Benedict XVI

On 11 February 2013, speaking in Latin at a routine consistory convened to approve some canonizations, Benedict XVI told the assembled cardinals that his strength of mind and body had deteriorated to the point where he could no longer adequately fulfil the ministry entrusted to him, and that he would vacate the see of Rome at eight in the evening on 28 February. Most of the room did not follow the Latin closely enough to understand what had just happened. The announcement was, in the strict sense, unprecedented in living memory: the last pope to resign of his own free will was Celestine V in 1294, and the last to resign at all was Gregory XII in 1415, under pressure to end the Western Schism.

Canon law had always permitted it. The 1983 Code of Canon Law states plainly that a pope may resign provided the resignation is freely made and properly manifested, and requires no one to accept it. What had lapsed was not the legal provision but the expectation, since seven centuries of practice had made a pontificate look like a life sentence, and Benedict himself had said in a 2010 interview that a pope has a duty to resign if he becomes physically, mentally or spiritually incapable of the office.

The decision created a situation the church had no settled vocabulary for. Benedict took the title pope emeritus, kept the white cassock without the mozzetta, and lived in a converted monastery inside the Vatican walls for almost a decade while Francis governed, a nearness that produced periodic argument about whether two living men in white blurred the unity of the office. He died on 31 December 2022, and Francis presided at his funeral, the first time in centuries that a reigning pope had buried his predecessor.

Ratzinger arrived at the papacy already carrying twenty-four years as prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the office that assesses whether a theological position is compatible with Catholic teaching. In that role he issued the 2000 declaration Dominus Iesus on the uniqueness of Christ, disciplined liberation theologians in Latin America, and became the figure critics called the enforcer and admirers called the church's intellect. His first encyclical as pope, Deus Caritas Est of 2005, surprised many by taking love rather than doctrine as its subject, and was followed by Spe Salvi on hope and Caritas in Veritate on economic justice.

The liturgical decision that defined his pontificate for many Catholics came in 2007. The motu proprio Summorum Pontificum declared that the Roman Missal of 1962, the form used before the reforms that followed the Second Vatican Council, had never been abrogated, and allowed priests to celebrate it without seeking a bishop's permission. Supporters read the ruling as a recovery of continuity, opponents as a partial reversal of the council, and the argument outlived his reign, since Francis substantially restricted the permission again in 2021.

The single most contested moment of the pontificate was academic in origin. Lecturing at the University of Regensburg in September 2006 on faith and reason, he quoted a fourteenth century Byzantine emperor's harsh remark about what Muhammad had brought to the world, intending it as a foil for an argument about violence and rationality. The quotation travelled without its frame, protests followed across several countries, and Benedict expressed regret at the reaction while declining to disown the lecture's argument.