Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI dies at 95. He was the first Catholic pope to abdicate in 600 years.
on the Roman Curia, the Holy See’s bureaucracy accused of corruption and conniving behind Vatican walls. The Vatican bank faced mounting criticism over its opaque operations, leading foreign financial institutions to temporarily suspend credit transactions in the world’s smallest state.
“We can reveal the face of the church and how this face is, at times, disfigured,” Benedict would say in his final homily as pope. “I am thinking in particular of the sins against the unity of the church, of the divisions in the body of the church.” To the surprise of supporters and detractors, Pope Benedict presided over the world’s 1.1 billion Catholics with a gentler touch.
“Benedict’s focus was very much on the church internally,” journalist David Gibson, who wrote a biography of the pontiff, said in an interview. “And not even the structures of the church, but the faith — promoting the faith as a kind of foundation to everything else. He just wasn’t interested in reforming the church or opening the church to new things. He wanted to get back to basics. To him, devotion, piety, faith came first. If people were true to that, everything else would not matter.
there in 2009 that the distribution of condoms aggravates the problem. Like his predecessor, he said sexual abstinence was a better way to control the disease. In 2017, two former top managers of the bank were convicted of minor violations of anti-money laundering norms. Angelo Proietti, an Italian contractor, who had done work for several Vatican offices, was sentenced in 2018 to 2½ years in jail for using a Vatican bank account for money laundering.
A subsequent Vatican investigation would allegedly uncover evidence of blackmail schemes against homosexual clerics in the Holy See hierarchy, a story first reported by the Italian daily La Repubblica. In the book “The Last Conversations of Benedict XVI,” a collection of interviews conducted by biographer Peter Seewald, the longtime Vatican watcher, Pope Benedict denied being pressured to resign, but made reference to a powerful “gay lobby” within the Vatican that he claimed to have broken up.
In 2008, he made a six-day visit to the United States, where he held the first publicly known meeting between a pope and victims of abuse by Catholic priests and apologized for a scandal that has upended the trust of many Catholics in the West, where many such cases have surfaced. In another unusually dramatic stroke, Pope Benedict in 2009 reached out to conservative members of the Anglican Communion possibly seeking reunification with the Catholic Church. He created a structure within Roman Catholicism that allowed them to keep not only their distinctive Anglican spiritual and liturgical heritage but their married priests as well.
Pope Benedict saw relativism as the core challenge facing the Catholic Church. The church, he believed, must reassert objective truth, with the person of Jesus as the focal point. In an address the day before he was elected pontiff, he decried the “dictatorship of relativism” for “not recognizing anything as for certain and which has as its highest goal one’s own ego and one’s own desires.”
“This was part of the understanding of what was supposed to happen in April 2005 — that this guy who had worked in Rome for 25 years and who knew how badly in need of redesign and reconfiguration the central machinery of the Catholic Church is would take that on,” Weigel said in 2009. In explaining his decision to resign, Pope Benedict invoked his infirmity and his belief that the modern papacy requires more vigor than he possessed.
Pope Benedict’s “esteem [for Francis] is very high,” the former pontiff’s private secretary Archbishop Georg Gänswein. “And it has grown because of the courage of the new pope, week after week. At the beginning, they did not know each other very well. But then Pope Francis phoned him, wrote him, visited him, phoned him again and invited him [to private meetings], so that their contact became very personal and confidential.”was born April 16, 1927, in the Bavarian village of Marktl am Inn.
Nazism, which dominated Germany, had begun its march through Europe. Religious instruction was banned at Joseph’s school, and lyrics in Christian songbooks were replaced by verses that celebrated Hitler. He served for a time in an antiaircraft unit that guarded a BMW plant outside Munich, but, because of a badly infected finger, he never had to fire a gun.
He grew to believe that reformers had gone too far, opening the door too wide to the surrounding culture and radically weakening the church. He wrote later in his memoir that “the impression grew steadily that nothing was now stable in the Church, that everything was open to revision … The faith no longer seemed exempt from human decision-making but rather was now apparently determined by it.”The young theologian was horrified by the protest culture that swept through Europe in the 1960s.
Under John Paul II, it became the second most powerful job in the Vatican — and the most controversial. Estimates are that formal censure — such as an order not to speak publicly or to publish — was imposed on a dozen theologians during his tenure as head of the congregation and that investigations were opened on about 80 more.
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