Pope Benedict and Pope Francis.
In 2013, when he stepped down, Pope Benedict promised that he would live “hidden to the world," “to a life of prayer” and meditation."
He moved into a monastery with a view of St. Peter’s dome, not far from Pope Francis’s residence on the Vatican’s grounds. For the most part, Pope Benedict kept to his promise, spending his days in seclusion.
Benedict made rare public appearances. He marked the opening of a Jubilee, or Holy Year, in 2015 with Pope Francis.
In the early years of his retirement, he attended the occasional special Mass or ceremony for promoting a cardinal.
Pope Benedict's longtime personal secretary, Archbishop Georg Gänswein, in an interview in April, on the occasion of Benedict’s 95th birthday, told Vatican News, that the retired Pope was in “good spirits.”
The Archbishop said that although Benedict was “physically relatively weak and frail,” he remained “lucid.”
He described a life devoted to reading, attending to correspondence, and receiving visitors, saying that the retired Pope also went out into the Vatican gardens, saying the rosary, “but seated.”
Although he stayed out of the spotlight, Benedict frequently found himself at the center of media attention and was viewed as a rival to Francis by detractors of the current Pope.
However, in 2019, he broke his post-papacy by issuing a 6,000-word letter that seemed to contradict the views of his successor on the Church’s sexual abuse scandals, attributing the crisis to the sexual revolution of the 1960s, secularization, and erosion of morality that he blamed on liberal theology.
On the contrary, Pope Francis traced the origins to the abuse of power in the church hierarchy and the exaltation of authority.
Considering Benedict’s frail health at the time, many Church watchers questioned whether the letter was indeed written by Benedict or whether he had been manipulated to issue it as a way to undercut Pope Francis.
When Francis seemed to be considering a proposal by his bishops to lift the restriction on married priests in remote areas, Benedict again weighed in, firmly defending the teachings of the Church on priestly celibacy in a 2020 book. Finally, Pope Francis rejected the proposal, to the excitement of conservatives.
Sometimes Benedict also chastised the cardinals who used his name as they criticized Francis. Benedict wrote that his pontificate would be tarnished by the "anger" voiced by some of his most ardent supporters, in private letters that were published in 2018 by the German newspaper Bild.
“I can well understand the deep-seated pain that the end of my pontificate caused you and many others,” he wrote in a November 2017 letter to Cardinal Walter Brandmüller of Germany.
“But for some — and it seems to me for you as well — the pain has turned to anger, which no longer just affects the abdication but my person and the entirety of my pontificate.”
Benedict added, “In this way, the pontificate itself is being devalued and conflated with the sadness about the situation of the Church today.”
Born Joseph Alois Ratzinger, Benedict
received his priestly ordination in 1951, and in 1977 he was elected a cardinal and also appointed as the Archbishop of Munich and Freising, in the same year.
Four years later, Pope John Paul II summoned Cardinal Ratzinger to Rome and appointed him to lead the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, one of the most important positions in the Vatican and the office in charge of defending church doctrines. He oversaw the office for roughly 25 years.
Pope Benedict XVI.
Cardinal Ratzinger was chosen to succeed John Paul II after his passing in 2005. He adopted the name of the monk, Benedict of Nursia, who established monasteries and the Benedictine order and contributed to the spread of Christianity throughout Europe in the sixth century.
As Benedict XVI, the Pope tried to re-evangelize a Europe that was having trouble maintaining its faith.
In the end, Pope Benedict resigned at a time of scandal and under intense pressure citing his failing health both "of mind and body" and said that he had freely resigned "for the good of the church."
He is likely to be remembered most for that resignation, which was the first by a Pope since 1415.
He spent his retirement years at a monastery on the grounds of the Vatican, mostly withdrawing from public life and devoting himself to meditation and prayer. Francis visited him and referred to him as "a wise grandfather in the home."
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