Pope emeritus Benedict XVI, Catholic scholar and champion of orthodoxy, was forced to confront priest abuse | 24CA News
Benedict XVI, who led the Roman Catholic Church by means of a interval of transformation, controversy and scandal earlier than turning into the primary pontiff in 600 years to resign, has died.
The pope emeritus was 95.
Benedict had been anticipated to make his papacy largely about reasserting conventional conservative Roman Catholic doctrine however ended up spending a lot of it coping with the fallout of the church’s sexual abuse scandal.
At 78, Benedict was elected as pontiff in April 2005, so his time period had all the time been anticipated to be brief, relative to his predecessors.
Known extra for teachings than charisma
He was the oldest cardinal to develop into pope since Clement XII in 1730 and was seen by many as a “transitional” chief.
Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, a Catholic scholar recognized extra for his rigorous theological teachings than his charisma, was an sudden alternative. Some thought-about him too polarizing and radical in comparison with his populist predecessor, John Paul II.
About 150,000 folks gathered in St. Peter’s Square to witness Pope Benedict XVI’s closing public look earlier than he retires to a lifetime of prayer and seclusion
Benedict made historical past when, on Feb. 28, 2013, he turned the primary pope in virtually 600 years to resign.
Pope Gregory XII, in 1415, was the final to stop whereas in workplace.
Benedict cited his age — he was 85 — and deteriorating well being as causes for his resignation. In late 2022, those that had seen Benedict stated his physique was very frail however his thoughts was nonetheless sharp. However, Italian news experiences stated he had been affected by respiratory issues over the Christmas interval.
His choice to resign after holding the papacy for lower than eight years caught Catholics around the globe and even a few of his closest advisers off guard.
Many anticipated his papacy to be characterised by a strict conservative interpretation of Roman Catholic doctrine.
While he positively used his time as pope to espouse his imaginative and prescient of a “purer” Catholic Church and denounce the “dictatorship of relativism” he noticed as permeating fashionable secular society and infiltrating elements of the church, he held what could be thought-about liberal positions on many social points.
He opposed the dying penalty and the battle in Iraq; advocated for the poor and disenfranchised; included extreme wealth and environmental air pollution among the many seven fashionable sins he launched in 2008; and denounced the blind pursuit of financial revenue for its personal good.
In the top, nevertheless, these facets of his papacy had been largely overshadowed by the widening scope of the sexual abuse scandal involving Catholic clergy.
Abuses of the previous
One of Benedict’s first acts as pope was to take away Marcial Maciel Degollado, a recognized pedophile and philanderer, from energetic ministry. The disgraced chief of the Legion of Christ, a secretive Catholic order Degollado based in Mexico, had sexually abused younger seminarians over a number of a long time and fathered youngsters by totally different ladies.
But earlier than Benedict, Degollado had by no means been sanctioned by the church.
Allegations that the church had turned a blind eye to sexual abuse by clergy reduce even nearer in 2010, when particulars surfaced {that a} priest from Essen, accused of sexually abusing minors, was transferred to Ratzinger’s archdiocese for “therapy” in 1980, when Ratzinger was archbishop of Munich.
Peter Hullermann was given a pastoral task within the archdiocese and continued to molest minors for years, even after he was convicted of such offences in 1986.
Although Ratzinger’s vicar-general on the Munich diocese, Gerhard Gruber, took full duty for Hullermann’s switch there and claimed Ratzinger was not conscious of all personnel issues inside the archdiocese, many discovered it laborious to imagine he might have remained blind to the case.
Scandal — even after apology
The Hullermann case was simply certainly one of a whole bunch of abuse allegations that surfaced throughout Benedict’s papacy, together with at the very least 300 in Germany alone.
The pope couldn’t shake the scandal, even after he wrote an unprecedented formal letter of apology to victims of abuse in Ireland, the place the Catholic Church had been rocked by revelations that bishops, usually in collusion with the state and police, coated up abuse and made youngsters signal confidentiality agreements defending their abusers.
Benedict appointed a bunch of prelates to analyze Irish dioceses and seminaries in May 2010. He was additionally the primary pope to maintain an official summit on the subject of sexual abuse within the church, assembling bishops from 100 nations and the leaders of 33 non secular orders for a four-day convention on the Vatican in February 2012.
Then in January 2022, an impartial report commissioned by the German church discovered he did not act in 4 circumstances of sexual abuse when he was Archbishop of Munich, between 1977 and 1982.
Benedict later requested for forgiveness for his dealing with of the circumstances, however admitted no wrongdoing.
Benedict’s tenure was additionally marred by a handful of non-public gaffes and controversies, which he generally took pains to right.
In 2006, for instance, he angered Muslims around the globe when he selected to cite a 14th-century Byzantine emperor’s disparaging remarks about Islam throughout a theological lecture on the University of Regensburg in Bavaria.
He tried to ease the rift three months later by visiting Istanbul’s Blue Mosque, turning into solely the second pope in historical past to enter a Muslim home of worship.
In 2009, he drew condemnation for reversing the excommunications of schismatic bishops from the ultraconservative Society of St. Pius X, a few of whom had denied sure facets of the Holocaust.
He additionally raised eyebrows when he created a particular division of the Catholic Church for Anglican bishops defecting from the Church of England over points such because the ordaining of girls bishops.
Liberal views
Although typically unwavering on points corresponding to homosexuality, the ordaining of girls monks and contraception, Benedict stunned many in November 2010 when he instructed a journalist that there could also be some circumstances by which utilizing a condom is justified.
In talking out, for instance, towards the battle in Iraq or extreme consumption, he noticed the alignment of a social conscience with one’s particular person morality as integral to Catholic teachings and because the solely method to alleviate human struggling and convey the world out of its ethical turpitude.
“It is the responsibility of the church to educate consciences, to teach moral responsibility and to unmask the evil, to unmask this idolatry of money, which enslaves man,” he instructed media travelling with him on a March 2012 papal go to to Mexico, the place he spoke out strongly towards the nation’s lethal drug battle.
He advocated towards the clergy’s direct engagement in politics, whether or not in Latin America or elsewhere.
“The church’s mission is not political in nature,” he stated on a go to to the West African nation of Benin. “Christ does not propose a revolution of a social or political kind.”
Instead, Benedict targeted on the concept of charity — quite than the extra political notion of social justice — as “the heart of the church’s social doctrine” and urged Christians engaged in charitable works to “not be inspired by ideologies aimed at improving the world,” however quite by their “living relationship with Christ” and the love for others it evokes.
The seminary years
An achieved pianist who spoke a number of languages, Ratzinger was born on April 16, 1927, in Marktl am Inn, a small city in Bavaria, the strongly Catholic area in southern Germany.
His father, a policeman additionally named Joseph, got here from an previous Bavarian farming household of modest means. He took an anti-Nazi stance after Adolf Hitler got here to energy, and the household moved a number of instances earlier than settling in a village outdoors town of Traunstein in 1937.
Ratzinger entered the seminary at Traunstein in 1939 and in 1943 was drafted together with the remainder of his class into an anti-aircraft unit of the navy.
In his early teenagers, he was a member of the Hitler Youth, which was obligatory for all German youngsters on the time, though in response to National Catholic Reporter senior correspondent John L. Allen Jr., who has written two books about Benedict, he was an unenthusiastic member and recurrently skipped conferences.
Ratzinger insisted he by no means fired a shot whereas within the navy and in 1945, he abandoned and returned to Traunstein, the place he was briefly held in an American prisoner of battle camp.
After the battle, he re-entered the seminary and was ordained into the priesthood in 1951. Soon after, he acquired his doctorate in theology from the Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich.
By the top of the last decade, he was lecturing as a full professor of theology on the University of Bonn.
Conservative theologian
He later moved to the University of Muenster, and by the late Sixties, was chair of dogmatic theology on the University of Tuebingen.
But he was irritated by the rising liberalism and ’60s radicalism of Tuebingen’s pupil physique and moved to the extra conservative University of Regensburg, the place he ultimately turned dean and spent a part of his time advising German bishops on issues of theology.
In 1977, Pope Paul VI appointed him archbishop of Munich, one of many largest dioceses on this planet, and three months later, made him a cardinal.
Ratzinger would go on to be elected dean of the College of Cardinals 25 years later.
Ratzinger continued alongside a conservative path, turning into prefect of the Vatican’s highly effective Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) in 1981 and shifting to Rome to function Pope John Paul II’s defender of the “clear faith,” a place he held till the 2005 conclave.
His zeal in implementing orthodoxy earned Ratzinger fairly a couple of labels through the years.
‘Cardinal No’
He was referred to as, variously, “the Hammer,” “Cardinal No” and “God’s Rottweiler.”
But some have additionally stated he had a heat “pastoral” aspect that didn’t all the time come throughout within the media’s protection. What he lacked within the type of theatrical flourish that made John Paul so in style, he made up for in his devotion to pedagogy and his eloquence on issues of theology.
When describing the enchantment of the seemingly stiff and stern Benedict, Allen famously instructed Time journal that whereas folks might have come to “see” John Paul, they got here to “hear” Benedict. With his passing, the voice of Benedict the pope could also be gone, however that of Benedict the theologian will undoubtedly dwell on by means of the numerous scholarly works he authored all through his profession and papacy.
