Pope Benedict XVI, who resigned the papacy, dies at 95 hours into New Year
Just hours to the New Year 2023 and days after Pope Francis issued a global intercession appeal to the ailing Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, the latter has taken his final bow.
The Bavarian-born theologian in Germany whose conservative Roman Catholicism earned him the nickname “God’s Rottweiler” and who shocked his flock by suddenly resigning the papacy after just eight years died today morning aged 95.
Benedict was the longest-living pope, having surpassed Pope Leo XIII in September 2020.
“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 early Saturday. No cause of death was provided. “Further information will be provided as soon as possible,” the statement said.
The Vatican said Benedict’s remains would be on public display in St. Peter’s Basilica starting Monday for the faithful to pay their final respects.
Benedict, the first pope to voluntarily give up the pontifical reins in nearly 600 years, spent his twilight years living at the Vatican in a refurbished monastery, rarely appearing in public with the man who replaced him, Pope Francis.
But he continued to advise his far more liberal-minded successor in private. His influence was felt in August 2016, when Francis, who had made attempts to reach out to the LGBTQ community, took an unexpectedly hard line against schools’ teaching children that they could choose their gender.
“We must think about what Pope Benedict said — ‘It’s the epoch of sin against God the Creator,’” Francis said at a gathering of Polish bishops.
Born Joseph Aloisius Ratzinger on April 16, 1927, in Marktl, in Germany, Benedict, the son of police officer Josef and Maria, grew up in a Germany infected by Nazism. Like his father, Benedict opposed Hitler. But at age 14, he was forced to join the Hitler Youth. And two years later, while still in the seminary, the future pope was conscripted into the German army and sent to the front.
With the Allies on the verge of victory, Benedict deserted and went home. After a brief stint in a POW camp, he returned to the seminary and, along with his brother Georg, was ordained a priest on June 29, 1951.
Unlike most priests, Benedict logged little time in parishes. Instead, he embarked on an academic career and found himself moving to the conservative right as German campuses moved to the liberal left in the 1960s.
Unlike the wildly popular John Paul II, Benedict was a stern and forbidding figure with little of his Polish predecessor’s charisma. He was seen more as a transitional pope — a keeper of John Paul’s flame.
Like John Paul, Benedict was a witness to the Holocaust and made it his mission to reach out to Jews and to fight antisemitism. In 2008, Benedict became the first pope to visit a Jewish house of worship in the United States when he prayed at the Park East Synagogue in New York City.
Benedict also made a historic pilgrimage to ground zero in New York City, where he prayed with the families of the victims of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
