Pope Benedict XVI
Pope BenedictXVI was head of the Catholic Church and sovereign of Vatican City from 2005 until his resignation in 2013. Following his resignation, he chose to be known as "pope emeritus", a title he held until his death on 31 December 2022.
Ordained as a priest in 1951 in Bavaria, Ratzinger embarked on an academic career and established himself as a highly regarded theologian by the late 1950s. He was appointed a full professor in 1958 when aged 31. After a long career as a professor of theology at several German universities, he was appointed Archbishop of Munich and Freising and created a cardinal by Pope Paul VI in 1977, an unusual promotion for someone who had only been ordained to the episcopate less than a month prior and not having much pastoral experience. In 1981, he was appointed Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, one of the most important dicasteries of the Roman Curia. In 2002, he also became Dean of the College of Cardinals. Before becoming pope, he had been "a major figure on the Vatican stage for a quarter of a century"; he had had an influence "second to none when it came to setting church priorities and directions" as one of John Paul II's closest confidants. Following the death of John Paul II on 2 April 2005, a conclave elected Ratzinger as his successor on 19 April; he chose Benedict XVI as his papal name in honour of Benedict XV and Benedict of Nursia.
Benedict's writings were prolific and generally defended traditional Catholic doctrine, values, and liturgy. He was originally a liberal theologian but adopted conservative views after 1968. During his papacy, Benedict advocated a return to fundamental Christian values to counter the increased secularisation of many Western countries. He viewed relativism's denial of objective truth, and the denial of moral truths in particular, as the central problem of the 21st century. Benedict also revived several traditions and permitted greater use of the Tridentine Mass. He strengthened the relationship between the Catholic Church and art, promoted the use of Latin, and reintroduced traditional papal vestments, for which reason he was called "the pope of aesthetics". He also established personal ordinariates for former Anglicans and Methodists joining the Catholic Church. Benedict's handling of sexual abuse cases within the Catholic Church and opposition to usage of condoms in areas of high HIV transmission was criticized by public health officials, anti-AIDS activists, and victims' rights organizations.
Citing health reasons due to his advanced age, Benedict resigned as pope on 28 February 2013. He became the first pope to resign from office since Gregory XII in 1415, and the first without external pressure since Celestine V in 1294. He subsequently moved into the newly renovated Mater Ecclesiae Monastery in Vatican City for his retirement. The 2013 conclave elected Francis as his successor on 13 March. In addition to his native German language, Benedict had some proficiency in French, Italian, English, and Spanish. He also knew Portuguese, Latin, Biblical Hebrew, and Biblical Greek. He was a member of several social science academies, such as the French Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques.
Early life: 1927–1951
Joseph Alois Ratzinger was born on 16 April, Holy Saturday, 1927 at Schulstraße 11 at 8:30 in the morning in his parents' home in Marktl, Bavaria, Germany. He was baptised the same day. He was the third and youngest child of Joseph Ratzinger Sr., a police officer, and Maria Ratzinger ; his grand-uncle was the German priest-politician Georg Ratzinger. His mother's family was originally from South Tyrol. Benedict's elder brother, Georg, became a Catholic priest and was the former director of the Regensburger Domspatzen choir. His sister, Maria, who never married, managed her brother Joseph's household until she died in 1991.Aged five, Ratzinger was in a group of children who welcomed the visiting Cardinal Archbishop of Munich, Michael von Faulhaber, with flowers. Struck by the cardinal's distinctive garb, he announced later that day that he wanted to be a cardinal. He attended the elementary school in Aschau am Inn, which was renamed in his honour in 2009. In 1939, aged 12, he enrolled in a minor seminary in Traunstein. This period lasted until the seminary was closed for military use in 1942, and the students were all sent home. Ratzinger returned to Traunstein.
Wartime and ordination
Ratzinger's family, especially his father, bitterly resented the Nazis, and his father's opposition to Nazism resulted in demotions and harassment of the family. Following his 14th birthday in 1941, Ratzinger was conscripted into the Hitler Youthas membership was required by law for all 14-year-old German boys after March 1939but was an unenthusiastic member who refused to attend meetings, according to his brother. In 1941, one of Ratzinger's cousins, a 14-year-old boy with Down syndrome, was taken away by the Nazi regime and murdered during the Aktion T4 campaign of Nazi eugenics. In 1943, while still in seminary, he was drafted into the German anti-aircraft corps as Luftwaffenhelfer. Ratzinger then trained in the German infantry. As the Allied front drew closer to his post in 1945, he deserted back to his family's home in Traunstein after his unit had ceased to exist, just as American troops established a headquarters in the Ratzinger household. As a German soldier, he was interned in US prisoner of war camps, first in Neu-Ulm, then at Fliegerhorst Bad Aibling where he was at the time of Victory in Europe Day, and released on 19 June 1945.Ratzinger and his brother Georg entered Saint Michael Seminary in Traunstein in November 1945, later studying at the Ducal Georgianum of the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich. They were both ordained in Freising on 29 June 1951 by Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber of Munichthe same man Ratzinger had met as a child. He recalled: "At the moment the elderly Archbishop laid his hands on me, a little birdperhaps a larkflew up from the altar in the high cathedral and trilled a little joyful song". He celebrated his first Mass later that summer in Traunstein, at St. Oswald's Church.
Ratzinger's 1953 dissertation, earning him a Doctor of Theology degree from the University of Munich, was on Augustine of Hippo: it was titled The People and the House of God in Augustine's Doctrine of the Church. His habilitation was on Bonaventure. It was completed in 1957 and he became a professor at Freising College in 1958.
Encounter with Romano Guardini
From 1946 to 1951, he pursued studies in philosophy and theology at the University of Munich and at the Philosophisch-Theologische Hochschule in Freising. During this time, Ratzinger was deeply influenced by the ideas of Italian-German philosopher Romano Guardini, who was teaching in Munich while Ratzinger was a student there. The intellectual affinity between these two thinkers, who would later become decisive figures for the twentieth-century Catholic Church, was preoccupied with rediscovering the essentials of Christianity: Guardini wrote The Essence of Christianity in 1938, while Ratzinger penned Introduction to Christianity, three decades later in 1968. Guardini inspired many in the Catholic social-democratic tradition, particularly the Communion and Liberation movement in the New Evangelization encouraged under the papacy of the Polish Pope John Paul II. Ratzinger wrote an introduction to a 1996 reissue of Guardini's 1954 work The Lord.Pre-papal career: 1951–2005
Academic career: 1951–1977
Ratzinger began as assistant pastor at the parish St. Martin, Moosach, in Munich in 1951. Ratzinger became a professor at the University of Bonn in 1959, with his inaugural lecture on "The God of Faith and the God of Philosophy". In 1963, he moved to the University of Münster. During this period, he participated in the Second Vatican Council and served as a peritus to Cardinal Frings of Cologne. He was viewed during the time of the council as a reformer, cooperating with theologians like Hans Küng and Edward Schillebeeckx. Ratzinger became an admirer of Karl Rahner, a well-known academic theologian of the Nouvelle théologie and a proponent of Church reform.In 1966, Ratzinger was appointed to a chair in dogmatic theology at the University of Tübingen, where he was a colleague of Hans Küng. In his 1968 book Introduction to Christianity, he wrote that the pope has a duty to hear differing voices within the Church before making a decision, and he downplayed the centrality of the papacy. During this time, he distanced himself from the atmosphere of Tübingen and the Marxist leanings of the student movement of the 1960s that quickly radicalized, in the years 1967 and 1968, culminating in a series of disturbances and riots in April and May 1968. Ratzinger came increasingly to see these and associated developments as connected to a departure from traditional Catholic teachings. Despite his reformist bent, his views increasingly came to contrast with the liberal ideas gaining currency in theological circles. He was invited by Rev. Theodore Hesburgh to join the theology faculty at the University of Notre Dame, but declined on grounds that his English was not good enough.
Some voices, among them Küng, deemed this period in Ratzinger's life a turn towards conservatism, while Ratzinger himself said in a 1993 interview, "I see no break in my views as a theologian ". Ratzinger continued to defend the work of the Second Vatican Council, including Nostra aetate, the document on respect of other religions, ecumenism, and the declaration of the right to freedom of religion. Later, as the Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Ratzinger most clearly spelled out the Catholic Church's position on other religions in the 2000 document Dominus Iesus which also talks about the Catholic way to engage in "ecumenical dialogue". During his time at Tübingen University, Ratzinger published articles in the reformist theological journal Concilium, though he increasingly chose less reformist themes than other contributors such as Küng and Schillebeeckx.
In 1969, Ratzinger returned to Bavaria, to the University of Regensburg and co-founded the theological journal Communio, with Hans Urs von Balthasar, Henri de Lubac, Walter Kasper, and others, in 1972. Communio, now published in seventeen languages, including German, English, and Spanish, has become a prominent journal of contemporary Catholic theological thought. Until he was elected pope, he remained one of the journal's most prolific contributors. In 1976, he suggested that the Augsburg Confession might be recognised as a Catholic statement of faith. Several of Benedict's former students became his confidantes, notably Christoph Schönborn, and a number of his former students sometimes meet for discussions. He served as vice-president of the University of Regensburg from 1976 to 1977. On 26 May 1976, he was appointed a Prelate of Honour of His Holiness.