BREAKING: The former Pope Benedict XVI, born Joseph Aloisius Ratzinger, whose resignation as the head of the Catholic Church rocked the world, has died. He was 95.
Ratzinger was born and baptized on Holy Saturday, April 16, 1927, and as a boy lived in Traunstein, Germany, a small village near the Austrian border. A teenager at the outset of WWII, in 1941 Ratzinger was automatically enrolled into the Hitler Youth, per the policy of his school.Ratzinger would spend two years as a member of the Nazi youth group before being drafted and serving with an anti-aircraft unit that guarded a BMW plant outside Munich.
Throughout the '50s and '60s, Ratzinger rose through the ranks of the church, serving as an advisor to the Archbishop of Cologne. Pope Paul VI later named him Archbishop of Munich and Freising in 1977, before promoting him to Cardinal later that same year. It was as head of the CDF, whose mission is"to promote and safeguard the doctrine on faith and morals in the whole Catholic world," that he earned the nickname"God's Rottweiler," for his ferocious defense of traditional church values.
But he also aroused criticism for remaining steadfastly opposed to homosexuality, the ordination of female priests and allowing priests to wed.
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