Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI is dead.
Only three days ago, Pope Francis called for prayer for his 95-year-old predecessor, who he said was “very sick”.
Benedict XVI, who became the Pope on 19th April 2005, shocked the world by making the almost unprecedented decision to resign from his position on 28th February 2013, citing “advanced age.”
His announcement marked the first time a Pope had stepped down in nearly 600 years.
“With sorrow, I inform you that the Pope Emeritus, Benedict XVI, passed away today at 9:34 in the Mater Ecclesiae Monastery in the Vatican,” Vatican spokesman Matteo Bruni said in a statement on Saturday.
The German Pope Emeritus, whose birth name was Joseph Ratzinger, had been living a quiet life in a former convent inside the Vatican grounds since February 2013.
His death brings to an end an unprecedented situation in which two “men in white” — Benedict and Francis — had co-existed within the walls of the tiny city state.
While there is no rulebook for former Popes, Benedict’s funeral is expected to be at the Vatican, presided over by Francis.
In 2005 the body of John Paul II, the last pope to die, lay in state before a funeral mass in St Peter’s Square attended by one million people, including heads of state.
The Pope Emeritus was a brilliant theologian but his papacy was beset by Vatican in-fighting and a scandal over clerical sexual abuse of children that rocked the Catholic Church the world over, in which he was criticised for a lack of leadership.
The abuse scandal overshadowed his final months after a damning report for the German church in January 2022 accused him of personally failing to stop four predatory priests in the 1980s while archbishop of Munich.
He denied wrongdoing and the Vatican strongly defended his record in being the first pope to apologise for the scandals, who expressed his own “deep remorse” and met with victims.
Born on 16th April 1927 in Marktl am Inn, in Bavaria, Benedict was 78 when he succeeded the long-reigning and popular Pope John Paul II in April 2005, the first German pope of the modern era.
He later said his election felt “like the guillotine”.
Unlike his successor Pope Francis, a Jesuit who delights in being among his flock, Benedict was a conservative intellectual dubbed “God’s Rottweiler” in a previous post as chief doctrinal enforcer.
His papacy was dogged by controversy, from comments that angered the Muslim world to a money-laundering scandal at the Vatican bank and a personal humiliation when, in 2012, his butler leaked secret papers to the media.
Despite saying he would live “hidden from the world” after his resignation, he repeatedly intervened on key issues facing the Church through books, interviews and articles.
In January 2020, he expressed his opposition to allowing priests to marry. A year earlier, he blamed clerical abuse scandals on the 1960s sexual revolution and a collapse in faith in the West.
In an interview in March 2021, he said “there is only one pope”, but acknowledged “fanatical” supporters who refused to accept his resignation.
Source: AFP
