Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI dies aged 95

Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI died on Saturday at the age of 95.

The German will be marked by the surprising decision, on February 11, 2013, to resign from the papacy. Since Gregory the 12th, in 1415, a pontiff had not left the leadership of the Catholic Church on his own.

Italian newspapers said at the time that he was disgusted by sexual and financial scandals at the Vatican’s top hierarchy. But the version ended up not being confirmed, which favored the thesis that he, sick, and three encyclicals later, was weakened by the routine of almost eight years of the pontificate.

Already under the title of pope emeritus, after his resignation, Benedict 16 began to occupy modest dependencies of a monastery on Vatican land, which he rarely left, such as, at the invitation of Pope Francis, his successor, for the canonization mass of João Paulo II (1920-2005), whom he had succeeded in 2005.

It’s hard to know to what extent Joseph Ratzinger, his original name, worked to weaken Francis, much more open on issues such as divorce or the church’s relationship with LGBTQIA+ people.

But one of the biographical consensuses attributes exceptional erudition and theological preparation to Ratzinger. As pope, he wanted to mark his presence by combating the relativization of religious or moral values.

It is likely, however, that it will go down in the history of the Catholic Church due to its management marked by allegations of pedophilia in the institution, a bomb with a delayed effect that it received from previous pontificates.

Reserved and uncharismatic, Ratzinger, upon leaving the April 2005 conclave with the papal miter, succeeded John Paul II, a man who, in more than 26 years of pontificate and travels to 129 countries and autonomous regions, became a pop star of Catholicism. . Benedict XVI visibly lost out in that comparison.

Karol Wojtyla, the original name of John Paul II, a Pole discriminated against by communism, devoted part of his energies to undermining the legitimacy of political regimes in the Soviet sphere. And, in the process, he neutralized the growth of left-wing thinking within the church. For this task, he had as his right-hand man Cardinal Ratzinger, his prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (formerly the Inquisition).

With the internal adversary neutralized —progressive bishops did not become cardinals, like the Brazilian Helder Câmara—, the political game, so to speak, automatically lost importance.

Ratzinger’s platform, already as pope, became more abstract for the great mass of Catholics.

Benedict 16 sought to oppose secularization and the loss of spiritual content in the 21st century. Or, more radically, he said that he valued prayer for militancy, which the Vatican experts pointed out as a very conservative idea, similar, by the way, to those that prevailed in the last decades in the high hierarchy of the church. The last one to escape them was John XXIII, the pope of the Second Vatican Council, who died in 1963.

Within the most absolute orthodoxy, Benedict XVI made no concessions to condoms as an instrument to combat AIDS. To them he contrasted abstinence, marital fidelity and actions against poverty.

He did not waive the ban on women’s ordination — a somewhat stale topic among Catholic feminists — and he criticized homosexuals. Even opposing homophobic prejudice, she stated in 2008 that the relativization of the difference between men and women was a “violation of the natural order” and that the church should “protect humanity from its self-destruction”.

But accusations of pedophilia against religious people have eclipsed these other aspects. The first symptoms of a major problem grew in 1991, when Ratzinger suggested to John Paul that he remove the investigations from the dioceses and centralize them in the Vatican, under the jurisdiction of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

He wanted to expedite the punishment of erring priests. One of them, the Mexican Marcial Degollado, founder of the conservative Legion of Christ, had his privileges suspended only in 2010. In the last year of John Paul II’s pontificate, a report by the American episcopal conference cited more than 10,000 complaints against 4,300 priests, who in 81% of the cases, male adolescents were victims.

Already under Benedict XVI, scandals erupted in the USA, Canada, Ireland, Belgium and Germany, generating criminal actions in civil courts and damages proceedings. No Vatican expert would accuse Ratzinger of omission. What they insinuate, however, is that the pope emeritus, when he was a cardinal, had other priorities, above all the framing of theologians and priests seduced by liberation theology.

Benedict XVI also believed that he did not need to rely on the media. With cases of pedophilia in the headlines, his responses were always slow and sparse, leading to an impression of inactivity.

Born in 1927 in the small Bavarian town of Marktl, Ratzinger was the son of a very Catholic policeman. At the age of 14 he was enrolled in the Hitler Youth, as determined by a 1939 law.

His biographers mention his horrified reaction when a cousin of his, with Down syndrome, was arrested and killed, in the name of “purification of the race”. Recruited into antiaircraft defense groups, he became a prisoner of war before returning to the seminary and completing his training. He was ordained a priest in June 1951. He remained only a few months as head of a parish. Stimulated by a church that valued intellectual figures, he exercised his vocation for academic life.

He taught theology at the universities of Bonn, Tübingen —where he became close to the left-wing theologian Hans Küng, from whom he distanced himself in the late 1960s— and Regensburg. In 1977, already as a bishop, he was appointed by Paul 6th Archbishop of Munich and, in the same year, cardinal. By becoming the 256th pope, aged 78, he was already the oldest cardinal in the Roman Curia, with 24 years as a direct aide to his predecessor.