Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI (Joseph Ratzinger, German) died on Dec. 31, 2022 at the age of 95 and was laid to rest yesterday amid solemn rites at the Vatican City. As we all know, he resigned from
Here are excerpts from my piece on his election as Pope Benedict XVI in 2005. He succeeded the charismatic Pope St. John Paul II .
DW showed tabloids with screaming headlines saying “Papa Ratzi,” “German Shepherd,” “God’s Rottweiler,” and something about the Hitlerjugend, to which Ratzinger was conscripted in his youth. “When I heard his name mentioned, my heart sank,” said American Maryknoll sister and theology professor Helen Graham the morning after the announcement. She’s had little sleep since the news broke the night before, she confided.
Graham was not entirely distraught. “I have some hope that this new role would take him in new directions. Now he has a different agenda, a different job, which is to be a symbol of unity.” “I was very happy,” Bishop Rolando Tria-Tirona of the recently devastated Prelature of Infanta told the Inquirer. “I hope to see him put back moral, spiritual, and pastoral sense in Western Europe where the church is dwindling. There has been too much relativism, a kind of wishy-washiness there.”