The Vatican has announced the death of former Pope Benedict, aged 95.
Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, the German theologian who will be remembered as the first pope in 600 years to resign, died at 9.34am local time (7.34pm AEDT) on Saturday.
Benedict (born Joseph Ratzinger) shocked the world on February 11, 2013, when he announced, in his typical soft Latin, that he no longer had the strength to lead the 1.2 billion-strong Catholic Church he had led for eight years years of scandal and indifference.
The Vatican has announced the death of Pope Benedict, aged 95. (AP)
His dramatic decision paved the way for the conclave that chose Pope Francis as his successor. The two popes then lived together in the Vatican gardens, an unprecedented arrangement that set the stage for future “popes emeritus” to do the same.
A statement from Vatican spokesman Matteo Bruni said Saturday morning that: “It is with sorrow that we report that Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI died today at 9:34 a.m. at the Mater Ecclesia monastery in the Vatican. More information will be provided as soon as possible possible”.
The Vatican said Benedict’s remains would be on public display in St Peter’s Basilica from Monday for worshipers to pay their last respects.
Newly appointed Archbishop of Munich and Freising Joseph Ratzinger, right, prays with Bishop Erns Tewes in the crypt of Freising Cathedral, southern Germany, March 31, 1977. (AP Photo/Dieter Endlicher ) Pope Benedict XVI greets the crowd from the central balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican on April 19, 2005, shortly after his election. (AP Photo/Andrew Medichini)
Former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger had never wanted to be pope, planning at 78 to spend his last years writing in the “peace and quiet” of his native Bavaria.
Instead, he was forced to follow in the footsteps of the beloved St. John Paul II and lead the church through the fallout from the clerical sex abuse scandal and then a second scandal that erupted when his own butler stole his personal papers and gave them to a reporter.
On being elected pope, he once said, he felt as if a “guillotine” had been dropped on him.
Yet he set to work with a determined vision to revive faith in a world which, he often lamented, seemed to think it could do without God.
Pope John Paul II, left, stands with German Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger at the Vatican in 1979. Ratzinger became Pope Benedict XVI. (AP) Pope Benedict XVI greets pilgrims at the end of a papal mass at Islinger Field in Regensburg, southern Germany, September 12, 2006. (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber)
“Today there is a strange forgetting of God in large areas of the world,” he told a million young people gathered in a sprawling field for his first trip abroad as pope, at World Youth Day in Cologne, Germany in 2005.
“It seems as if everything would be the same even without him.”
With some decisive, often controversial moves, he tried to remind Europe of its Christian heritage. And it set the Catholic Church on a conservative and traditional path that often alienated progressives.
He relaxed restrictions on the celebration of the old Latin Mass and launched a crackdown on American nuns, insisting that the church stay true to its doctrine and traditions in the face of a changing world.
Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, with the towers of Munich Cathedral in the background, bid farewell to the Bavarian faithful in central Munich, Germany, February 28, 1982, before heading to Rome to lead the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in the Vatican. Cardinal Ratzinger became Pope Benedict XVI. (AP) Pope Benedict XVI celebrates a special Mass for the sick in front of the Basilica of the Rosary in Lourdes, France, September 15, 2008. (AP Photo/Francois Mori)
It was a path that was in many ways reversed by his successor, Francis, whose priorities of mercy over morality alienated the traditionalists who had been so pleased by Benedict.
Benedict’s style could not have been more different from that of John Pau or Francis. Neither darling nor populist of the globe-trotting media, Benedict was a teacher, a theologian and an academic through and through: quiet and thoughtful with a fierce mind.
He spoke in paragraphs, not sound bites. He had a soft spot for the Orange Ghost as well as his beloved library; when he was elected pope, he had his entire studio, as it is, moved from his apartment just outside the Vatican walls to the Apostolic Palace. The books followed him to his retirement home.
“In them are all my advisors,” he said of his books in a 2010 Light of the World interview.
Pope Benedict XVI greets pilgrims aboard the Sydney 2000 ship in Sydney, Australia, July 17, 2008. (AP Photo/Gregorio Borgia)Pope Benedict XVI, center, speaks with an Aboriginal Australian as he greets pilgrims at aboard a cruise ship in the harbor of Sydney, Australia, on July 17, 2008. (AP Photo/Gregorio Borgia)
“I know every corner and everything has its story.”
It was Benedict’s devotion to history and tradition that endeared him to members of the traditionalist wing of the Catholic Church. For them, Benedict remained even in retirement as a beacon of nostalgia for the Orthodoxy and Latin Mass of his youth, and the pope they much preferred over Francis.
Over time, this group of arch-conservatives, whose complaints were amplified by sympathetic US-based conservative Catholic media, would become a key source of opposition to Francis, who responded to what he said which were threats of division by re-imposing the restrictions on old Latin. Mass that Benedict had let go.
Like his predecessor John Paul, Benedict made reaching out to the Jews a hallmark of his papacy. His first official act as pope was a letter to the Jewish community in Rome and he became the second pope in history, after John Paul, to enter a synagogue.
In his 2011 book, Jesus of Nazareth, Benedict made a radical exoneration of the Jewish people for the death of Christ, explaining biblically and theologically why there was no basis in Scripture for the argument that the people Jews as a whole were responsible for the death of Jesus.
Pope Benedict XVI walks through the gate of the former Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz, with a sign above it that reads in German “Work will set you free,” in Oswiecim, Poland, May 28, 2006. (Photo (AP/Diether Endlicher)
“It’s very clear that Benedict is a true friend of the Jewish people,” Rabbi David Rosen, who heads the American Jewish Committee’s office of interfaith relations, said at the time of Benedict’s retirement.
However, Benedict also offended some Jews who were outraged by his constant defense and promotion to sainthood of Pope Pius XII, the World War II-era pope accused by some of not sufficiently denouncing the holocaust And they sharply criticized Benedict when he withdrew the excommunication of a traditionalist British bishop who had denied the Holocaust.
Benedict’s relations with the Muslim world were also a mixed bag. He angered Muslims with a speech in September 2006, five years after the 9/11 attacks on the United States, in which he quoted a Byzantine emperor as characterizing some of the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad as “evil and inhumane.” in particular his command to spread the faith “by the sword.”
Subsequent commentary following the massacre of Christians in Egypt led the Al Azhar center in Cairo, the seat of Sunni Muslim learning, to suspend ties with the Vatican, which were only restored under Francis.
Pope Benedict XVI, center, kneels in prayer during his visit to ground zero in New York on April 20, 2008. (AP Photo/Pier Paolo Cito, Pool)
The Vatican under Benedict suffered notorious public relations blunders, and sometimes Benedict himself was to blame.
He angered the United Nations and several European governments in 2009 when, en route to Africa, he told reporters that the AIDS problem could not be solved by handing out condoms.
“On the contrary, it increases the problem,” Benedict said.
A year later, he published a review that said if a male prostitute used a condom to avoid passing HIV to his partner, he could be taking a first step toward more responsible sexuality.
Pope Benedict XVI is welcomed by United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon at UN headquarters April 18, 2008, during a visit to New York. (AP Photo/Craig Ruttle)
But Benedict’s legacy was irreversibly tarnished by the 2010 global outbreak of the sex-abuse scandal, although as a cardinal he was responsible for turning the Vatican around on the issue.
The documents revealed that the Vatican was well aware of the problem but turned a blind eye for decades, sometimes rejecting bishops who tried to do the right thing.
Benedict knew firsthand the extent of the problem, since his former office—the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which he had led since 1982—was in charge of dealing with cases of abuse.
In fact, it was he who, before becoming pope, made the then-revolutionary decision in 2001 to take responsibility for prosecuting these cases after he realized that bishops across the around the world they did not punish abusers, but moved them from one parish to another. could violate again.
And once he became pope, Benedict essentially reversed his beloved predecessor, John Paul, by taking action against the most notorious pedophile priest of the 20th century, the Reverend Marcial Maciel.
Benedict took over Maciel’s Legionaries of Christ, a conservative religious order considered a model of orthodoxy by John Paul, after it was revealed that Maciel sexually abused seminarians and fathered at least three children.
Joseph Ratzinger, Archbishop of Munich and Freising, greets children in front of the Ramersdorfer Marienkirche (Church of Mary) after being named archbishop on May 23, 1977. (AP Photo/Dieter Endlicher)
In retirement, Benedict was criticized by an independent report for his treatment of four priests while he was bishop of Munich; he denied any personal wrongdoing, but…