Pope Benedict obituary: ‘Enforcer in chief’ and first pontiff to resign in over 600 years

Born: April 16th, 1927

Died: December 31st, 2022

For a great many people the decision of Pope Benedict XVI to resign in 2013 remains the outstanding event of his eight-year papacy but there was another – his election as a German who had been a member of the Hitler Youth.

As a teenager he was conscripted by the Nazis and had no say in the matter but, in 2005 after his election in succession to Pope John Paul II, there was no doubt about the impact his accession had on German people present in St Peter’s Square that April day where his investiture as Benedict XVI took place.

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Stefan Rieger, a fireman from Berphalz near Regensburg in Bavaria, where Pope Benedict himself came from, would not say he was proud to be German when speaking to The Irish Times that afternoon. “It is difficult to say ‘proud’, especially with our history. But I am happy that he is pope,” he said. “He is very special, [we] all know him personally, [he is] very normal. He doesn’t like such big events. He wants to read and write books,” he said.

Fr Christopher Eichkorn was from the Black Forest area of Freiberg diocese near the German/Swiss border. “We are very glad to have a pope from Bavaria – the first German one for 500 years. From the country which started the Reformation, and which started two world wars. We now have a special chance to start a new time in our country,” he said.

[ Pope Benedict dies in Rome nine years after resignation ]

[ Pope Benedict: A complex riddle who many Germans remain ambivalent towards ]

More generally, Benedict XVI will be remembered as the first pope to resign in over 600 years. It may become practice. Time will tell. For a man whose hugely influential career as “enforcer in chief” of orthodoxy during the long almost 27 year papacy of Pope John Paul II, it was utterly unexpected.

Benedict was not expected to break any new ground, with his papacy seen as an extension of that of his predecessor, which began in 1978. It could be said to have continued to that February 2013 announcement by him that he was stepping down. It was clear by then he had lost control of the Curia at the Vatican, with a series of scandals culminating in the leaking to media of his private papers by butler Paolo Gabriele in 2012.

Prior to his election as pope his views were well-known, as were his attitudes to dissent. As prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) from 1981, the then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger helped to force close many windows thrown open by Pope John XXIII and Vatican II in the 1960s.

He forcefully silenced the liberation theologians of Latin America and dissenters such as American Fr Charles Curran, who had questioned the church’s1968 document Humanae Vitae, which banned artificial means of contraception.

Where ecumenism was concerned, in his infamous Dominus Iesus document of 2000, he dismissed all reformed churches as not churches “in the proper sense”. They were merely “ecclesial communities”. All other faiths were “gravely deficient”.

In a 1986 document he described homosexuality as “a more or less strong tendency ordered toward an intrinsic moral evil; and thus the inclination itself must be seen as an objective disorder”, and he was believed central to the 1994 document, published by Pope John Paul, which banned the ordination of women to priesthood.

For such reasons in his period as prefect of the CDF he became known as “God’s rottweiler”.

It was also while at the CDF that he wrote in 2001 to every Catholic bishop in the world asking that they refer to him all credible allegations of clerical child sexual abuse on their records and that this correspondence be kept secret. He hoped to streamline the church’s response to the abuse issue but was so inundated with files from across the world he asked the bishops to revert to how they usually dealt with such allegations.

At the CDF in 1999 he attempted to launch an investigation into a favourite of Pope John Paul II’s, Legionaries of Christ founder Fr Marcial Maciel Degollado, in connection with child sexual abuse but it was stopped by senior figures in the Vatican Curia.

One of his first acts as pope was to suspend Maciel from ministry while an investigation got under way. It found he had sexually abused many boys and young men and, after his death in 2008, it emerged Maciel also had relationships with as many as four women, one a minor, and with whom he fathered up to six children, two of whom he also abused.

Benedict took the clerical child sexual abuse issue seriously, unlike Pope John Paul who saw it as an attack on the church by hostile forces. Following the publication of the Ryan Commission report into clerical child abuse in 2009, he criticised Ireland’s Catholic bishops for their handling of allegations. He told them: “It cannot be denied that some of you and your predecessors failed, at times grievously, to apply the long-established norms of canon law to the crime of child abuse. Serious mistakes were made in responding to allegations.”

He continued: “It must be admitted that grave errors of judgment were made and failures of leadership occurred. All this has seriously undermined your credibility and effectiveness.”

The said the handling of clerical child sexual abuse allegations by the Irish church authorities had “obscured the light of the Gospel” in Ireland “to a degree that not even centuries of persecution succeeded in doing”. In other words, it had consequences that were worse than the Penal Laws. However, he failed to accept any Vatican responsibility for clerical sexual abuse in Ireland or elsewhere.

Benedict’s beginnings as pope where Islam-Catholic relations were concerned could also hardly be described as sure-footed. Just over a year in office, in September 2006, he delivered a lecture at his old university in Regensburg where he quoted a medieval emperor as saying “show me just what Muhammad brought that was new and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached”.

It did not go down well in the Muslim world. One consequence was that nine out of ten Turks opposed a trip planned for the following November to Turkey. Even as he arrived in Ankara it was still unclear whether Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan would meet him. He did and, later, Pope Benedict prayed at the Blue Mosque in Istanbul as a Muslim would have done but which Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger would probably have found hard to approve.

More happily, perhaps, in 2007 he relaxed restrictions on the use of the Tridentine Rite in Masses, much to the delight of traditional Catholics while his 2005 encyclical Deus Caritas Est (God is Love), took many by surprise through its almost lyrical language on love.

His visit to the UK in 2010 was something of an unexpected success and despite torrid opposition in advance. He impressed in an address at the Palace of Westminster and touched many British hearts when, during his beatification of Cardinal John Henry Newman at Crofton Park near Birmingham, he recalled “with shame and horror” the bombing of nearby Coventry in an English spoken in a heavily accented German accent.

Joseph Aloisius Ratzinger was born on April 16th 1927 at Marktl in Bavaria. He was the third and youngest child of policeman Joseph Ratzinger and mother Maria. Both his older brother Fr Georg and sister Maria are deceased.

The family were opposed to the Nazis but in 1941 Joseph was conscripted into the Hitler Youth. After the war, In November 1945, he began training for the priesthood in Munich and was ordained in 1951. Following a period as professor in various German universities and throughout the Second Vatican Council, from 1962 to 1965, he was theological consultant to Cardinal Frings Archbishop of Cologne. He was then seen as a reform-minded, liberal theologian.

In 1966 he became professor of dogmatic theology at the university of Tubingen in Germany, where a colleague was that other reform-minded theologian Fr Hans Küng. Following student riots there in 1967/68 his thinking drifted more and more towards conservatism and orthodoxy in theology. It was the beginnings of a rift between himself and Küng that lasted most of their lives.

In 1977 Fr Ratzinger was appointed archbishop of Munich and he was made cardinal by Pope Paul VI in June of that year. In November 1981 he was appointed prefect of the CDF in Rome by Pope John Paul II.

A shy, diffident, man he was a classic number two, highly qualified academically but not at all suited to leading from the front. He was a scholar who wished to remain so but had high office thrust upon him. It was a mistake.