His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI (in Latin Benedictus XVI) was born Joseph Alois Ratzinger on April 16, 1927. He is the 265th and current Pope, the bishop of Rome and head of the Roman Catholic Church. He was elected on April 19, 2005, in the 2005 papal conclave, over which he presided. He was formally inaugurated during the papal inauguration Mass on April 24, 2005.

Overview

Coat of Arms of Pope Benedict XVI Pope Benedict was elected at the age of 78, the oldest pope since Clement XII (elected 1730) at the start of his papacy. He served longer as a cardinal before being elected pope than any pope since Benedict XIII (elected 1724). He is the eighth German pope, the last being Adrian VI (1522-1523), while the first was Gregory V (996-999). The last Pope Benedict, Benedict XV, was an Italian who served as pope from 1914 to 1922 and reigned during World War I.

Ratzinger had a distinguished career as a university theologian before being made Archbishop of Munich and Freising; he was subsequently made a Cardinal by Pope Paul VI in the consistory of June 27, 1977. He was appointed prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith by Pope John Paul II in 1981 and was made Cardinal Bishop of the Suburbicarian Church of Velletri-Segni on April 5, 1993. In 1998, he was made Sub-Dean of the College of Cardinals; later, on November 30, 2002, he became the Dean and Cardinal Bishop of the Suburbicarian Church of Ostia, La Candelaria. He was the first Dean of the College elected Pope since Pope Paul IV in 1555 and the first Cardinal Bishop elected Pope since Pope Pius VIII in 1829.

Before becoming pope, Cardinal Ratzinger was already one of the most influential men in the Vatican, and was a close associate of the late Pope John Paul II. He presided over the funeral of Pope John Paul and also over the 2005 conclave in which he himself was elected. He was the public face of the church in much of the sede vacante, although he ranked below the Camerlengo in administrative authority during that time.

Benedict XVI's views appear to be similar to those of his predecessor, Pope John Paul II, in maintaining the traditional Catholic doctrines on birth control, abortion, and homosexuality and promoting Catholic social teaching.

Benedict speaks several languages, including German, Spanish, Italian, English, and Latin. He is also fluent in French and has been an associate member of the French Académie des sciences morales et politiques since 1992. He plays the piano and has a preference for Mozart and Beethoven. He is also known for his fondness for cats.

Early life (1927–1951)
Main article: Early life of Pope Benedict XVI

Marktl am Inn, the house where Benedict XVI was bornJoseph Alois Ratzinger was born on Holy Saturday, at 11 Schulstrasse, his parents' home in Marktl am Inn, Bavaria. He was the third and youngest child of Joseph Ratzinger, Sr., a police officer, and his wife, Maria Ratzinger (nee Riger), whose family were from South Tyrol. His father served in both the Bavarian State Police (Landespolizei) and the German national Regular Police (Ordnungspolizei) before retiring in 1937 to the town of Traunstein. The Sunday Times of London described the elder Ratzinger as "an anti-Nazi whose attempts to rein in Hitler’s Brown Shirts forced the family to move several times." According to the International Herald Tribune, these relocations were directly related to Joseph Ratzinger, Sr.'s continued resistance to Nazism, which resulted in demotions and transfers. The pope's brother Georg said: "Our father was a bitter enemy of Nazism because he believed it was in conflict with our faith."

His brother, Georg, who also became a priest as well as a musician and medievalist, is still living. His sister, Maria Ratzinger, who never married, managed her brother Joseph's household until her death in 1991. Their grand uncle Georg Ratzinger was a priest and member of the Reichstag, as the German Parliament was called then. The future pope's relatives agree that his ambitions to reside in the upper echelons of the Church were apparent since childhood. At five years old, Ratzinger was in a group of children who presented the archbishop of Munich with flowers; later that day he announced he wanted to be a cardinal. (See also Early life of Pope Benedict XVI.)

When Ratzinger turned 14 he joined the Hitler Youth, membership in which was legally required from March 25, 1939. According to the National Catholic Reporter correspondent and biographer John Allen, Ratzinger was an unenthusiastic member who refused to attend meetings. Ratzinger has mentioned that a Nazi mathematics professor arranged reduced tuition payments for him at seminary. This normally required documentation of attendance at Hitler Youth activities; however, according to Ratzinger, his professor arranged so that he did not need to attend to receive a scholarship.

Military service (1943–1945)

In 1943, when he was 16, Ratzinger was drafted with many of his classmates into the FlaK (anti-aircraft artillery corps). They were posted first to Ludwigsfeld, north of Munich, as part of a detachment responsible for guarding a BMW aircraft engine plant. Next they were sent to Unterföhring, northwest of Munich, and briefly to Innsbruck. From Innsbruck their unit went to Gilching to protect the jet fighter base and to attack Allied bombers as they massed to begin their runs towards Munich. At Gilching, Ratzinger served in a telephone communications post.

On September 10, 1944, his class was released from the Corps. Returning home, Ratzinger had already received a new draft notice for the Reichsarbeitsdienst. He was posted to the Hungarian border area of Austria, which had been annexed by Germany in the Anschluss of 1938. Here he was trained in the "cult of the spade" and when Hungary was occupied by the Red Army, Ratzinger was put to work setting up anti-tank defences in preparation for the expected Red Army offensive. While there, he saw Jews being herded to death camps. On November 20, 1944, his unit was released from service.

Ratzinger again returned home. After three weeks passed, he was drafted into the German army at Munich and assigned to the infantry barracks in the center of Traunstein, the city near which his family lived. After basic infantry training, Ratzinger served at various posts around the city with his unit. They were never sent to the front.

In late April or early May, days or weeks before the German surrender, Ratzinger deserted. Desertion was widespread during the last weeks of the war, even though punishable by death (executions, frequently extrajudicial, continued to the end); diminished morale and the greatly diminished risk of prosecution from a preoccupied and disorganized German military contributed to the growing wave of soldiers looking toward self-preservation. On his way home he ran into soldiers on guard, but they let him go. (See also Early life of Pope Benedict XVI.)

When the Americans arrived in the village, "I was identified as a soldier, had to put back on the uniform I had already abandoned, had to raise my hands and join the steadily growing throng of war prisoners whom they were lining up on our meadow. It especially cut my good mother's heart to see her boy and the rest of the defeated army standing there, exposed to an uncertain fate..." Ratzinger was briefly interned in a prisoner-of-war camp near Ulm and was released on June 19, 1945. He and another young man began to walk the 120 km (75 miles) home but got a lift to Traunstein in a milk truck. The family was reunited when his brother, Georg, returned after being released from a prisoner-of-war camp in Italy.

Education (1946–1951)

Fr. Joseph Ratzinger as a young priest celebrates mass in Ruhpolding, Southern Germany, 1952
Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger seen with Pope John Paul I at his papal inauguration in September 1978After he was repatriated in 1945, he and his brother entered a Catholic seminary in Freising, and then studied at the Herzogliches Georgianum of the Ludwig-Maximilian University in Munich. According to an interview with Peter Seewald, he and his fellow students were particularly influenced by the works of Gertrud von le Fort, Ernst Wiechert, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Elisabeth Langgässer, Theodor Steinbüchel, Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers. The young Ratzinger saw the last three in particular as a break with the dominance of Neo-Kantianism, with the key work being Steinbüchel's Die Wende des Denkens (The Change in Thinking). By the end of his studies he was drawn more to the active Saint Augustine than to Thomas Aquinas, and among the scholastics he was more interested in Saint Bonaventure.

On June 29, 1951, he and his brother were ordained by Cardinal Michael Cardinal von Faulhaber of Munich. His dissertation (1953) was on Saint Augustine, entitled "The People and the House of God in Augustine's Doctrine of the Church," and his Habilitationsschrift (a dissertation which serves as qualification for a professorship) was on Saint Bonaventure. It was completed in 1957 and he became a professor of Freising college in 1958.

Early church career (1951–1981)

Ratzinger was a professor at the University of Bonn from 1959 until 1963, when he moved to the University of Münster. At the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965), Ratzinger served as a peritus or theological consultant to Josef Cardinal Frings of Cologne, Germany, and has continued to defend the council, including Nostra Aetate, the document on respect of other religions and the declaration of the right to religious freedom. He was viewed during the time of the council as a reformer. (Later, as the Prefect for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Ratzinger most clearly spelled out the Catholic Church's position on other religions in the document Dominus Iesus (2000) which also talks about the proper way to engage in ecumenical dialogue.)

In 1966, he took a chair in dogmatic theology at the University of Tübingen, where he was a colleague of Hans Küng but was confirmed in his orthodox views by the liberal atmosphere of Tübingen and the Marxist leanings of the student movement of the 1960s, that in Germany quickly radicalised in the years 1967 and 1968, culminating in a series of disturbances and riots in April and May 1968. Ratzinger came increasingly to see these and associated developments (decreasing respect for authority among his students, the rise of the German gay rights movement) as related to a departure from traditional Catholic teachings. Increasingly, his views, despite his reformist bent, contrasted with those liberal ideas gaining currency in the theological academy. In 1969 he returned to Bavaria, to the University of Regensburg.

Ratzinger's coat of arms as a cardinal.In 1972, he founded the theological journal Communio with Hans Urs von Balthasar, Henri de Lubac , Walter Kasper and others. Communio, now published in seventeen editions (German, English, Spanish and many others), has become one of the most important journals of Catholic thought. He remains one of the journal's most prolific contributors.

In March 1977 Ratzinger was named archbishop of Munich and Freising. According to his autobiography, Milestones, he took as his episcopal motto Cooperatores Veritatis, co-workers of the Truth, from 3 John 8.

In the consistory of June 1977 he was named a cardinal by Pope Paul VI. By the time of the 2005 Conclave, he was one of only 14 remaining cardinals appointed by Paul VI, and one of only three of those under the age of 80 and thus eligible to participate in that conclave.

Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (1981 - 2005)

On November 25, 1981, Pope John Paul II named Ratzinger prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, formerly known as the Holy Office of the Inquisition. He resigned the Munich archdiocese in early 1982. Already a cardinal priest, he was raised to Cardinal Bishop of Velletri-Segni in 1993. He became vice-dean of the College of Cardinals in 1998, and dean in 2002.

In office, Ratzinger usually took traditional views on topics such as birth control, homosexuality, and inter-religious dialogue. Among other things, he played a key role in silencing outspoken liberation theologians and clergy in Latin America in the 1980s.

(See also Theology of Pope Benedict XVI.)

Health
In the early 1990s Ratzinger suffered a stroke which slightly impaired his eyesight. The existence of the stroke had been known during the conclave that elected him pope. In May 2005, the Vatican revealed that he had subsequently suffered another mild stroke - it did not reveal when, other than that it occured between 2003 and 2005. France's Philippe Cardinal Barbarin further revealed that since the first stroke, Ratzinger has suffered from a heart condition. Because of his health problems, Ratzinger had hoped to retire, but had continued in his position in obedience to the wishes of Pope John Paul II.

Sex abuse scandal
Regarding the Roman Catholic Church sex abuse scandal, he was seen by critics as at best, indifferent to the abuse and at worst, complicit in covering it up, both in specific cases and as a matter of policy. As prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), such abuses were ultimately his responsibility to investigate within the Church.

On May 18, 2001, Cardinal Ratzinger, as part of the implementation of the norms enacted and promulgated on April 30, 2001 by Pope John Paul II, sent a Latin language letter to every bishop in the Catholic church reminding them of the strict penalties facing those who revealed confidential details concerning enquiries into allegations against priests of certain grave ecclesiastical crimes, including sexual abuse, reserved to the jurisdiction of the CDF. The letter established a prescription (statute of limitations) of 10 years for these crimes. However, when the crime is sexual abuse of a minor, the "prescription begins to run from the day on which the minor completes the eighteenth year of age." According to Catholic News Service, "One bishop who is well informed on the issue and asked not to be named said the secrecy demanded by the new norms gives the appearance of a “cover-up” by the church." Lawyers acting for two alleged victims of abuse in Texas claim that by sending the letter the cardinal conspired to obstruct justice. However, the letter did not discourage victims from reporting the abuse itself to the police; the secrecy related to the internal investigation. "The letter said the new norms reflected the CDF’s traditional “exclusive competence” regarding delicta graviora—Latin for “graver offenses.” According to canon law experts in Rome, reserving cases of clerical sexual abuse of minors to the CDF is something new. In past eras, some serious crimes by priests against sexual morality, including pedophilia, were handled by that congregation or its predecessor, the Holy Office, but this has not been true in recent years." The promulgation of the norms by Pope John Paul II and the subsequent letter by the then Prefect of the CDF were published in 2001 in Acta Apostolicae Sedis which, in accordance with the Code of Canon Law, is the Holy See's official journal, disseminated monthly to thousands of libraries and offices around the world.

On April 23, 2005, The Independent reported that Ratzinger had since 1997 ignored specific sex abuse allegations made by nine different people against Friar Marcial Maciel, the founder of the Legion of Christ. Cardinal Ratzinger is quoted as having said "One can't put on trial such a close friend of the Pope's as Marcial Maciel." After the nine brought claims—many corroborated by each other's detailed testimonies—before the Vatican's courts in the mid-1990s, on December 24, 1999, Ratzinger's secretary, Father Gianfranco Girotti, wrote to the men saying that the Vatican considered the matter closed. In a last-ditch attempt to persuade Ratzinger to change his mind, another letter was despatched to him in 2002 through an intermediary. It went unanswered. Cardinal Ratzinger re-opened the investigation in December of 2004.

In 2002 Cardinal Ratzinger told Catholic News Service that "less than one percent of priests are guilty of acts of this type." [22] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Benedict_XVI#endnote_ZE02120324) Opponents saw this as ignoring the crimes of those who committed the abuse; others saw it as merely pointing out that this should not taint other priests who live respectable lives. A report by the Catholic Church itself estimated that some 4,450 of the Roman Catholic clergy who served between 1950 and 2002 have faced credible accusations of abuse. His Good Friday reflections in 2005 were interpreted as strongly condemning and regretting the abuse scandals, which largely put to rest the speculation of indifference. Shortly after his election, he told Cardinal Francis George, Archbishop of Chicago, that he would attend to the matter.

Dialogue with other faiths

Cardinal Ratzinger speaking with German philosopher Jürgen Habermas at the Katholische Akademie in Bayern, 2004In 2000, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued a a document entitled Dominus Iesus, which created a lot of controversy. Some religious groups took offense to wild claims regarding the document, that supposedly stated that, "only in the Catholic Church is there eternal salvation." However this statement appears nowhere in the document. The document condemned "relativistic theories" of religious pluralism and described other faiths as "gravely deficient" in the means of salvation. The document was primarily aimed at reining in liberal Catholic theologians like Jacques Dupuis, who argued that other religions could contain God-given means of salvation not found in the Church of Christ, but it offended many religious leaders. Jewish religious leaders boycotted several interfaith meetings in protest.

A remarkable but unappreciated aspect of this document can be found in the actual official Latin text. Here, in the Latin text of Dominus Iesus, the famous "filioque clause," ("and the Son") is REMOVED without comment. Was this removal an attempt to reach a hand across the theological/historical chasm separating Eastern and Western Churches? The filioque clause was a highly controversial change to the Nicene Creed. The clause was added by the Third Council of Toledo in 589. In Latin, the changed sentence is "Credo in Spiritum Sanctum qui ex patre filioque procedit ("I believe in the Holy Spirit who proceeds from the Father and the Son.") One site summarizes the significance of the Filioque clause, saying, "The filioque clause was probably devised in response to Arianism, which denied the full divinity of the Son....The Eastern and Western churches have remained separate, and the doctrine represented by the term filioque stands as one of the primary points of difference between them."

Already in 1987, Cardinal Ratzinger had stated that Jewish history and scripture reach fulfillment only in Christ – a position critics denounced as "theological anti-Semitism," although it is very much in the general tradition of Christian views of the Old Testament and the Jews. Despite this, groups such as the World Jewish Congress commended his election as Pope as "welcome" and extolled his "great sensitivity".

Though his advent was congratulated by Buddhist leaders around the world, critics remembered that in March 1997 Cardinal Ratzinger predicted that Buddhism would over the coming century replace Marxism as the main "enemy" of the Catholic Church. Some also criticized him for calling Buddhism an "autoerotic spirituality" that offered "transcendence without imposing concrete religious obligations", though that might be a mistranslation from the French auto-erotisme, which more properly translates to self-absorption, or narcissism. Also the quote did not address Buddhism as such, but rather about how Buddhism "appears" to those Europeans who are using it to obtain some type of self-satisfying spiritual experience.

In an interview in 2004 for Le Figaro Magazine, Ratzinger said Turkey, a country Muslim by heritage and staunchly Secularist by its state constitution, should seek its future in an association of Islamic nations rather than the EU, which has Christian roots. He said Turkey had always been "in permanent contrast to Europe" and that linking it to Europe would be a mistake.

His defenders argue that it is to be expected that a leader within the Catholic Church would forcefully and explicitly argue in favor of the superiority of Catholicism over other religions. Others also maintain that single quotes from Dominus Iesus are not indicative of intolerance or an unwillingness to engage in dialogue with other faiths, and this is clear from a reading of the entire document. They point out that Ratzinger has been very active in promoting inter-faith dialogue. Specifically, they argue that Ratzinger has been instrumental at encouraging reconciliation with Lutherans. In defending Dominus Iesus, Benedict himself has stated that his belief is that inter-faith dialogue should take place on the basis of equal human dignity, but that equality of human dignity should not imply that each side is equally correct.

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