His death was announced in Rome on Dec. 31.
“With sorrow I inform you that the Pope Emeritus, Benedict XVI, passed
away today at 9:34 in the Mater Ecclesiae Monastery in the Vatican,” Vatican
press office director Matteo Bruni said. “Further information will be provided
as soon as possible.”
Born Joseph Aloisius Ratzinger, he was elected to the papacy in April
2005, taking the name Benedict XVI, after decades of service to the Catholic
Church as a theologian, prefect for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the
Faith, cardinal, and one of the closest collaborators of St. John Paul II, whom
he succeeded as pope.
On Feb. 11, 2013, the
85-year-old Benedict shocked the world with a Latin-language announcement of
his retirement, becoming the first pope in 600 years to do so. He cited his
advanced age and his lack of strength as unsuitable to the exercise of his
office.
Widely
recognized as one of the Catholic Church's top theologians, Benedict’s
pontificate was marked by a profound understanding of the challenges to the
Church in the face of growing ideological aggression, not least from an
increasingly secular Western mindset, both within and outside the Church. He
famously warned about the “dictatorship of relativism” in a homily just before
the conclave in 2005 that elected him pope.
Born in
a small village in Bavaria called Marktl am Inn on April 16, 1927, the future
pope grew up in a region of Germany long known as a stronghold of Marian
devotion and piety. He was the third and youngest child of Joseph and Maria
Ratzinger.
His
youth in the nearby Bavarian town of Traunstein was overshadowed by the rise of
the Nazi party, a regime he called “sinister” and that “banished God and thus
became impervious to anything true and good.”
After a
brief forced conscription of two months into the German army at the end of the
Second World War, Ratzinger and his older brother, Georg, resumed their studies
for the priesthood, first in Freising and then in Munich.
Ordained a priest with his brother on June 29, 1951, Ratzinger finished his doctoral studies in theology and became a university teacher and vice president at the prestigious University of Regensburg in Bavaria. His reputation as an intellectual prompted an invitation to serve as an expert, or peritus, at the Second Vatican Council from Cardinal Joseph Frings, the archbishop of Cologne. He rapidly distinguished himself as an eminent theologian.
In 1977, Pope Paul VI named him archbishop of Munich and Freising and, later that same year, gave him the cardinal’s red hat.
Just
four years later, in 1981, Pope John Paul II appointed Ratzinger as prefect of
the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the department
of the Vatican dedicated to promoting and defending the teachings
of the Catholic faith. He held the post until the death of John Paul II in
2005.
After
his retirement in 2013, the pope emeritus resided in the Mater Ecclesiae
Monastery, a small convent built in 1994 inside the Vatican City walls,
dedicating himself to a life of penance and prayer.
Source: Catholic News Agency
