of thought of many Christians has often been tossed about by these waves — thrown from one extreme to the other: from Marxism to liberalism, even to libertinism; from collectivism to radical individualism; from atheism to a vague religious mysticism; from agnosticism to syncretism and so forth.”
As pope, Benedict took hardline stances against divorce, women in the clergy, and artificial birth control. He was also staunchly opposed to gay marriage and long espoused controversial views on homosexuality. Back in the Eighties, he helped author the document “On the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons,” which described homosexuality as as a “more or less strong tendency ordered toward an intrinsic moral evil” (the document was “progressive” in the sense that it did at least decry violence against gay people). As pope, Benedict warned against gay marriage, describing it in a January 2012 speech as one of several threats that “undermine the family, threaten human dignity and the future of humanity itself.”
As for his handling of Catholic Church’s vast sex abuse crisis, Benedict did do more than his predecessor — though considering how little John Paul II did, that wasn’t particularly hard. Benedict issued apologies for child sex abuse perpetrated by clergy members and privately met with victims, while he reportedly defrocked 400 priests for sex abuse in his final years as pope.
Even still, many advocates and survivors felt Benedict did not do enough during his tenure. Upon his resignation, Tom Cronin of the Irish Survivors of Institutional Abuse International, suggested to The New York Times that the sex abuse crisis was “the straw that broke [Benedict’s] back.” Cronin added: “Every day we still get revelations about this priest or that bishop, and maybe he wasn’t young enough to confront it and perhaps, too, he hasn’t been getting the right advice. Whatever the reason, the church hierarchy just hasn’t faced up to the atrocities and their denials and inaction continue to damage them.”
Benedict’s handling of the sex abuse issues in the church continued to follow him after his retirement as well — sometimes because of his own doing. In 2019, he issued a surprising 6,000-word essay in which he blamed the Church’s sex abuse crisis on things like the sexual revolution of the Sixties and more liberal theological ideas that emerged out of the Vatican II council. One year later, Benedict was heavily implicated — though not as much as John Paul II — in a damning Vatican report about how the defrocked Cardinal Theodore McCarrick was allowed to rise up Church ranks despite numerous allegations of abuse (he was finally ousted in 2019).
And then, in early 2022, Benedict was accused of mishandling four cases involving the sexual abuse of minors while he was an archbishop in Germany during the late Seventies and early Eighties. Benedict denied any wrongdoing, but acknowledged “abuses and errors” had taken place under his watch.
Even before his death, Benedict’s legacy essentially seemed settled on ideological lines. While he had his many critics, his staunch traditionalism made him a favorite in conservative corners of the Catholic Church. His standing there only grew after his resignation, and as his successor, Pope Francis, espoused more liberal views (sort of). One of Benedicts biographers, John L. Allen Jr. told The New York Times that even the recent revelations about his handling of sex abuse cases would do little to sway people one way or the other.
“Benedict has always been a lighting rod, and I am not sure this chapter will change much,” he said. “Benedict’s legacy is in the eye of his beholder, and those who are inclined to admire him will give him the benefit of the doubt.”