People begin to gather at St. Peter's Square in Vatican City on Saturday, December 31, to mourn the death of former Pope Benedict. 📷 Guglielmo Mangiapane, Yara Nardi/Reuters
, December 31, aged 95, was the first pontiff in 600 years to resign, leaving behind a Catholic Church battered by sexual abuse scandals, mired in mismanagement and polarized between conservatives and progressives.
Victims groups said the couched response squandered an opportunity from a scandal that rattled the Church worldwide. The Seat of St Peter was declared vacant on Feb. 28, 2013, when Benedict took up residence at the papal summer retreat at Castelgandolfo, south of Rome, while cardinals from around the world gathered in the Vatican to choose his successor.Before he formally stepped down, Benedict and his aides unilaterally chose the title “pope emeritus” and decided he would continue to wear a white cassock, albeit a slightly modified one.
Although he said he would remain “hidden from the world,” Benedict did not live up to that promise and in retirement sometimes caused controversy and confusion through his writings. It led to Francis dismissing Archbishop Georg Ganswein, Benedict’s secretary, from a top Vatican job. Ganswein’s role as a middleman between Benedict and the cardinal was unclear, with many believing he had misled Benedict, the cardinal, or both.
The “Vatileaks” case resulted in the arrest of his butler, Paolo Gabriele, who was convicted of handing secret documents to a journalist. Benedict later pardoned him. Gabriele was given a job in a Vatican-owned hospital and died in 2020. “Practical government is not my strong point and that is certainly a weakness. But I cannot see myself as a failure,” he added.He was born Joseph Aloisius Ratzinger on April 16, 1927, in the southern German village of Marktl, close to Austria.
However, the Marxism and atheism of the 1968 student protests across Europe prompted him to become more conservative to defend the faith against growing secularism. In the 1990s, Ratzinger brought pressure against theologians, mostly in Asia, who saw non-Christian religions as part of God’s plan for humanity.
Benedict visited his homeland three times as pope and confronted its dark past when he visited the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz in Poland. Calling himself “a son of Germany,” he prayed and asked why God was silent when 1.5 million victims, most of them Jews, died there during World War Two. The pope made a trip to the United States in 2008 where he apologized for the sexual abuse scandal, promised that pedophile priests would have to go and comforted abuse victims.The Jewish world, and many Catholics, were outraged after he lifted the excommunication of four traditionalist bishops, one of whom was a notorious Holocaust denier. Benedict later said the Vatican should have researched him better.
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