Papa Emeritus Benedict XVI., died today, in his home in Vatican City, basically of old age. He was 95.
I violently disagree with most of what he believed and fiercely defended, but I must admit that I never found anything I read of and by him to be uninteresting, boring, or weakly argued, as so much theological writing is these days. There was one sharp mind, and one who knew how to handle language.
He was, it seems, quite inept at actually administering or leading anything, including his diocese in the 80s and the brooding quagmire of criminal dealing that is the Vatican Curia. That was probably the reason to resign the papacy in 2013, an unheard-of step for more than a 1000 years. I still chuckle at him pronouncing his stepping down in the most public manner, speaking before a crowd of several hundred people - and speaking effortlessly and fluently in a language most fitting the Catholic Church but which most nobody in the audience could understand, Latin. Not immune to vanity, he must have loved that.
Had he wiped the slate clean about his inaction, and that means: complicity, in the various cases of sexual abuse of minors by priests under his responsibility as Bishop of Munich and Freising in the eighties, named his mistakes, named names, and repented to the vicitms, named individually, one could have respected him as a Christian who knows that "mea culpoa, mea maxima culpa" must be more that a phrase sputtered out during mass. But he failed in that, too. For him, as for too many others, defending the Church is more important than living what that Church proclaims.