Pope Benedict XVI

1. Who Joseph Ratzinger Was

Ratzinger was the youngest of three children of a Bavarian policeman who moved the family repeatedly because of his opposition to the Nazi party. His brother Georg became a priest and a choirmaster, and his sister Maria kept house for him for most of his adult life.

He was enrolled in the Hitler Youth in 1941, when membership became compulsory for boys of his age, and he said afterwards that he did not attend and that a sympathetic teacher recorded him as a member so that he could keep his school fee reduction. In 1943, at sixteen, he was conscripted into an anti-aircraft unit, and later into the labour service and the infantry. In the last weeks of the war he left his unit and walked home, which was a capital offence, and he spent a short period in an American prisoner-of-war camp. He entered the seminary afterwards and was ordained with his brother on 29 June 1951.

That biography is often raised against him and it is worth stating accurately. The compulsory enrolment and the conscription are facts. The desertion is also a fact, and the family's opposition to the regime is documented. Nothing in the record supports the suggestion, which circulates, of voluntary or enthusiastic service.

2. The Intellectual Giant

Joseph Ratzinger was one of the most accomplished academic theologians ever to become pope. He took his doctorate in 1953 with a thesis on the Church in the teaching of Augustine, and his habilitation in 1957 on the theology of history in Bonaventure, which was initially challenged by one of his examiners and passed after revision. He held chairs at Bonn, Münster, Tübingen and Regensburg. His lectures published as Introduction to Christianity in 1968 remain in print and are probably still his most widely read book.

For decades he headed the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which earned him a reputation as the Vatican's enforcer and a nickname in the press that stuck. People who met him privately described a shy, courteous man who played Mozart on the piano and preferred a conversation to a confrontation. Both descriptions are accurate about different parts of the job.

3. From the Council to the Doctrine of the Faith

Ratzinger went to the Second Vatican Council in 1962 as a thirty-five-year-old theological adviser to Cardinal Josef Frings of Cologne, and he was firmly among the reformers. He helped draft interventions criticising the preparatory documents and the working methods of the Roman offices, and he supported the Council's work on revelation, on the liturgy and on the Church.

His position shifted after 1968, and he never pretended otherwise. The student revolts at Tübingen, where he was then teaching, convinced him that a Marxist reading of Christianity was taking hold and that appeals to the spirit of the Council were being used to detach it from the Church's tradition. He moved to the quieter university of Regensburg. In 1972 he helped found the journal Communio, with Hans Urs von Balthasar and Henri de Lubac among others, as a counterweight to the journal Concilium, which he had helped launch a few years earlier.

His own account of the change was that his position had stayed the same and the situation around it had moved. Critics said he had turned. What is beyond argument is that he read the Council as reform in continuity with the Church's tradition, and he set that reading out formally in his address to the Roman Curia of 22 December 2005, contrasting a hermeneutic of reform in continuity with what he called a hermeneutic of discontinuity and rupture.

Paul VI made him archbishop of Munich and Freising in 1977 and a cardinal three months later. John Paul II brought him to Rome in 1981 as prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, where he stayed until his own election. In that office he oversaw the publication of the Catechism of the Catholic Church in 1992, the instructions on liberation theology of 1984 and 1986, and the declaration Dominus Iesus of 2000 on the uniqueness of Christ and the Church, which drew heavy criticism from other Christian bodies. In 2001 he obtained the transfer to his congregation of competence over the most serious clerical offences, including the sexual abuse of minors, which centralised cases that had previously been handled by dioceses.

4. Dictatorship of Relativism

He famously warned against a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognise anything as definitive and whose ultimate goal consists solely of one's own ego and desires. He argued that truth liberates rather than constrains.

The phrase comes from the homily he preached at the Mass for the election of a pope on 18 April 2005, the day before he was elected, and it became the signature of his pontificate before it began. The argument behind it is that a culture which treats all claims about the good as private preference leaves the strongest preference in charge, and that people are then defenceless against whatever happens to be fashionable.

He paired it consistently with an argument about reason. His claim was that Christian faith is reasonable, that reason unaided reaches real conclusions about the world and the good, and that a reason which restricts itself to what can be measured has cut away the questions people most need answered. Faith without reason turns into fanaticism, and reason without faith loses its nerve about anything beyond technique.

5. What He Taught as Pope

Benedict wrote three encyclicals, and their subjects were chosen deliberately: the three theological virtues, in order, with the third left unfinished at his resignation.

Deus caritas est, 2005

His first encyclical, on Christian love, opens by refusing the assumption that the Church's message is a list of prohibitions. It works through the relation between eros and agape, argues that they belong together rather than being rivals, and then turns to the Church's charitable work, insisting that it is not an optional extra to be handed off to the state and that it must never be used as a means of proselytism.

Spe salvi, 2007

The second, on hope, argues that modern progress has been asked to carry a weight it cannot bear, and that a hope which extends only as far as technology and politics leaves death unanswered. It contains an extended treatment of prayer, of suffering, and of judgment, and it is the most personal of the three.

Caritas in veritate, 2009

The third, published during the financial crisis, applies Catholic social teaching to a globalised economy. It argues that markets require a moral framework they cannot generate themselves, insists on the link between the Church's teaching on economic justice and its teaching on human life, and calls for economic activity that includes gratuitousness and gift as well as contract.

Jesus of Nazareth

Alongside the encyclicals he wrote a three-volume study of the life of Christ, published between 2007 and 2012, in which he stated explicitly that the books were his personal search for the face of the Lord and were not acts of the teaching office, so that anyone was free to contradict them. A pope publishing under those conditions was unusual and deliberate.

6. Liturgy, Summorum Pontificum and the Ordinariates

Liturgy was Benedict's lifelong subject, and his book The Spirit of the Liturgy argued that worship is something received rather than manufactured, and that a congregation which stages its own liturgy ends up worshipping itself.

On 7 July 2007 he issued the motu proprio Summorum Pontificum, which declared that the Roman Missal in use before the reforms that followed the Second Vatican Council had never been abrogated, and gave priests broad permission to celebrate it without needing their bishop's consent. He described the older and newer forms as two uses of the one Roman Rite and said his purpose was reconciliation. Our page on the Traditional Latin Mass covers that decision, and the later restrictions placed on it by Pope Francis in 2021, in full.

On 4 November 2009 he issued Anglicanorum coetibus, which created personal ordinariates allowing groups of Anglicans to enter full communion with the Catholic Church while keeping elements of their liturgical and pastoral tradition. Ordinariates were subsequently established in England and Wales, in the United States and in Australia. Our page on the Anglican Ordinariate explains how they work.

7. Regensburg, the Lefebvrist Bishops and Vatileaks

The Regensburg lecture, 2006

On 12 September 2006, lecturing at his old university on faith and reason, Benedict quoted a fourteenth-century Byzantine emperor, Manuel II Palaiologos, who had made a hostile remark about Islam and violence. The quotation was reported without its context, and protests followed in several countries, some of them violent. Benedict said that the words did not express his own view and that he was sorry for the reaction the quotation had caused. The lecture's actual argument, that violence in religion is contrary to reason and that reason must not be cut down to the empirical, was largely lost in the row.

The lifting of the excommunications, 2009

In January 2009 Benedict lifted the excommunications of four bishops of the Society of Saint Pius X, ordained without papal mandate in 1988, as a step toward reconciliation. One of them, Richard Williamson, had given a television interview denying the extent of the Holocaust, which was broadcast at almost the same moment. The Vatican said it had not known of the interview, and Benedict wrote an unusually frank letter to the world's bishops in March 2009 acknowledging failures of communication in his own administration. Our page on the SSPX covers the society and its canonical position.

Vatileaks, 2012

Confidential documents from the papal apartment were leaked to an Italian journalist and published. The pope's butler, Paolo Gabriele, was tried by a Vatican court, convicted of aggravated theft, and later pardoned by Benedict. The affair exposed serious dysfunction in the Roman Curia and was widely discussed as a factor in the decision he took a few months later.

8. The Resignation

In 2013, he became the first pope in nearly six hundred years to resign. He cited his failing strength and said the Church needed a leader with the vigour the office required.

The details matter. He announced it in Latin, at an ordinary consistory on 11 February 2013, to a room of cardinals gathered for other business, most of whom did not immediately understand what they had heard. He declared the See of Rome vacant from eight in the evening on 28 February 2013. He said that he had come to certainty that his strength, because of his advanced age, was no longer suited to exercising the ministry, and that in today's world, subject to rapid change and shaken by questions of great importance for the life of faith, both strength of mind and body are necessary.

Canon law provides for it. The 1983 Code states that a pope may resign, and requires only that the resignation be made freely and properly manifested, with no requirement that anyone accept it. The last comparable case was Gregory XII, who resigned in 1415 to help end the Western Schism, and before him Celestine V, who resigned in 1294 after a few months in office.

The decision was read in opposite directions at the time and still is. Some regarded it as an act of humility that separated the office from the man and made the papacy less of a personal monarchy. Others thought it weakened the office by making it look resignable under pressure. A small number of people have argued that the resignation was invalid, and that argument has been rejected by the Church and by Benedict himself, who stated repeatedly that there is only one pope and that his own resignation was free and valid.

9. Criticism and the Munich Abuse Report

Benedict XVI's record on clerical sexual abuse has drawn sustained criticism. A report commissioned by the Archdiocese of Munich and Freising from the law firm Westpfahl Spilker Wastl, published on 20 January 2022, faulted his handling of four cases during his years as archbishop from 1977 to 1982. In a letter published on 8 February 2022 he apologised to victims, expressed shame and sorrow, denied any cover-up, and acknowledged that an earlier written submission wrongly said he had been absent from a chancery meeting of 15 January 1980 where a priest's case was discussed, which he attributed to an error in preparing the document rather than to a deliberate falsehood. His legal advisers published an accompanying analysis stating he had never covered up abuse. The Munich report is a commissioned law-firm review and not a court judgment. A civil damages claim filed in June 2022 at the Traunstein Regional Court named him among several defendants and continued against his estate after his death in December 2022. No criminal charge was ever brought against him and no court has found him liable. Supporters point to the abuse norms he tightened in De delictis gravioribus in 2001 and to his removal of Marcial Maciel from ministry in 2006.

The wider criticism runs beyond Munich. As prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith from 1981 he presided over the office that handled the most serious cases, in a period when the Church's response across the world was slow and defensive, and survivors' groups have held him responsible for that. His defenders answer that he saw the scale of the problem earlier than most senior figures in Rome, that the 2001 centralisation of cases in his own office was what made systematic action possible, and that as pope he laicised a substantial number of priests and met victims on several foreign journeys.

Both of those accounts describe real parts of the record. Our page on scandals in the Church sets out the wider history and what has changed since.

10. Pope Emeritus, Death and Burial

Benedict took the title Pope Emeritus, kept the white cassock without the shoulder cape, and moved into the Mater Ecclesiae monastery inside the Vatican gardens, where he lived for almost ten years. He said he was retiring to a life of prayer and would remain hidden from the world, and he largely kept to that, though occasional writings under his name caused controversy. The most contested was a 2020 book on priestly celibacy published with Cardinal Robert Sarah, after which Benedict's secretary asked that his name be removed as co-author and the two men gave differing accounts of what had been agreed.

He died at the Mater Ecclesiae monastery on 31 December 2022, aged ninety-five. His funeral was celebrated by Pope Francis in Saint Peter's Square on 5 January 2023, the first time in modern history that a reigning pope buried his predecessor. He is buried in the crypt beneath Saint Peter's Basilica, in the tomb that had held John Paul II before that pope's beatification.

He has not been declared a saint. The ordinary procedure requires a waiting period of five years after death before a cause may be opened, which a pope may dispense, and the Church's process is set out on our page about the saints.

11. What to Take From Benedict XVI

• Faith is answerable to reason. His constant argument was that Christianity can be examined and defended. A believer who cannot say why he believes has been shortchanged somewhere.
• Worship is received. His writing on the liturgy insists that the Church's prayer is handed on rather than invented, and that the point of it is God.
• Let go of the office when you cannot do it. Whatever else the resignation was, it was a public statement that a man is not the same thing as his position.
• Read the whole record. The same man who wrote on love and hope was faulted by an independent report over four abuse cases in Munich and apologised for the harm. Neither half is deleted by the other.
• Do not put off the ordinary things. No one knows the day or the hour (Mark 13:32). Confession, Mass and honest prayer are available this week, and they cost nothing.

12. Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Pope Benedict XVI?

Benedict XVI was born Joseph Ratzinger at Marktl am Inn in Bavaria on 16 April 1927 and was elected pope on 19 April 2005. He had been a professor of theology at Bonn, Münster, Tübingen and Regensburg, a theological adviser at the Second Vatican Council, archbishop of Munich and Freising from 1977, and prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith from 1981 until his election. He resigned the papacy on 28 February 2013 and died at the Vatican on 31 December 2022.

Why did Pope Benedict XVI resign?

He announced on 11 February 2013 that after examining his conscience he had come to certainty that his strength, because of his advanced age, was no longer suited to exercising the papal ministry, and that both strength of mind and body are needed in a world subject to rapid change and shaken by questions of great importance for the life of faith. He declared the See of Rome vacant from the evening of 28 February 2013. Canon law permits a pope to resign, requiring only that the resignation be freely made and properly manifested.

Was Benedict XVI the first pope to resign?

No. He was the first in nearly six hundred years. Gregory XII resigned in 1415 as part of the settlement that ended the Western Schism, and Celestine V resigned in 1294 after a few months in office. A small number of people have argued that Benedict's resignation was invalid, and the Church rejects that argument, as did Benedict himself, who stated repeatedly that his resignation was free and valid and that there is only one pope.

What did the Munich report say about Benedict XVI?

A report commissioned by the Archdiocese of Munich and Freising from the law firm Westpfahl Spilker Wastl, published on 20 January 2022, faulted his handling of four abuse cases during his years as archbishop from 1977 to 1982. In a letter published on 8 February 2022 he apologised to victims, expressed shame and sorrow, denied any cover-up, and acknowledged that an earlier written submission had wrongly said he was absent from a chancery meeting of 15 January 1980, which he attributed to an error in preparing the document. The report is a commissioned law-firm review rather than a court judgment. No criminal charge was ever brought against him and no court has found him liable.

What did Benedict XVI write as pope?

He wrote three encyclicals: Deus caritas est in 2005 on Christian love, Spe salvi in 2007 on hope, and Caritas in veritate in 2009 on Catholic social teaching in a globalised economy. He also published a three-volume study, Jesus of Nazareth, between 2007 and 2012, stating explicitly that it was his personal search rather than an exercise of the teaching office and that anyone was free to contradict it. His pre-papal book Introduction to Christianity, published in 1968, remains his most widely read work.

What was Summorum Pontificum?

Summorum Pontificum was a motu proprio issued by Benedict XVI on 7 July 2007. It declared that the Roman Missal in use before the liturgical reforms that followed the Second Vatican Council had never been abrogated, and gave priests broad permission to celebrate it without their bishop's prior consent. Benedict described the older and newer forms as two uses of the one Roman Rite and said his purpose was reconciliation within the Church. Pope Francis restricted the permission in 2021 with the motu proprio Traditionis custodes.