Former Pope Benedict XVI, born Joseph Ratzinger in Germany, has died at his Vatican residence at the age of 95. The 265th leader of the Roman Catholic Church had been ill for some time. He led the Catholic Church for less than eight years until, in 2013, he became the first Pope to resign since Gregory XII in 1415.
The last pope to step down in 600 years was the former Pope Benedict, who passed away on Saturday at the age of 95. He left behind a Catholic Church divided between conservatives and progressives, plagued by scandals around sexual abuse, and entrenched in administration.
Although Benedict, the first German pope in a millennium, got along well with Pope Francis, his ongoing presence inside the Vatican following his resignation in 2013 furthered the Church’s ideological divisions.
Conservatives alarmed by Francis’ progressive moves looked to Benedict as the guardian of tradition. Several times he had to tell nostalgic admirers via visitors: “There is one pope, and it is Francis.”
With his own admission, Benedict was a weak leader who struggled to assert himself within the secretive Vatican bureaucracy and stumbled from crisis to crisis during his eight-year rule.
Although Benedict was the first pope to take significant action against abuse, his repeated apologies for the Church’s inability to stop clergy sexual abuse of minors were ineffective in stopping the West’s and particularly Europe’s dramatic decrease in church attendance.
In 2022, a third-party investigation in his native Germany claimed that Benedict had ignored four allegations of abuse while he served as the Archbishop of Munich from 1977 to 1982.
Shaken by the story, he sent a heartfelt letter to plead for forgiveness and admit that mistakes had been made. In a thorough reply, his attorneys contended that he was not solely to blame.
Victims groups claimed that the couched response wasted a chance from a scandal that shook the Church globally.
The moment Benedict shocked the world by announcing his resignation and informing the cardinals he was too old and fragile to manage an organization with more than 1.3 billion members in Latin on February 11, 2013, will go down in history as his most talked about incident.
“There were moments of joy and light, but also moments that were not easy … There were moments … when the seas were rough and the wind blew against us and it seemed that the Lord was sleeping,” Benedict told his last general audience, a gathering of more than 150,000 people.
