Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI had a long and illustrious career as one of the Roman Catholic Church’s pre-eminent theologians. For all his accomplishments and accolades, however, Benedict will forever be known as the first pope in 600 years to resign.
But Ratzinger was also responsible for one of the most important in-house reforms at the Vatican: requiring all cases of clergy sex abuse be sent to his office for processing. The 2001 change was a response to mounting evidence that bishops were moving priestly abusers around rather than sanctioning them.
But his eight-year papacy was marred by a series of communications blunders, missteps and scandals that culminated with a Vatican criminal trial of his former butler who was accused of leaking his personal correspondence to a journalist.Benedict made an outreach to Jews a hallmark of his papacy, and in one of his most significant acts, he made a sweeping exoneration of the Jewish people for the death of Christ.
Benedict’s relations with Muslims were more fraught. He roiled the Islamic world with a 2006 speech in Regensburg, Germany, in which he quoted a Byzantine emperor who characterized some of the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad as “evil and inhuman,” particularly his command to spread the faith “by the sword.”
While the decision took the world by surprise, Benedict had been nursing it for months. He had taken a nighttime fall during a 2012 trip to Mexico that confirmed to him that he could no longer keep up with the grueling, globe-trotting demands of the 21st century papacy.
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