The greatest service Pope Benedict XVI did the Papacy was his leaving of it, and the manner in which this happened — by and through resignation.
By doing so, he set an example that cannot be ignored by the popes, starting with Francis, who will come after him.
His resignation came as a great shock because (a) there was no precedent for it in the modern history of the Papacy, and (b) he had given no prior indication to any of those close to him that he was actually contemplating such a dramatic exit on February 11, 2013.
There had, however, been a straw in the wind. What Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger witnessed during the final years of Pope John Paul II’s Papacy left a lasting impression, so much so that three years before his shock decision he spoke of an “obligation” on an incapacitated pope to resign.
In an interview with the German journalist Peter Seewald for a book called and published in 2010, Benedict XVI said: “If a Pope clearly realises that he is no longer physically, psychologically, and spiritually capable of handling the duties of his office, then he has a right and, under some circumstances, also an obligation, to resign.” Benedict added: “One can resign at a peaceful moment or when one simply cannot go on.”
Asked directly whether he would ever consider resigning, he said: “Yes.” In fact, we know that as Cardinal Ratzinger he had asked John Paul II three times to allow him to retire but was turned down on each occasion. This adds weight to the argument of those who contend that he should never have been elected Pope.
Back in October 1966, Pope Paul VI sparked a flurry of speculation when he paid a visit to the tomb of Pope Celestine V near Agnani in central Italy. Celestine was famous as the last pope to have voluntarily resigned — in 1294. Was Paul VI considering the prospect of resignation? Was he dropping a hint?
We know now that nothing came of that, but the visit by Paul VI gave rise to much gossip at the time. In Benedict’s case, he had given no sign nor had he done anything to indicate that he was actually thinking of abdicating.
In truth, of course, Joseph Ratzinger should never have been elected Pope in the first place.Shy, unworldly, and donnish, he was temperamentally unsuited for the pressures and demands of the Papacy, and utterly incapable of coping with the unbridled careerism, in-fighting, jealousy, and intrigue that is endemic to the papal court.
And this despite the fact that he had himself operated at the highest levels in the Vatican for over 20 years as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF). That fact, that he was very much an “insider”, may have worked against him in any attempted reform of the Roman Curia. But it also must not be forgotten that his work in the CDF was really an extension of the work he had done as a professional theologian in various universities. He had his own fiefdom, and one that was hermetically sealed off from Vatican intrigues.
Perhaps the other cardinals should have listened to what the then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger said during the 16-day interregnum between the death of John Paul II on April 2, 2005, and the opening of the Conclave on April 18. Knowing that he was a favourite to succeed the Polish pope, he warned the others that “I am not a man of governance”. He was, in effect, putting his own case against himself. But nobody listened.
In that sense, it could be said that the Papacy was foisted on him. His fears, expressed at the time, about the burdens the office would impose, were to prove well-founded. In the end, he was overwhelmed by them, and simply couldn’t cope. Significantly, in September 2016, in a book-length interview, excerpts of which were published in , the retired Pope felt it necessary to publicly declare that he did not regard his Papacy as “a failure”.
Ratzinger was elected on April 19, 2005, after one of the shortest Conclaves in over a hundred years (only four ballots were needed).
And it’s not as though the warning bells didn’t start to ring (as a cardinal, he once described Buddhism as an “auto-erotic spirituality”). The most egregious of the gaffes was a speech he gave at the University of Regensburg in Germany in September 2006 which inflamed opinion in the Muslim world. During the speech, he quoted a description of Islam as “evil and inhuman”.
Then in March 2009, he had to concede in a letter to the bishops of the world (released to the media shortly afterwards) that “errors” had been made in the way the Vatican handled the case of a Holocaust-denying bishop, Richard Williamson, whose excommunication had been lifted by the Pontiff in January 2009. The Vatican said it was not aware of Williamson’s views on the Holocaust, but critics pointed out that Internet-based material written by Williamson on the matter had existed for some time.
Later, the Pope had to cancel his decision to name a controversial Austrian cleric as bishop — an appointment that caused a storm of protest in Vienna. Benedict then annulled the appointment of Gerhard Maria Wagner as auxiliary bishop of Linz. Wagner had described the Harry Potter novels as “Satanism”, and implied that natural disasters such as Hurricane Katrina in 2005 were divine punishment for “spiritual pollution”.
We don’t know whether Benedict XVI was aware of the problematic situation his resignation created. For the first time in the 2,000-year history of the Papacy there were also two Popes — de jure and de facto — in the Vatican, living in close proximity. In addition, there is the fact that the unprecedented situation created by Pope Benedict XVI’s surprise decision to resign could well serve as a template for the future in more ways than one. Having a Pope emeritus resident in the Vatican could create real problems for the reigning Pope.
The late Fr Andrew Greeley, the Chicago-based sociologist and author of , said in that book that popes in the future may serve for fixed terms, thus removing the need for voluntary retirement. Under the current Code of Canon Law, however, only a pope can enforce that provision.
The code itself, the updated version of which was promulgated by Pope John Paul II in January 1983, provides for a papal resignation. Canon 332 states: “Should it happen that the Roman Pontiff resigns from his office, it is required for validity that the resignation be freely made and properly manifested, but it is not necessary that it be accepted by anyone”.
The unexpected resignation of Benedict XVI, though, created real difficulties. An editorial in the English Catholic weekly The Tablet identified the core problem: “There is a real danger of splitting the loyalties of hitherto faithful Catholics, particularly if the new Pope does things, as he is more or less bound to do eventually, that depart from the policies of his predecessor and near neighbour”.
And this is just what happened.
Despite an initial promise to stay on the sidelines, Joseph Ratzinger made a number of statements in due course which conflicted with the stance of Pope Francis, and “split the loyalties” of Catholics. In April 2019, in particular, he sent a long essay to a German magazine in which he took the opposite position of his successor on the issue of sexual abuse by clerics.
Benedict XVI linked the ongoing crisis within the Catholic Church over sexual abuse of children to the 1960s sexual revolution, overlooking the fact that the history of the Church showed that abuse by clerics was not just a 20th-century phenomenon.
There was always the possibility that something like this might happen where you have a Pope and a Pope emeritus residing in the Vatican. That danger was always real, but the clear lesson to be drawn was that if and when a future pope resigns, his place of residence in retirement should be far away from Rome.
We have to go back nearly 600 years and nearly 720 years respectively to find the last papal resignations – that of Gregory XII in 1415 and Celestine V in 1294. Looking for parallels between then and now is not really helpful.
In the cases of 1294 and 1415, though for different reasons, there was an element of the bizarre. One of these was a forced abdication. Gregory was forced out to heal a breach caused by the presence of antipopes. He lived for another two years after his resignation, during which time he served as the cardinal bishop of Porto.
Celestine V, who was just pope from July 5 to December 13, 1294, was actually imprisoned in the tower of Castel Fumone, east of Ferentino, by his successor, Boniface VIII. He was fearful that Celestine, who died in May 1296, could become the rallying point for a schism. Celestine’s was the last voluntary abdication; he, like Benedict, was just overwhelmed by the job.
Since, Benedict XVI is the only other Pope to freely abdicate, though there were warnings that his continued presence in the Vatican would inevitably cast a shadow over the papacy of his successor.
Could the new Pope, if he were so minded, take the Church in a very different direction from that pursued by Benedict XVI, knowing that the latter is living just a short distance away?
We entered uncharted papal waters in 2013, and there were concerns about what might happen in the aftermath. Fixed-term pontificates are as yet futuristic, but Pope Francis and those who come after him will now have to take account of the novel situation established by the unexpected resignation of Joseph Ratzinger. His decision to step down from the chair of St Peter on grounds of “incapacity” will weigh on all future popes.
Benedict, who was born on April 16, 1927, in a small town in Bavaria, and who was conscripted into the Hitler Youth in 1941 at the age of 14, said he was leaving the Papacy with “humility and honour”, and he undoubtedly believed that in deciding to abdicate he acted honourably and in the best interest of the Papacy and the Church. He was ideally placed to witness the way the Papacy of John Paul II crash-landed three years before Karol Wojtyla actually died.
It must not be forgotten that he witnessed at first hand the distressing spectacle of the final years of his predecessor’s long pontificate when it was evident that John Paul II, stricken by Parkinson’s disease, was no longer in control. The reality is that for the last three years of that Papacy no one was really in charge in the Vatican.
He would also have seen that where you have a pope who is clearly incapacitated, there will inevitably be unseemly manoeuvrings and plotting within the papal inner circle and the higher echelons of the Vatican to assume some measure of control.
The most bizarre example of this happened during the final stages of the pontificate of Pius XII, who was Pope from 1939 to 1958. When the white smoke swirled from the chimney of the Sistine Chapel in 1939, the world knew it had a new pope: Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli was now Pius XII. What the world did not know was that the Church had also acquired a “Popessa” — a tiny, beautiful, brilliant nun named Sr Pascalina.
A native of Germany, she wielded a secret and unprecedented power within the Vatican. “She was the Pope’s aide, his housekeeper, his confidant, his adviser, his surrogate mother, and, in critical times, his conscience,” explained Paul Murphy in his acclaimed 1983 biography ( ) of the Bavarian nun.
“Her immense impact on his controversial papacy had so aroused the Sacred College of Cardinals that many of the Vatican’s purple-robed prelates had repeatedly demanded that he oust her.”
It was towards the end of Pius’s 19-year pontificate that her role was most pronounced. She blocked access to the ailing pontiff and controlled the flow of paper to his study.
The influence wielded by Sr Pascalina was exceptional and is unlikely that any member of the papal household will be so powerful ever again.
One of the difficulties Benedict XVI had to contend with was a dysfunctional Roman Curia (the Church’s central administration). Internal squabbling, rivalries, jealousies, and power-plays had come to the fore in the final years of John Paul II’s papacy when he was patently and painfully incapable of governing.
The continuation of this came embarrassingly into the public forum during the “Vatileaks” scandal in October 2012 when the Pope’s own butler, Paolo Gabriele, was arrested and placed on trial for stealing thousands of sensitive documents from the Pope’s apartment and leaking them to an Italian journalist. The latter, Gianluigi Nuzzi, selected dozens of those stolen documents and used them as the basis for a best-selling book called ('His Holiness').
Robert Mickens, the Vatican correspondent for , reported that these documents showed “instances of financial corruption, mismanagement, factional fighting and careerism involving the priests and bishops that run the Roman Curia”.
Benedict’s failure to tackle these problems so alarmed one of his champions that, in April 2009, George Wiegel (author of biographies of Karol Wojtyla and Joseph Ratzinger) wrote an impassioned article for magazine in which he pleaded with the Pope to take decisive action. Noting that his pontificate was proceeding “under storm clouds of crisis”, Wiegel highlighted a “complex set of administrative and managerial problems that Benedict must confront and resolve”. The title of the article was instructive: 'The Pope Versus the Vatican'.
Marco Politi, Vatican correspondent for and co-author (with Carl Bernstein) of , told BBC Radio 4 after the Pope’s resignation that he believed Joseph Ratzinger “was unsuited to the papal role”.
His Papacy was certainly a fraught one, leaving in his wake a dysfunctional Roman Curia. “He has hardly governed the Church,” wrote John Wilkins, former editor of , “preferring to write encyclical letters, books and speeches.” John Allen of the , compared Benedict to a headmaster writing great essays while around him the school building was on fire.
Nevertheless, when he did make his momentous decision known on Monday, February 11, 2013, it took top cardinals as well as the rest of the world by surprise. So an otherwise unremarkable papacy came to an end with the bequest of a template that will undoubtedly impact on future popes. The decision to abdicate may even be Benedict XVI’s best service to the Church.
As a young theologian, Joseph Ratzinger, like his friend and university colleague Hans Kung, attended all four sessions of the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) as theological advisers to the German bishops. Both were champions of greater collegiality among the world’s bishops, liturgical reform, ecumenism, and a more transparent style of government within the Church.
But whereas Kung remained committed to a reform agenda throughout his life, Ratzinger was to be a U-turn. What happened? Why was there a shift from “Ratzinger the liberal” to “Ratzinger the conservative”, a change that occurred in his thought in the critical years since the end of Vatican II in 1965, and 1977 when Pope Paul VI made him archbishop of Munich.
“The pivotal point seems to have come in 1968,” according to his biographer, John L Allen, “with the student revolutions that swept across Europe, including Tubingen, where Ratzinger was teaching. More troubling still, those uprisings often had the explicit support of sectors within the Catholic Church, which tended to identify Marxist socialism with Catholic social teaching. This was deeply troubling for Ratzinger.”
Henceforth, Ratzinger, who was made a cardinal in 1977, would become a staunch conservative. And, of course, on becoming head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (the powerful Vatican department responsible for the upholding of and adherence to “doctrinal orthodoxy”) he would work hand-in-glove with Pope John Paul II, the man who appointed him, to roll back the reforms of Vatican II and implement a policy of “restoration”.
It was also in his capacity as head of the CDF that he played a role in the decision of John Paul II to strip Hans Kung, his old colleague from Tubingen, of his licence to teach Catholic theology.
Kung had, among other things, published a book entitled in which he questioned the doctrine of papal infallibility defined at the First Vatican Council in 1870.
Indeed, Ratzinger’s harsh treatment of other liberal theologians would earn him the nickname “God’s Rottweiler”.
As Pope, he wrote three encyclicals — on faith, hope, and charity — but they never registered with the public, and in the midst of the scandals caused in Ireland by the spate of extremely damaging revelations about clerical child sex abuse and cover-ups, his pastoral letter to the Catholics of Ireland, published on March 19, 2010, will be remembered for its evasions more than anything else.
In retirement, Joseph Ratzinger’s own record as Archbishop of Munich (1977-1982) would come back to haunt him when a report published in January 2022 said the former pontiff failed to take action against four abusive priests, with allegations of a cover-up.
Survivors of Catholic clerical child abuse in Germany welcomed the report and said it marked “the collapse of a monument”.
The report concluded that “Emeritus Pope Benedict clearly put church and priestly interests ahead of the interests of injured parties”.
The verdict of one historian of the Papacy, Michael Walsh, after a pontificate of drift and disappointment, that overall it was “disastrous”, will stand.