Pope Benedict XVI Elected
Joseph Ratzinger was elected pope on 19 April 2005 on the fourth ballot, one of the fastest conclaves in modern times, and took the name Benedict XVI. He was seventy-eight, the oldest man elected in nearly three centuries, and the best-known cardinal in the Church. He had spent twenty-four years as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, John Paul II's chief guardian of orthodoxy, disciplining liberation theologians and dissenting moral theologians, and he had preached the funeral homily two weeks earlier and the pre-conclave Mass in which he denounced a dictatorship of relativism. Born in Bavaria in 1927, the son of a policeman, he was enrolled in the Hitler Youth as a fourteen-year-old when membership became compulsory, served in an anti-aircraft unit and deserted in 1945. He was a young reforming theologian at the Second Vatican Council and moved sharply rightward after 1968, which he attributed to the student revolts. His pontificate was intellectually serious and administratively unhappy. He wrote three encyclicals beginning with one on love, permitted wider use of the old Latin Mass, and was a considerable prose stylist. He also gave the Regensburg lecture in 2006, whose quotation about Islam produced riots, and lifted the excommunication of a bishop who turned out to be a Holocaust denier. He tightened the handling of abuse cases substantially and was criticised for his own record in Munich. He resigned in February 2013, citing his strength, and lived a further ten years. His decade as pope emeritus, living inside the Vatican in white while another pope reigned, created a situation the Church had no rules for. He died on the last day of 2022, and Francis presided at his funeral.
- Year: 2005 CE
- Category: Biographical
