On December 31, 2022, the former Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI died of natural causes at his Vatican residence at the age of 95.

His funeral was held on St. Peter’s Square on Thursday, January 5, 2023.

Pope Benedict was known to be the longest-living pope surpassing Pope Leo XIII in September of 2020. He shocked the world in 2013 when he resigned his papacy after only eight years, the first pope to resign in 600 years. Pope Francis described him as a noble and kind man and a “gift to the church”. Earlier this week he asked for his general audience to pray for his predecessor who was very sick.

Benedict was born on April 16, 1927 in Martkl, Germany and grew up during the time of Nazism. Like his father, he opposed Hitler; but when he was 14 years old, he was forced to join the Hitler Youth and was conscripted to the Germany Army. Like Pope John Paul II, Benedict was a witness of the Holocaust and made it his mission to help the Jews and fight antisemitism.

Unlike most priests, Benedict focused most of time on his academic career in philosophy rather than going to parishes and praying. Still, he was known to be a dominant intellectual figure in Roman Catholicism. By 1981, he would become part of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

He earned the nickname, “God’s Rottweiler” for his controversial acts, which includes his resistance to secularize church, opposing female priests and normalizing homosexuality.

On April 19, 2005, following the death of his predecessor, Pope John Paul II, was elected as the new pope. He was ranked one of the top 100 influential people in the world by Time magazine. He was 78 when he became pope, the oldest pope elected in three centuries. By 2013, he had gotten tired and slow and therefore resigned from being pope.

He said, “After having repeatedly examined my conscience before God, I have come to the certainty that my strengths due to an advanced age are no longer suited to an adequate exercise of the Petrine ministry,” three weeks before resigning.

In 2022, he was criticized by the archdiocese of Munich for his mishandling of his past scandal mainly about sexual abuse going on with the Catholic clergy. Benedict denied ever being involved in such wrongdoing but still asked for forgiveness for his handling of the scandalous cases.

Determining if he was involved in the scandals is still a mystery today. However, even though he was a controversial pope, he was also an intellectual, religious, noble and important person in our world and in Catholicism.