Vita gazette – Benedict XVI, the first Pope emeritus after his historic resignation from the pontificate in February 2013, ended his earthly journey this morning. Funeral on January 5th.

The Pope Emeritus, born Josep Ratzinger, passed away today, December 31 at the age of 95. He had been ill for some time. On December 28, 2022 Pope Francis had launched an appeal to the faithful, calling them to prayer for his predecessor: “Remember him, he is very ill, asking the Lord to console him, to support him in this testimony of love for the Church, until the end”. The funeral will be celebrated on Thursday 5 January, at 9.30 am, in St. Peter’s Square and will be presided over by Pope Francis, as reported by the director of the Vatican press office, Matteo Bruni.

“It is with pain that I inform you that the Pope Emeritus, Benedict XVI, passed away today at 9.34 am, in the Mater Ecclesiae Monastery in the Vatican”, reported the director of the Press Office of the Holy See, Matteo Bruni, also announcing that from the morning of Monday 2 January, the body of Joseph Ratzinger will be in St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican for the greeting of the faithful.

“It is with pain that I inform you that the Pope Emeritus, Benedict XVI, passed away today at 9.34 am, in the Mater Ecclesiae Monastery in the Vatican”, reported the director of the Press Office of the Holy See, Matteo Bruni, also announcing that from the morning of Monday 2 January, the body of Joseph Ratzinger will be in St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican for the greeting of the faithful.

“Stand firm in the faith! Do not be confused! Jesus Christ is truly the way, the truth and the life – and the Church, with all its insufficiencies, is truly His body.” This is one of the spiritual bequests that Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI entrusts to the faithful in his will, which is published in the book Nothing but the truth written by Archbishop Georg Gänswein, his private secretary, with Saverio Gaeta, for the Piemme editions and out in early January.

The origins

Created cardinal at the age of 50, Ratzinger was born in Marktl, Bavaria, in 1927. “His father was a gendarmerie commissioner and came from a family of farmers in Lower Bavaria, whose economic conditions were rather modest – reads the official biography of the Vatican -. The mother was the daughter of craftsmen from Rimsting, on Lake Chiem, and before getting married she had worked as a cook in various hotels”. He spent his adolescence near the border between Germany and Austria, a few kilometers from Salzburg: a context that the pope himself would define as “Mozartian” and in which he would develop a passion for classical music. A skilled pianist, Ratzinger loved, above all others, the compositions of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: “When the Kyrie began it was as if the sky were opening”. In Mozart’s music, for Ratzinger, “the grace of creation resounds, as it should have been at the origin and as it will have to be at the end of time; resounds the simple transparency of something that must not be sought or built, but is simply donated”.

The scandals

His pontificate, which began on April 19, 2005, was immediately animated by the intention of removing “the filth that is in the church”: Benedict XVI, a few weeks before his election, had denounced the scandals of the clergy during the Via Crucis . In the following years, Ratzinger wanted to personally meet some victims of pedophile priests, for example during trips to the United States and Australia in 2008, and in 2010 to England and Malta. Famous is the letter addressed to the Irish community, a country particularly affected by the pedophilia scandal. “I cannot but share the dismay and sense of betrayal many of you have felt upon learning of these sinful and criminal acts and the way in which Church authorities in Ireland have dealt with them. For my part, considering the seriousness of these faults and the often inadequate response given to them by the ecclesiastical authorities in your country, I have decided to write this pastoral letter to express my closeness to you, and to offer you a path of healing, of renewal and repair”.

With the document De delictis gravioribus, Benedict XVI made judicial procedures for cases of sexual abuse more effective, also underlining the importance of “always following the provisions of civil law with regard to the referral of crimes to the appropriate authorities”. On May 16, 2011, in a circular letter, the pontiff published guidelines against the pedophilia of clerics, urging monitoring and intervention actions by the diocesan bishops. Actions that come after centuries of silence and hypocrisy, but which represent too great a responsibility for a pontiff who is the symbol of an institution that needs to change but does not yet have the conditions – and hierarchies – to do so.

From the point of view of the financial transparency of the Vatican State, Ratzinger has also imprinted a change of direction to make entities and persons connected to the Holy See adhere to international norms against money laundering and the financing of terrorism. Among the records mentioned at the beginning, it should be noted that Ratzinger was the first pope to open a Twitter account, in 2012: @Pontifex. Iconic, after the abdication – a very rare event in the history of the papacy – the photograph taken on March 23, 2013 in Castel Gandolfo, when the successor Bergoglio visited Ratzinger. For the first time in centuries, two popes met. Even before he turned 95, monsignor Gaenswein, Ratzinger’s secretary, had made public the slow physical decline that was affecting the pope emeritus.