Pope Benedict XVI, a fierce defender of church dogma who became the primary pontiff in six centuries to abdicate the papacy, died Saturday morning. He was 95 years old.
Benedict XVI died at 9:34 AM local time within the Mater Ecclesiae Monastery in Vatican City, where he resided following his resignation, in response to Vatican spokesman Matteo Bruni.
Benedict XVI’s body will lie in state at Saint Peter’s Basilica starting on Jan. 2.
The funeral service for Pope Emeritus is scheduled to happen in St. Peter’s Square on Jan. 5.
Pope Francis will preside over the funeral.
His death got here after Pope Francis asked his flock for “prayers” for his predecessor at the Vatican Wednesday.
“I would like to ask you all for a special prayer for Pope Emeritus Benedict who sustains the Church in his silence. He may be very sick,” Francis, 86 said during his weekly general audience.
“We ask the Lord to console and sustain him on this witness of affection for the Church to the very end.”
The German-born spiritual leader — born Joseph Ratzinger on 16 April 1927 in Bavaria — succeeded the sainted Pope John Paul II in 2005.
Known for his staunchly conservative views and the nearly 25 years he spent because the powerful head of the Vatican’s doctrinal office, Benedict became the primary German pope in 1,000 years — but only served for eight years before deciding to step down in 2013.
“I believe that if he had been able to make your mind up his own future, he would have been quite blissful to spend his life as a school professor, teaching and writing books,” the Latest York Archbishop Timothy Cardinal Dolan told The Post in December 2018.
“But he was called to greater service… And he accepted all of this as one who follows not his own will, but God’s will.”
As a quiet, unassuming mental who mostly stayed out of the limelight, Benedict didn’t often comment on political issues, but might be remembered for his extensive writings and teachings concerning the love of God and the love of 1’s neighbor.
Benedict produced greater than 60 books between 1963, when he was a priest, and 2013, when he resigned.
Nonetheless, his short tenure was marred by the clergy sex abuse crisis, which reached a peak in the general public sphere during this time, and the “Vati-leaks” scandal.
Paolo Gabriele, Benedict’s butler, leaked secret documents to an Italian journalist in 2012 that exposed corruption and feuding inside the Vatican.
The stolen documents uncovered power struggles contained in the Vatican over its efforts to point out greater financial transparency and comply with international norms to fight money laundering.
After Gabriele was arrested, he admitted that he’d given the papers to reporter Gianluigi Nuzzi because he believed the pope wasn’t being informed of the “evil and corruption” within the Vatican.
He insisted that he believed exposing it will get the church back on course.
A yr after the scandal rocked the Holy See, Benedict, at the age of 85, stepped down.
Nonetheless, he said he needed to step aside because his health prevented him from being of sound enough mind and body to guide the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics.
“In today’s world, subject to so many rapid changes and shaken by questions of deep relevance for the life of religion, with the intention to govern the bark of St. Peter and proclaim the gospel, each willpower and body are mandatory, “ he said.
“Strength which in the previous couple of months has deteriorated in me to the extent that I even have had to acknowledge my incapacity to adequately fulfill the ministry entrusted to me.”
Everyone, even the Vatican’s own spokesman, was shocked by the announcement: the pinnacle of the church was quitting — the primary since Pope Gregory XII in 1415.
Years later, Benedict’s stunning decision was lauded by church leaders and experts as courageous and an indication of true humanity — to give you the chance to acknowledge one’s own failings.
“It was really a moment of humility. He admitted his own weakness and form of demystified the papacy,” Christopher P. Vogt, the chair of the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at St. John’s University told The Post in Dec. 2018.
“He didn’t attempt to hide behind the mystic of the papacy. He was clearly a person of religion dedicated to serving the church one of the simplest ways he could.”
Following Benedict’s shock resignation the pope emeritus spent the last years of his life in near seclusion at a Vatican City monastery, blind in his left eye and unable to walk unattended.
Benedict had also endured other health setbacks in his life. In 1991, he’s suffered a hemorrhagic stroke after which suffered one other stroke in 2005. He was also fitted with a pacemaker as a Cardinal, though this was only revealed following his resignation.
A church insider told The Post Benedict largely spent his days reading, praying, doing just a little writing and sometimes meeting with old friends.
He was succeeded by a charismatic Argentinian Cardinal who became Pope Francis.
On the time of Benedict’s election, he’d been a natural selection inside the college of 115 cardinals who selected him, because the man who shared his predecessor John Paul II’s traditionalist ideology, having served as his right-hand man for twenty years.
When he donned his robes on April 19, 2005, at the age of 78, he became the eldest pontiff to be elected since 1730.
Born on Holy Saturday, April, 16, 1927 within the committed Catholic German village of Traunstein to a policeman father and hotel cook mother, Benedict was 6 when Adolf Hitler got here to power.
He was a 12-year-old student about to enter a seminary when Germany invaded Poland, igniting World War II.
In 1941, Benedict was pressed into the compulsory Hitler Youth movement, a indisputable fact that caused widespread criticism upon his ascension to the papacy — though the long run pontiff was “not an enthusiastic” member, wrote his biographer John Allen.
Later, Benedict recalled in his memoirs that in this troublesome time the church was “a citadel of truth and righteousness against the realm of atheism and deceit” — a sense that influenced his selection to hitch the priesthood.
Each he and his brother Georg, also a priest, joined the German army and Benedict underwent basic infantry training in late 1944. He deserted when the country began to be invaded by Allied forces and ended up in an American POW camp for several weeks.
After the war, he returned home and to the seminary, having been convinced that God “wanted something from me, something which could only be completed by becoming a priest.” He was ordained in 1951.
Soon, Benedict became often known as considered one of the mental stars of the West German church and traveled to Rome in 1962 to function considered one of the young aides to Joseph Cardinal Frings of Cologne.
During his time within the Vatican, he was often known as the official accountable for reigning in dissident priests — and even earned the nickname “God’s Rottweiler” — and he began to have second thoughts concerning the direction the church was taking.
“I discovered the mood within the church and amongst theologians to be agitated,” he wrote. “An increasing number of there was the impression that nothing stood fast within the church, that all the pieces was up for revision.”
For Benedict — who became related to the conservative wing of the church, known for its fierce opposition to moral “relativism” on issues reminiscent of homosexuality, contraception and girls priests — some things weren’t up for debate.
The world was changing and student protests of the late Nineteen Sixties were reverberating from Manhattan to Paris to the University of Tuebingen, where Benedict had a teaching post.
“He had big clashes along with his most intimate students and assistants,” Rev. Hans Kung recalled to The Post in 2005.
A short while later, a deeply distraught Benedict moved to the more conservative University of Regensburg.
“I had the sensation that to be faithful to my faith I need to even be in opposition to interpretations of the religion that will not be interpretations but oppositions,” he later said.
Benedict’s warning concerning the danger of abandoning traditional church views became familiar in Germany — and took on greater authority when he moved to Rome and his star began to rise.
Benedict was appointed bishop of Munich in 1977 and elevated to cardinal three months later by Pope Paul VI.
“On the one hand he’s a conservative figure, supportive of traditional family and marriage, sexual mores,” Vogt said. “But at the identical time he’s very progressive, he believes within the rights of labor, the rights of the poor, having a right to food.”
In Italy, Benedict struck up what would grow to be a 40-year friendship with the archbishop of Krakow, Karol Cardinal Wojtyla — who was elected John Paul II in 1978.
John Paul named him to go the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in 1981 as guardian of church dogma, which he served in for nearly 25 years.
In that role, he was also charged with investigating and policies surrounding sexual abuse.
In that role, he led necessary changes to church law, reminiscent of the inclusion of crimes against children related to the Web and a case-by-case basis for waving the statute of limitations.
He then became the primary Pope to kick predator priests out of the church — following a series of embarrassing scandals within the US, Ireland and Australia.
In 2011 and 2012, the last two full years of his papacy, 384 abusive priests were defrocked — though this motion only took place after the anus horriblis of 2010 that saw quite a few sexual abuse cases pop up almost weekly.
As pope emeritus, Benedict didn’t comment on his successors’ policies or every other scandals that arose, largely keeping to himself.
“He has successfully moved out of the highlight and never tried to align himself with critics of Francis,” Vogt said. “He sees this as a time of prayer and reflection.”
A report commissioned by a German archdioceses released in early 2020 found the previous pontiff mishandled 4 abuse cases when he served as archbishop within the Seventies and Eighties. Benedict denied flawed doing.
It’s still unclear how Benedict’s shock resignation will affect the long run of the church — but it surely was little doubt significant.
“It has shifted the understanding of what it means to be in that position, that it’s something you’ll be able to potentially leave,” Vogt said.
Cardinal Dolan believes the effect has been a “positive one.”
“The effect on the Church has been, I believe, a positive one, in that it was such a display of humility; it’s been a reminder to me that I mustn’t be too attached to the things of this world,” he said.
Dolan, who was appointed Archbishop of Latest York in 2009 by Benedict described him as a “man of great faith, humble, warm, gentle, soft spoken.”
He was “someone who listened rigorously, and was then in a position to quickly and accurately summarize and synthesize the varied points of view expressed.”
“His legacy will almost actually be as considered one of, if not the, pre-eminent theologians of the twentieth and twenty first Centuries,” Dolan said.