Pope Benedict XVI

• 1. Introduction

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  Pope Benedict XVI was born Joseph Alois Ratzinger on Holy Saturday, the 16th of April 1927, and was baptised the same day. For years as a cardinal, he said what he wanted most was a quiet life in his house in Pentling, a Bavarian village near Regensburg. There he planned to write books. Instead, in 2005, his fellow cardinals elected him pope. He later spoke about that moment with wry honesty: 'At a certain point, I prayed to God please don't do this to me... Evidently, this time He didn't listen to me.' He led the Catholic Church until 2013. How did a Bavarian boy who once announced he wanted to be a cardinal end up in a role he had begged to avoid? What did a scholar who began as a reformer actually believe, and why did critics and admirers read his legacy so differently? And why did a man who dreaded the office finally choose to leave it on his own terms?

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• 2. Bavarian Boyhood and War

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  At the age of five, Joseph Ratzinger stood among children who greeted Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber, Archbishop of Munich, with flowers. The cardinal's distinctive robes made such an impression that the boy announced, later that day, that he wanted to be a cardinal himself.

  His father, Joseph Ratzinger Sr., was a police officer. His mother, Maria, came from a family that originally lived in South Tyrol. Joseph was the third and youngest child. A grand-uncle, Georg Ratzinger, had been a priest and a politician. His elder brother, also named Georg, became a priest and directed the Regensburger Domspatzen choir. His sister Maria never married and managed his household until she died in 1991. The elementary school he attended in Aschau am Inn was renamed in his honour in 2009.

  In 1939, at the age of twelve, he enrolled in a minor seminary in Traunstein. The military took over the building in 1942, the seminary closed, and the students were sent home.

  The Ratzinger household bitterly resented the Nazis, especially his father, whose opposition brought demotions and harassment to the family. In 1941, after his fourteenth birthday, Joseph was conscripted into the Hitler Youth. The law required membership of every German boy that age after March 1939. According to his brother, he was an unenthusiastic member who refused to attend meetings. That same year, a cousin with Down syndrome, a boy of 14, was taken away by the Nazi regime and murdered in the Aktion T4 campaign of eugenics.

  In 1943, while still a seminarian, he was drafted into the German anti-aircraft corps as a Luftwaffenhelfer. He then trained in the infantry. In 1945 the Allied front drew close to his post and his unit ceased to exist, so he deserted and went home to Traunstein. American troops were establishing a headquarters in the Ratzinger house at that very moment. As a German soldier, he was interned in American prisoner of war camps, first at Neu-Ulm and then at the Bad Aibling military airfield. He was at Bad Aibling on Victory in Europe Day, and he was released on the 19th of June 1945.

  In November 1945, Ratzinger and his brother Georg entered Saint Michael Seminary in Traunstein. They later studied at the Ducal Georgianum of the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. On the 29th of June 1951, both brothers were ordained in Freising by Cardinal von Faulhaber, the man Joseph had greeted with flowers as a child. Ratzinger remembered the moment this way: 'At the moment the elderly Archbishop laid his hands on me, a little bird, perhaps a lark, flew up from the altar in the high cathedral and trilled a little joyful song.' He celebrated his first Mass later that summer at St. Oswald's Church in Traunstein.

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• 3. Professor to Prefect

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  Romano Guardini, an Italian-German philosopher, taught at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München while Ratzinger studied there between 1946 and 1951. His ideas left a deep mark on the student. Both men were drawn to the question of what Christianity essentially is. Guardini wrote The Essence of Christianity in 1938, and Ratzinger followed three decades later with Introduction to Christianity in 1968. In 1996 Ratzinger wrote an introduction for a reissue of Guardini's 1954 book The Lord.

  Ratzinger began as an assistant pastor at the parish of St. Martin in Moosach, Munich, in 1951. His doctoral dissertation of 1953 studied Augustine of Hippo and was titled The People and the House of God in Augustine's Doctrine of the Church. His habilitation, the work that qualified him for a professorship, examined Bonaventure and was completed in 1957. In 1958, aged 31, he became a full professor at Freising College. In 1959 he moved to the University of Bonn, opening with an inaugural lecture called 'The God of Faith and the God of Philosophy'. In 1963 he transferred to the University of Münster.

  The Second Vatican Council ran from 1962 to 1965, and Ratzinger took part as a peritus, a theological consultant, to Cardinal Frings of Cologne. At the time he was seen as a reformer who worked alongside theologians such as Hans Küng and Edward Schillebeeckx. He also admired Karl Rahner, a leading academic voice for church reform.

  In 1966 Ratzinger took a chair in dogmatic theology at the University of Tübingen, where Küng was his colleague. His 1968 book Introduction to Christianity argued that a pope has a duty to hear differing voices before making a decision. It also downplayed the central role of the papacy. Yet the student movement at Tübingen turned radical and Marxist-leaning in 1967 and 1968, ending in disturbances and riots in April and May 1968. Ratzinger came to link that unrest, and his students' fading respect for authority, to a drift away from traditional Catholic teaching.

  Rev. Theodore Hesburgh invited him to join the theology faculty at the University of Notre Dame. Ratzinger declined because he felt his English was not good enough. Küng and others saw these years as a turn toward conservatism. Ratzinger rejected that reading in a 1993 interview: 'I see no break in my views as a theologian.'

  In 1969 Ratzinger returned to Bavaria and the University of Regensburg. In 1972 he co-founded the journal Communio with Hans Urs von Balthasar, Henri de Lubac, Walter Kasper and others. Communio is now published in seventeen languages. Ratzinger stayed among its most prolific contributors until his election as pope. In 1976 he suggested that the Augsburg Confession might be recognised as a Catholic statement of faith. He served as the university's vice-president in 1976 and 1977. Several former students became his confidants, notably Christoph Schönborn.

  On the 24th of March 1977, Ratzinger was appointed Archbishop of Munich and Freising. He was ordained a bishop on the 28th of May. He took as his motto Cooperatores veritatis, Latin for 'cooperators of the truth', a phrase from the Third Epistle of John. On the 27th of June 1977, Pope Paul VI made him a cardinal. It was an unusual promotion for a man with little pastoral experience who had been a bishop for barely a month.

  On the 25th of November 1981, Pope John Paul II named Ratzinger Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, after Franjo Šeper retired. The office had once been called the Holy Office, the historical Roman Inquisition. Ratzinger left Munich in early 1982. He rose through the College of Cardinals, becoming Cardinal Bishop of Velletri-Segni in 1993, vice-dean in 1998 and dean in 2002.

  Under Ratzinger, the congregation reaffirmed Catholic teaching on birth control, homosexuality and inter-religious dialogue. The theologian Leonardo Boff was suspended, and Matthew Fox was censured. Posthumous writings by the Jesuit priest Anthony de Mello drew an official notification. The congregation saw in many of them a religious indifferentism, the idea that Christ was 'one master alongside others'. In 2000, the jubilee year, it published Dominus Iesus, which restated that salvation is found through Christ alone. The document angered many Protestant churches by calling them 'ecclesial communities' rather than churches.

  In 1997, when he turned 70, Ratzinger reportedly asked John Paul II to let him leave and run the Vatican Secret Archives and the Vatican Library. John Paul refused. In 2004 he held a dialogue with the critical theorist Jürgen Habermas, which Ignatius Press published three years later.

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• 4. Reluctant Pope

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  John Paul II died on the 2nd of April 2005. That month, Time listed Ratzinger among the 100 most influential people in the world. He had been, in one assessment, 'a major figure on the Vatican stage for a quarter of a century'.

  The conclave elected him on the 19th of April, on its second day, after four ballots. Only fourteen cardinals appointed by Paul VI were still living, only three of them were under the age of 80, and just two of those voted: Ratzinger and William Wakefield Baum. One account captured the mood of the room: 'it was, if not Ratzinger, who? And as they came to know him, the question became, why not Ratzinger?'

  Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor remembered the final vote: 'It's very solemn when you go up one by one to put your vote in the urn and you're looking up at the Last Judgement of Michelangelo. And I still remember vividly the then Cardinal Ratzinger sitting on the edge of his chair.'

  The German newspaper Bild ran one of its most famous headlines the next day: Wir Sind Papst, meaning We are (the) Pope. From the balcony, Benedict spoke first in Italian, before giving the Urbi et Orbi blessing in Latin. He described himself as 'a simple, humble labourer in the vineyard of the Lord'. He said the Lord could work even with 'insufficient instruments', and he asked the crowd for their prayers.

  On the 24th of April, he celebrated the Papal Inauguration Mass in St. Peter's Square and was invested with the Pallium and the Ring of the Fisherman. On the 7th of May, he took possession of his cathedral church, the Archbasilica of St. John Lateran.

  He explained his papal name at his first general audience, on the 27th of April 2005. Benedict comes from the Latin word for 'the blessed'. The first namesake was Benedict XV, pope during the First World War, whom Benedict called a 'courageous prophet of peace'. The second was Benedict of Nursia, founder of the Benedictine monasteries and author of the Rule of Saint Benedict. That rule is still the most influential text on monastic life in Western Christianity.

  At the inaugural Mass, the old custom of every cardinal submitting to the new pope gave way to a greeting from twelve people. They included cardinals, clergy, a married couple and their child, and newly confirmed Catholics. The cardinals had already sworn obedience at his election. He began using an open-topped papal car because he wanted to be closer to the people. Each year, on the Feast of the Baptism of the Lord, he baptised several infants in the Sistine Chapel.

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• 5. Faith and Reason

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  'Do not be afraid! Open wide the doors for Christ!' Benedict opened his first homily as pope by quoting these famous words of John Paul II. He then asked whether people fear that Christ might take something away from them. His answer was no. Nothing that makes life free, beautiful and great is lost, and 'when we give ourselves to Him, we receive a hundredfold in return'.

  Friendship with Jesus Christ became a constant theme of his preaching, and he said that 'everything depends' on it. His book Jesus of Nazareth aimed 'to help foster in the reader the growth of a living relationship' with Christ. He also taught that friendship with God leads us to love those whom God loves. Prayer, he said, was 'urgently needed' to counter the activism and growing secularism of many Christians engaged in charitable work.

  On the 6th of June 2005, Benedict called relativism a particularly insidious obstacle to education, because it recognises nothing as definitive and leaves only the self and its desires. He named 'a dictatorship of relativism' as the core challenge facing the Church and humanity. At its root, he said, lay Immanuel Kant's 'self-limitation of reason'. That self-amputation of reason, he argued, breeds sicknesses of religion such as terrorism and sicknesses of science such as ecological disasters. He traced the failed revolutions and violent ideologies of the 20th century to partial viewpoints turned into absolute guides. In his words: 'Absolutizing what is not absolute but relative is called totalitarianism.'

  The day before John Paul II died, Benedict gave an address on the 'Crisis of Culture' in the West. In it he called Christianity the 'religion of the Logos', using a Greek word that can mean word, reason, meaning or intelligence. He argued that the Enlightenment was of Christian origin, born in the realm of the Christian faith. Christians, he said, must keep a faith that comes from creative reason and is open to everything truly rational.

  Benedict wrote three encyclicals: Deus caritas est, Spe salvi and Caritas in veritate. Their titles mean God is Love, Saved by Hope and Love in Truth. The first runs to almost 16,000 words in 42 paragraphs. Benedict is said to have written its first half in German in the summer of 2005. The second half draws on unfinished writings left by John Paul II. He signed it on Christmas Day, the 25th of December 2005, and it appeared a month later in Latin. It was the first encyclical published since the Vatican decided to assert copyright over the pope's official writings.

  Spe salvi, on the virtue of hope, was released on the 30th of November 2007. Caritas in veritate was signed on the 29th of June 2009, the Feast of Sts. Peter and Paul, and released on the 7th of July 2009. It continued the Church's teaching on social justice. It condemned an economic system 'where the pernicious effects of sin are evident' and called on people to rediscover ethics in business.

  By the time of his resignation, Benedict had drafted a fourth encyclical, Lumen fidei, meaning The Light of Faith. It was meant to complete a trilogy on faith, hope and love. His successor Francis finished it and published it in June 2013, four months after Benedict retired. Paragraph 7 of the document acknowledges the debt: 'as his brother in Christ I have taken up his fine work and added a few contributions of my own.'

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• 6. Tradition and Beauty

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  On the 7th of July 2007, Benedict issued the motu proprio Summorum Pontificum. It made it easier to celebrate Mass according to the Missal of 1962, known as the Tridentine Mass. Stable groups who once had to petition their bishop could now simply ask their local priest. Any qualified priest could also offer the older Mass privately. Regularly scheduled public celebrations needed the permission of the priest in charge of the church.

  Many feared that this reversed the Second Vatican Council. In an accompanying letter, Benedict insisted that it did not, and that the Mass of Paul VI remained the norm. He argued that the older form 'was never juridically abrogated'. He also criticised 'deformations of the liturgy', blaming a mistaken belief that the Council required creativity. He saw the permission as a way to prevent or heal schism. Bishop Bernard Fellay, superior general of the Society of St. Pius X, expressed deep gratitude. Cardinal Darío Castrillón Hoyos said the decree had 'opened the door for their return'.

  In July 2021, Pope Francis issued the apostolic letter Traditionis custodes. It substantially reversed Summorum Pontificum and placed broad new limits on the Traditional Latin Mass. Conservative and traditionalist Catholics widely criticised the decision as lacking in charity.

  The red papal shoes were among the traditions Benedict revived. Popes had worn them since Roman times, but the habit had faded under John Paul II. The press first speculated that the Italian fashion house Prada had made them. The Vatican said they came from the pope's personal shoemaker. Together with his promotion of Latin and traditional vestments, such details earned him a nickname. The journalist Charlotte Allen called him 'the pope of aesthetics'. She wrote that he had reminded a world growing ugly and debased that 'there is such a thing as the beautiful'.

  In 2006, Benedict met the Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams. Their Common Declaration noted 40 years of dialogue and also acknowledged 'serious obstacles to our ecumenical progress'. On the 4th of November 2009, answering a 2007 petition from the Traditional Anglican Church, Benedict issued the apostolic constitution Anglicanorum coetibus. It allowed personal ordinariates for Anglicans entering full communion. Three were created between 2011 and 2012, and together they reported 9090 members, 194 priests and 94 parishes.

  During his pontificate, Benedict beatified 870 people and canonized 45. On the 9th of May 2005, he began the beatification process for John Paul II. He waived the usual five-year wait after death. Cardinal Camillo Ruini, vicar general of the Diocese of Rome, had cited 'exceptional circumstances'. Paul VI had done the same for Pius XII and John XXIII. The announcement came on the 13th of May 2005, the Feast of Our Lady of Fátima and the 24th anniversary of the attempt on John Paul's life.

  On the 29th of September 2005, the Congregation for the Causes of Saints announced that beatifications would be celebrated by a papal representative. Benedict made one famous exception. On the 19th of September 2010, during his visit to the United Kingdom, he personally proclaimed the beatification of John Henry Newman.

  His canonizations produced several firsts. George Preca became the first Maltese saint since St. Paul converted the island's inhabitants in A.D. 60. Mary MacKillop, canonized on the 17th of October 2010, became the first Australian saint. Kateri Tekakwitha, canonized on the 21st of October 2012, became the first Native American saint. On the 7th of October 2012, Benedict named Hildegard of Bingen and John of Ávila Doctors of the Church, the 34th and 35th people so recognised in Christian history.

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• 7. Dialogue and Journeys

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  On the 12th of September 2006, Benedict gave a lecture at the University of Regensburg, where he had once been a professor. It was titled 'Faith, Reason and the University - Memories and Reflections'. Political and religious authorities paid close attention.

  Many Muslims were offended by a passage he quoted from a dialogue written in 1391 by the Byzantine emperor Manuel II Palaeologus: 'Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.' The emperor was one of the last Christian rulers in Constantinople before its fall to the Ottomans. In the German text, Benedict's own comment was that the emperor spoke in an astoundingly harsh way. His aim was to address the rationality of religious violence, but many Islamic politicians and religious leaders protested what they called an insulting mischaracterization of Islam.

  Benedict apologised for any offence he had caused and visited Turkey, where he prayed in the Blue Mosque. The trip met nationalist and Islamic protesters and unprecedented security. There he also signed a joint declaration with Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I, an attempt to begin healing the rift between the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches. The First Meeting of the Catholic-Muslim Forum was held from the 4th to the 6th of November 2008. On the 9th of May 2009, he visited the King Hussein Mosque in Amman, Jordan, where Prince Ghazi bin Muhammad addressed him.

  When Benedict was elected, the Anti-Defamation League welcomed his 'great sensitivity to Jewish history and the Holocaust'. British Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks responded more reservedly, and Israeli foreign minister Silvan Shalom offered tentative praise. Critics later accused Benedict of insensitivity. They pointed to the wider use of the Tridentine Mass, whose Good Friday rubrics include a prayer that Jews be 'delivered from their darkness'. They also pointed to the lifting of the excommunication of four bishops of the Society of St. Pius X. One of them, Richard Williamson, was an outspoken historical revisionist sometimes interpreted as a Holocaust denier. In September 2007, during a three-day visit to Austria, Benedict joined Vienna's chief rabbi, Paul Chaim Eisenberg, in a memorial to the 65,000 Viennese Jews who died in Nazi death camps.

  The Dalai Lama congratulated Benedict on his election and visited him in October 2006. In 2007 China was accused of using its political influence to stop a meeting between the two. In Brazil in May 2007, Benedict said that native populations had been 'silently longing' for the Christian faith. Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez demanded an apology. Benedict later said it was 'not possible to forget the suffering and the injustices inflicted by colonizers', though he made no apology. On the 17th of April 2008, the Hindu scholar Radhika Ramana Dasa presented him with a gift of an Om symbol.

  In April 2008, Benedict made his first visit to the United States as pope. He was formally received at the White House and met privately with President George W. Bush. He celebrated Mass at the Washington Nationals' baseball stadium before 47,000 people and met privately with victims of sexual abuse by priests. In New York, he addressed the United Nations General Assembly and spoke to some 25,000 young people. On the final day he visited the World Trade Center site and celebrated Mass at Yankee Stadium.

  In Sydney on the 19th of July 2008, at St. Mary's Cathedral, he apologised for child sexual abuse by clergy in Australia. On the 13th of September 2008, at an outdoor Mass in Paris attended by 250,000 people, he condemned modern materialism. He called the world's love of power, possessions and money a modern-day plague, comparable to paganism. In 2009 he made his first trip to Africa as pope, visiting Cameroon and Angola. There he suggested that altering sexual behaviour was the answer to the AIDS crisis. That remark, and his opposition to condoms in areas of high HIV transmission, drew criticism from public health officials and anti-AIDS activists. In May 2009 he visited Jordan, Israel and Palestine. On the 17th and the 18th of April 2010 he travelled to Malta, where 50,000 people gathered in a drizzle for Mass in Floriana.

  Inside the Vatican, the pope sometimes rode without the protective bulletproof case of a typical popemobile, and security lapses followed. On the 6th of June 2007, a man leapt a barrier during a general audience and nearly mounted the pope's vehicle before he was stopped. On Christmas Eve 2009, on the 24th of December, a 25-year-old woman named Susanna Maiolo jumped the barrier and pulled the 82-year-old pope to the ground as he walked toward the altar. Benedict was helped to his feet and carried on to the altar. Roger Etchegaray fell as well and fractured his hip. In his homily, Benedict forgave her and urged the world to 'wake up' from selfishness and petty affairs.

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• 8. Scandal and Farewell

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  In 2001, Ratzinger persuaded John Paul II to put the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in charge of all sexual abuse investigations. Until then, the main responsibility had rested with individual dioceses. His 2001 letter De delictis gravioribus clarified the confidentiality of internal church investigations of grave crimes by priests, including sexual abuse. It built on the 1962 document Crimen sollicitationis, which Ratzinger had been responsible for enforcing for 20 years. Bishops held that the secrecy applied only internally and did not block civil investigation, but the letter was often seen as promoting a coverup.

  The journalist John L. Allen Jr. wrote that Ratzinger's years of handling these cases gave him a familiarity almost no one else in the Church could claim. During 2003-04, Allen said, Ratzinger seemed to undergo a 'conversion experience' and to act with a 'convert's zeal'. Cardinal Vincent Nichols credited him with changes in church law. These covered internet offences against children, abuse offences against anyone under 18, case-by-case waivers of the statute of limitations and a fast-track dismissal from the clerical state. Charles J. Scicluna, a former prosecutor, praised his 'great wisdom and firmness'. Cardinal Christoph Schönborn said Ratzinger tried to investigate rather than cover things up, which not everyone in the Vatican welcomed. Ratzinger had pressed John Paul II to investigate Hans Hermann Groër, an Austrian cardinal accused of sexual abuse, and Groër resigned.

  The case of Marcial Maciel, a Mexican priest who founded the Legionaries of Christ, shows the limits Ratzinger faced. Maciel had been accused repeatedly of sexual abuse. The biographer Andrea Tornielli suggested that Ratzinger wanted to act but that John Paul II and other high officials, including the pope's secretary Stanisław Dziwisz, prevented it. According to Jason Berry, Cardinal Angelo Sodano pressured him to halt proceedings in 1999. When new accusers came forward after Maciel was honoured in 2004, Ratzinger authorized an investigation. As pope, he forced Maciel out of active service. On the 1st of May 2010, the Vatican denounced Maciel's behaviour as 'true crimes'.

  In March 2010, Benedict sent a pastoral letter to the Catholic Church in Ireland, expressing sorrow and promising changes. Victims' groups said it failed to clarify whether civil law enforcement took priority over canon law confidentiality. The next month, the Vatican issued guidelines stating that civil law on reporting crimes 'should always be followed'. A lawsuit also accused Benedict of conspiring to cover up the molestation of three boys in Texas. He sought and obtained diplomatic immunity from liability.

  In November 2020, the Vatican published a report blaming John Paul II and Benedict for allowing Theodore McCarrick to rise in power despite knowing of abuse allegations against him. Benedict had pressured McCarrick to resign as Archbishop of Washington in 2006. Even so, McCarrick stayed active in ministry and presided at the burial of senator Ted Kennedy at Arlington National Cemetery in 2009.

  In September 1991, Ratzinger suffered a haemorrhagic stroke that briefly affected his eyesight, and he recovered completely. The official story was that he had fallen and struck his head on a radiator, though the cardinals who elected him knew the truth. Three times he submitted his resignation as prefect, and John Paul II kept him in place. In May 2005 the Vatican announced another mild stroke. On the 17th of July 2009, he broke his right wrist in a fall while on holiday in the Alps. His biographer Peter Seewald said in 2023 that Benedict had suffered persistent insomnia since World Youth Day 2005 in Cologne. A March 2012 incident in Mexico forced him to cut back on sleeping pills and to appear in public only in the morning. According to Seewald, Benedict said shortly before his death that these limits were the 'central motive' for resigning before World Youth Day in Rio de Janeiro in July 2013. After the resignation, the Vatican revealed that he had been fitted with a pacemaker before his election. In his last year as pope, the Vatileaks affair exposed allegations of corruption, internal conflict and financial mismanagement.

  On the 11th of February 2013, the Vatican announced that Benedict would resign on the 28th of February. The move was unexpected, because every modern pope had held office until death. He became the first pope to resign since Gregory XII in 1415. He was also the first to do so without outside pressure since Celestine V in 1294. At 85 years and 318 days, he was the fourth-oldest person to hold the office. Addressing his cardinals in Latin, he cited his deteriorating strength and the physical and mental demands of the papacy. He promised to keep serving the Church 'through a life dedicated to prayer'. The Vatican said the timing was not caused by any specific illness but meant to 'avoid that exhausting rush of Easter engagements'.

  Benedict retired to the newly renovated Mater Ecclesiae Monastery in Vatican City. The conclave of 2013 elected Francis on the 13th of March, and Benedict took the title pope emeritus. In 2019, he released a 6,000-word letter blaming the abuse crisis on an erosion of morality driven by secularization and the sexual revolution of the 1960s. Francis saw the crisis instead as a product of abuses of power within the Church hierarchy. The New York Times reported that, given his frail health, many church watchers questioned whether Benedict had truly written the letter.

  In January 2022, a report by the German law firm Westpfahl Spilker Wastl concluded that Ratzinger had failed to act adequately in four cases of alleged abuse during his time as Archbishop of Munich and Freising. He denied the accusations. He also corrected his earlier statement that he had missed a January 1980 meeting, saying the mistake came from an error in the editorial processing of his statement. In February 2022, he admitted that errors had been made and asked forgiveness for any 'grievous fault', while denying personal wrongdoing.

  Benedict died on the 31st of December 2022. In March 2023, prosecutors in Munich discontinued their investigation after finding insufficient suspicion of criminal activity. Victims' groups reacted with mixed feelings. Francesco Zanardi, founder of the Italian group Rete l'Abuso, said that Ratzinger was less communicative than Francis but moved in the right direction. Anne Barrett Doyle of BishopAccountability.org said Benedict would be 'remembered chiefly for his failure to achieve what should have been his job one: to rectify the incalculable harm done to the hundreds of thousands of children sexually abused by Catholic priests.'

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