Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI has died at his home in the Vatican at 95, Vatican officials announced.
“With sorrow I inform you that the Pope Emeritus, Benedict XVI, passed away today at 9:34 in the Ecclesiae Monastery in the Vatican,” said the Director of the Holy See press office Matteo Bruni’s statement.
The Vatican press office has said that Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI’s body will lie in state in St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican for the faithful to pay their respects.
After his surprise resignation in February 2013 at the age of 85, he was only known to have left the tiny sovereign state briefly and was rarely seen in public.
Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was named the 265th pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church on April 19, 2005, at the age of 78, and chose the name of Benedict XVI.
He was the first German pope in several centuries, the second consecutive non-Italian pope and the oldest pope elected since Clement XII in 1730, according to church records.
During his nearly eight years as pope, the Catholic Church was the subject of several major scandals. A growing number of sexual abuse cases involving the clergy was perhaps the most damaging exposing how the church had dealt with these cases in the past; leaving the abusers and their superiors, who covered up for them, to go unpunished by law enforcement.
First as cardinal in his doctrinal post in the Vatican and later as Pope, Benedict acted to develop a unified church response to stop this increasingly public clerical sex abuse crisis.
Benedict reiterated the Church’s traditional conservative positions on important doctrinal issues like abortion, contraception, homosexuality, euthanasia and the priesthood.
Many Catholics loved and respected him until his death. During a trip to Malta in April 2022, his successor, Pope Francis described him as a “prophet” for predicting that the Catholic church of the future would become “smaller” but more “spiritual, poorer and less political.”
During his papacy, Pope Benedict XVI made 24 foreign trips to every continent.
He made a trip to the U.S. in 2008, during which he delivered a speech to the U.N. General Assembly.
He beatified 322 people and canonized 45.
A year after his visit, statue of Pope Francis to be unveiled in Romanian capital
