Brilliant theologian and fervent guardian of dogma, Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, whose resignation in 2013 took the whole world by surprise, died on Saturday at the age of 95.
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His funeral presided over by Pope Francis will be held on Thursday under the presidency of Pope Francis, an unprecedented event in the two thousand year history of the Catholic Church.
“I have the pain to announce to you that the pope emeritus, Benedict XVI, died today at 9:34 a.m., at the monastery Mater Ecclesiae, in the Vatican”, the monastery of the Vatican gardens where he had retired, announced in a statement from the director of the press service of the Holy See, Matteo Bruni.
Joseph Ratzinger’s body will be on display from Monday morning in the solemn setting of St. Peter’s Basilica to allow the faithful to pay homage to him.
The funeral ceremony of the 265th pope, “solemn but sober” according to Matteo Bruni, will be held in the presence of tens of thousands of faithful, but also heads of state or government and crowned heads.
The health of the German theologian – who was head of the Catholic Church from 2005 to 2013 – had deteriorated in recent days.
On Saturday, the announcement of his death took the faithful in St. Peter’s Square by surprise. “We are really devastated,” 30-year-old Italian Davide Di Tommaso told AFP.
His death puts an end to the unusual cohabitation of two men in white: the German Joseph Ratzinger, a brilliant theologian not very comfortable with crowds, and the Argentinian Jorge Bergoglio, a Jesuit endowed with an incisive word who wanted put the poor and migrants back at the center of the Church’s mission.
After his eight years of a pontificate marked by multiple crises, Benedict XVI had been caught up in early 2022 by the drama of pedocrime in the Church. Questioned by a report in Germany on his management of sexual violence when he was Archbishop of Munich, he broke his silence to ask for “pardon” but had assured that he had never covered up a child criminal.
His renunciation, announced in Latin on February 11, 2013, was a personal decision linked to his declining strength and not to the pressure of scandals, he assured in a book of confidences published in 2016.
For Marco Politi, Italian Vaticanist interviewed on Saturday by AFP, Benedict XVI “was important as a theologian but he did not have the mental profile of the role to be the pontiff”.
“It’s a part of the Church’s past that disappears with him. The Conservatives have been waving their banners in a civil war for ten years against Francis. (With his death), they lose a living symbol, they can no longer say here is the real pope, here is the fake,” he said.
HIV and Vatileaks
By his resignation, unprecedented in six centuries, the first German pope in modern history opened the way for his successors whose strength would come to decline. Francois, 86 and suffering from knee pain, left the possibility “open” himself.
Born in 1927, Joseph Ratzinger taught theology for 25 years in Germany before being appointed Archbishop of Munich.
He then became the strict guardian of the dogma of the Church for another quarter of a century in Rome at the head of the congregation for the doctrine of the faith, then pope for eight years, succeeding John Paul II.
As head of the Catholic Church, he defended a conservative line, notably on abortion, homosexuality or euthanasia.
His statements have sometimes shocked, such as on Islam or the use of condoms against HIV.
His pontificate was also marked in 2012 by the leak of confidential documents (“Vatileaks”) orchestrated by his butler. The scandal had exposed a Roman Curia (Vatican government) plagued by intrigue and devoid of financial rigour.