Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI died on Saturday at the age of 95 at the Mater Ecclesia monastery in the Vatican, where he lived for nearly ten years. Benedict XVI, whose birth name was Joseph Ratzinger, was elected in 2005 to succeed John Paul II as head of the Catholic Church’s destiny. He resigned in 2013 and remains Pope Emeritus.
Benedict XVI’s funeral will be held Thursday in St. Peter’s Square at the Vatican, with Pope Francis presiding. The body will remain in St Peter’s Basilica from Monday so the faithful can bid farewell to the Pope Emeritus.
Joseph Alois Ratzinger was born on April 16, 1927, in the German village of Marktl am Inn in Upper Bavaria, next to the Inn River and close to the Austrian border. He was baptized at 8:30 a.m., when he was four hours old, because, according to some biographies, he was weak and his parents feared he would die. It was Holy Saturday and, at that time, the Easter Vigil party was not yet, so the water used later, throughout the year, all baptisms, was blessed in the morning. Ratzinger was the first child to receive this “new water,” as the Church calls it, which was considered, Ratzinger says in his autobiography, “an important pioneering sign.”
His parents were called Maria and Joseph, and they already had a girl – Maria, like his mother – and another boy, George. The baptismal name for the child who would become Pope was given by a paternal great-uncle, later a doctor in theology and a deputy in the territorial parliament.
Joseph was not yet two years old when the family moved to Titmöning, a small town on the banks of the Salzburg River, a few dozen kilometers from Mozart’s birthplace of Salzburg. A proficient piano player, Ratzinger considered Mozart a great composer and never tired of listening to and reading his works. The parents were devout Catholics and, with their children, on Sundays, they attended three parish masses: at six in the morning, at nine in the afternoon and at one in the afternoon.
The future Benedict XVI stayed for a short time in Titmöning. In 1932, the father, a police commissioner, asked for a transfer to the hostel in Askaw. But the family soon moved again, this time to Trustein, where Ratzinger attended high school and, from 1939, a minor seminary. It was in March of the same year that the Nazi regime made it compulsory for seminarians to join the Hitler Youth. Ratzinger did not escape, but he never participated in the organization’s meetings and activities.
Army, Priest and Educator
In 1943, he reconciled his studies with military service, being mobilized for anti-aircraft batteries. After several assignments around Munich, he was offered a position in the telephone services and was given a small room. He lived with a group of staunch Catholics and had little leisure time and considerable autonomy.
In September 1944, he returned home to Trustein for a few days’ leave before being sent to a labor camp on the Austro-Hungarian border. At the end of April 1945, Ratzinger says he left, staying for a few days at the home of a friend of his father’s, a Catholic marshal of the Luftwaffe, and then at the family home on the outskirts of the city. It is there that, after the Allied victory, he is identified as a German soldier by American forces. Bade spends a few more weeks in the Abeling prison camp until he is released on June 19.
He went on to study at the recently reopened Faculty of Theology at the University of Munich, which had been closed by the Nazis in 1938. In 1951, he was ordained a priest by Cardinal Faulhaber. The following year, he began teaching at the Higher School of Philosophy and Theology in Freising, teaching dogmatic and fundamental theology. In 1953, he completed his doctorate with the thesis “People and the House of God in the Doctrine of the Church of Santo Agostinho”. Until he was named Archbishop of Munich in 1977, he would still teach at Bonn, Münster, Tübingen, and finally, the University of Regensburg, where he became Chair of Dogmatics in 1969. He was still in Bonn when John XXIII called for Vatican II, in which he participated first as adviser to Cardinal Frings, archbishop of Cologne, and then as “theologian of the Church”.
Ratzinger’s academic career ended in March 1977 when he was appointed Archbishop of Munich and Freising by Paul VI. Three months later, he was elevated to cardinal. A year later, he is already among those invited to choose Paul VI’s successor, Cardinal Albino Luciano, who chose the name of John Paul I, in honor of the two peace popes. It was in previous meetings. Ratzinger personally met the Polish Karol Wojtyła, with whom he only exchanged books and some correspondence. John Paul I died a month after his election, and in the new conclave, Ratzinger bet on the Pole, joining those who wanted to avoid the election of the ultraconservative Cardinal Giuseppe Siri, then archbishop of Genoa, to avoid turning left. .
Convention against change
In 1981, he was appointed president of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Especially in South America, he was hard-line in the emancipatory theories that gained a large following with an anti-capitalist political tone. In all the great controversies which the Church has passed through in the last few years, such as the celibacy of priests or the ordination of women, it intervenes in the sense of maintaining the orthodoxy which has always prevailed. He was so opposed to change that, in 1989, dozens of theologians signed the famous Cologne Declaration, in which they asked the Ratzinger-led congregation to exhibit “more pluralism” and “less interference.”
At the April 2005 conference, Ratzinger clearly positioned himself as the right man to elect. Due to his position as dean of cardinals, he presided over the funeral of John Paul II, the preparatory meetings of the conclave, and the mass opening the papacy during the transitional period. Election. His sermon famously included a critical reference to the “wind of dogma” that had driven “many Christians” and a plea for “clear faith” against “relativism”.
Elected to replace “the great Pope John Paul II” on April 19, 2005, the “humble” Ratzinger began by raising expectations in the ecumenical dialogue that had stagnated in the last years of Wojtyla’s pontificate. On several occasions, and the first mass he celebrated with the cardinals, while on April 20, Pope XVI referred to his Christian “priority”, considering it “a commitment to work without sparing energy on perfection and restoration”. The visible unity of all Christ’s followers”.
On February 11, 2013, eight years after being elected Supreme Pontiff of the Catholic Church, Benedict XVI announced his historic decision to step down due to “old age.” A decision that caused public surprise. The 265th Pope became Bishop Emeritus of the Diocese of Rome, known as Pope Emeritus.
“Hardcore explorer. Extreme communicator. Professional writer. General music practitioner. Prone to fits of apathy.”