Former Pope Benedict, who in 2013 became the first pontiff in 600 years to resign, died on Saturday at the age of 95 in a monastery away from the Vatican where he had lived since resigning, a spokesman for the Holy His.
The Vatican said his body would lie in state, on public display for worshipers to pay their last respects, starting Monday at St. Peter’s Basilica.
“It is with sadness that I inform you that Pope Emeritus, Benedict XVI, died today at 9:34 a.m. at the Mater Ecclesiae Monastery in the Vatican,” spokesman Matteo Bruni said in a statement.
On Wednesday, Pope Francis revealed during his weekly general audience that his predecessor was “very ill” and asked that people pray for him.
Benedict’s funeral will be held in St. Peter’s Square on Thursday, Jan. 5, and will be presided over by Pope Francis, Bruni said. The ceremony will begin at 9:30 a.m. local time (3:30 a.m. ET).
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni called the former pope a “giant of faith and reason” that history will never forget.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said that “the world is losing a formative figure of the Catholic Church, a combative personality and a wise theologian.”
The governor of Benedict XVI’s native German region says “we are mourning our Bavarian pope”. Bavaria’s governor Markus Soder said on Twitter that “many people in his land will remember him not only as a pope, but also as a humble shepherd.”
Benedict shocked the world on February 11, 2013, when he announced, in his typical smooth Latin, that he no longer had the strength to lead the 1.2 billion-strong Catholic Church he had led for nearly eight years through of a scandal and indifference
His dramatic decision to resign paved the way for the conclave that chose Pope Francis as his successor. The two popes then lived together in the Vatican gardens, an unprecedented arrangement that set the stage for future “popes emeritus” to do the same.
He led the church through sexual abuse scandals
The first German pope in 1,000 years, Benedict himself acknowledged that he was a weak administrator, saying he showed a “lack of decisiveness in governance and decision-making” during his papacy, which was marked by mistakes and a leak scandal.
Former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger had never wanted to be pope, planning at 78 to spend his last years writing in the “peace and quiet” of his native Bavaria.
Instead, he was forced to follow in the footsteps of the beloved St. John Paul II and lead the church through the fallout from the clerical sex abuse scandal and then a second scandal that erupted when his own butler stole his personal papers and gave them to a reporter.
On being elected pope, he once said, he felt as if a “guillotine” had been dropped on him.
Yet he set to work with a determined vision to revive faith in a world which, he often lamented, seemed to think it could do without God.
“Today there is a strange forgetting of God in large areas of the world,” he told a million young people gathered in a sprawling field for his first trip abroad as pope, at World Youth Day in Cologne, Germany in 2005.” It seems as if everything would be the same even without him.”
With some decisive, often controversial moves, he tried to remind Europe of its Christian heritage. And it set the Catholic Church on a conservative and traditional path that often alienated progressives. He relaxed restrictions on the celebration of the old Latin Mass and launched a crackdown on American nuns, insisting that the church stay true to its doctrine and traditions in the face of a changing world. It was a path that was in many ways reversed by his successor, Francis, whose priorities of mercy over morality alienated the traditionalists who had been so pleased by Benedict.
Quiet, thoughtful, with a fierce mind
Benedict’s style could not have been more different from that of John Pau or Francis. Neither darling nor populist of the globe-trotting media, Benedict was a teacher, a theologian and an academic through and through: quiet and thoughtful with a fierce mind. He spoke in paragraphs, not sound bites. He had a soft spot for the Orange Ghost as well as his beloved library; when he was elected pope, he had his entire studio, as it is, moved from his apartment just outside the Vatican walls to the Apostolic Palace. The books followed him to his retirement home.
“In them are all my advisors,” he said of his books in a 2010 Light of the World interview.
“I know every corner and everything has its story.”
Pope Benedict celebrates baptisms in the Sistine Chapel at the Vatican on January 8, 2012. Benedict resigned the following year, saying he no longer had the physical and mental strength to lead the Catholic Church. (L’Osservatore Romano/Getty Images)
It was Benedict’s devotion to history and tradition that endeared him to members of the traditionalist wing of the Catholic Church. For them, Benedict remained even in retirement as a beacon of nostalgia for the Orthodoxy and Latin Mass of his youth, and the pope they much preferred over Francis.
Over time, this group of archconservatives, whose grievances were amplified by conservative U.S.-based Catholic media sympathizers, would eventually become a key source of opposition to Francis, who responded to what he said were threats of division re-imposing the old restrictions. Latin mass that Benedict had loosened.