Former Pope Benedict, who died on Saturday aged 95, was the first pontiff in 600 years to resign, leaving behind a Catholic Church battered by sexual abuse scandals, mired in mismanagement and polarised between conservatives and progressives.

Benedict, the first German pope in 1,000 years, had good relations with his successor, Pope Francis, but his continued presence inside the Vatican after he stepped down in 2013 further polarised the Church ideologically.

Conservatives alarmed by Francis’ progressive moves looked to Benedict as the guardian of tradition. Several times he had to tell nostalgic admirers via visitors: “There is one pope, and it is Francis.”

A piano-playing professor and formidable theologian, Benedict was by his own admission a weak leader who struggled to impose himself on the opaque Vatican bureaucracy and stumbled from crisis to crisis during his eight-year reign.

Benedict repeatedly apologised for the Church’s failure to root out sexual abuse of children by clergy, and although he was the first pope to take serious action against abuse, the efforts failed to halt a rapid decline in church attendance in the West, especially in Europe.

In 2022, an independent report in his native Germany alleged that Benedict had failed to take action in four abuse cases when he was Archbishop of Munich between 1977-1982.

Shaken by the report, he acknowledged in an emotional personal letter that errors had occurred and asked for forgiveness. His lawyers argued in a detailed rebuttal that he was not directly to blame.

Victims groups said the couched response squandered an opportunity from a scandal that rattled the Church worldwide.

Benedict will be best remembered for shocking the world on Feb. 11, 2013, when he announced in Latin that he was resigning, telling cardinals he was too old and frail to lead an institution with more than 1.3 billion members.

It was always going to be tough following his charismatic predecessor Pope John Paul II, who died in 2005, and Benedict admitted to difficulties in an emotional farewell.

“There were moments of joy and light, but also moments that were not easy … There were moments … when the seas were rough and the wind blew against us and it seemed that the Lord was sleeping,” Benedict told his last general audience, a gathering of more than 150,000 people.

The Seat of St Peter was declared vacant on Feb. 28, 2013, when Benedict took up residence at the papal summer retreat at Castelgandolfo, south of Rome, while cardinals from around the world gathered in the Vatican to choose his successor.

Before he formally stepped down, Benedict and his aides unilaterally chose the title “pope emeritus” and decided he would continue to wear a white cassock, albeit a slightly modified one.

Some in the Church balked, saying he left his successor’s hands tied. They said he should have returned to being a cardinal or a priest dressed in red or black.

After the election of Pope Francis on March 13, Benedict moved into a converted convent on the Vatican grounds to spend his final years in prayer, reading, playing the piano and receiving friends.

He appeared in public rarely, usually for major Church ceremonies, though he made an emotional visit in June 2020 to his ailing elder brother Georg, a priest, in Bavaria. Georg died shortly afterwards, aged 96.

Although he said he would remain “hidden from the world”, Benedict did not live up to that promise and in retirement sometimes caused controversy and confusion through his writings.

In an essay for a Church magazine in Germany in 2019, he blamed the crisis over the abuse of children by priests on the effect of the 1960s sexual revolution, what he called homosexual cliques in seminaries and a general collapse in morality.

Critics accused him of trying to shift the blame away from the hierarchy of the institutional Church. But it was music to the ears of conservatives, who rallied to his defence.

The confusion over Benedict’s role came to a head in January 2020 over the extent of his involvement in a book written by a conservative cardinal that some saw as an attempt to influence a document Pope Francis was preparing.

It led to Francis dismissing Archbishop Georg Ganswein, Benedict’s secretary, from a top Vatican job. Ganswein’s role as a middleman between Benedict and the cardinal was unclear, with many believing he had misled Benedict, the cardinal, or both.

The episode brought calls by some Vatican officials for clear rules about the status of any future pontiff who resigns.

Francis has said that he would prefer the title Emeritus Bishop of Rome, as suggested by some, if he one day resigned. He has also said he would not live in the Vatican but in a home for retired priests in Rome.

An uncompromising conservative on social and theological issues, Benedict quite literally cloaked himself in tradition during his papacy, often donning fur-trimmed capes and red shoes in his public appearances – a stark contrast to the more humble, down-to-earth style of his successor.

He antagonised Muslims by appearing to suggest that Islam was inherently violent and angered Jews by rehabilitating a Holocaust denier. The gaffes and missteps culminated in 2012, when leaked papers revealed corruption, intrigue and feuding within the Vatican.

The “Vatileaks” case resulted in the arrest of his butler, Paolo Gabriele, who was convicted of handing secret documents to a journalist. Benedict later pardoned him. Gabriele was given a job in a Vatican-owned hospital and died in 2020.

Media speculated that the saga, which laid bare allegations of a lobby of gay clergy operating against the pope, might have pressured him to resign. Benedict insisted he stood down because he could no longer bear the full weight of the papacy, including the tiring international journeys the job demanded.

In a book-long interview published in 2016, he acknowledged his shortcomings but did not regard his papacy as a failure.

“One of my weak points is perhaps a lack of resolve in governing and in decision-taking. In reality I am more of a professor, a person who reflects and meditates on spiritual questions,” Benedict said in the book, “Last Testament”, by German journalist Peter Seewald.

“Practical government is not my strong point and that is certainly a weakness. But I cannot see myself as a failure.”

He was born Joseph Aloisius Ratzinger on April 16, 1927, in the southern German village of Marktl, close to Austria.

As a teenager he was forcibly enrolled in the Hitler Youth during World War Two and was briefly held by the Allies as a prisoner of war, but he was never a member of the Nazi party.

“Neither Ratzinger nor any member of his family was a National Socialist,” John Allen, a leading expert on the Church, wrote in a biography of Benedict.

Ratzinger became a priest in 1951 and gained attention as a liberal theological adviser at the Second Vatican Council, which opened in 1962 and led to a profound reform of the Church.

However, the Marxism and atheism of the 1968 student protests across Europe prompted him to become more conservative to defend the faith against growing secularism.

After stints as a theology professor and then Archbishop of Munich, Ratzinger was appointed in 1981 to head the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), the successor office to the Inquisition, where he earned the epithet “God’s Rottweiler”.

He and Pope John Paul agreed that traditional doctrine had to be restored in the Church after a period of experimentation.

Ratzinger first turned his attention to the “liberation theology” popular in Latin America, ordering the one-year silencing in 1985 of Brazilian friar Leonardo Boff, whose writings were attacked for using Marxist ideas.

In the 1990s, Ratzinger brought pressure against theologians, mostly in Asia, who saw non-Christian religions as part of God’s plan for humanity.

A 2004 document by Ratzinger’s office denounced “radical feminism” as an ideology that undermined the family and obscured the natural differences between men and women.

As pope from 2005, Benedict sought to show the world the gentler side of his nature, but he never achieved the “rock star” status of John Paul or appeared particularly comfortable in the job.

Child abuse scandals hounded most of his papacy. He ordered an official inquiry into abuse in Ireland, which led to the resignation of several bishops. But the Vatican’s relations with once devoutly Catholic Ireland plummeted during his papacy. Dublin shut its embassy to the Holy See in 2011.

Victims demanded he be investigated by the International Criminal Court. The Vatican said he could not be held responsible for the crimes of others and the court decided not to take up the case.

In September 2013, he denied that he had hushed up the scandals. “As far as you mentioning the moral abuse of minors by priests, I can only, as you know, acknowledge it with profound consternation. But I never tried to cover up these things,” he said in a letter to Italian author Piergiorgio Odifreddi.

Benedict visited his homeland three times as pope and confronted its dark past when he visited the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz in Poland. Calling himself “a son of Germany”, he prayed and asked why God was silent when 1.5 million victims, most of them Jews, died there during World War Two.

One trip to Germany also prompted the first major crisis of his pontificate. In a university lecture in 2006 he quoted a 14th century Byzantine emperor as saying Islam had only brought evil to the world and that it was spread by the sword.

After protests that included attacks on churches in the Middle East and the killing of a nun in Somalia, the pope said he regretted any misunderstanding the speech had caused.

In a move widely seen as conciliatory, he made a historic trip to predominantly Muslim Turkey later that year and prayed in Istanbul’s Blue Mosque with the city’s grand mufti.

The pope made a trip to the United States in 2008 where he apologised for the sexual abuse scandal, promised that paedophile priests would have to go and comforted abuse victims.

But in 2009 Benedict made one misstep after another.

The Jewish world, and many Catholics, were outraged after he lifted the excommunication of four traditionalist bishops, one of whom was a notorious Holocaust denier. Benedict later said the Vatican should have researched him better.

Jews were offended again in December 2009 when he restarted the process of putting his wartime predecessor Pius XII, accused by some Jews of turning a blind eye to the Holocaust, back on the road to sainthood after a two-year pause for reflection.

The pope prompted international dismay in March 2009, telling reporters on a plane taking him to Africa that the use of condoms in the fight against AIDS only worsened the problem.

At the Vatican, he preferred to appoint men he trusted and some of his early appointments were questioned.

He chose Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, who had worked with him for years in the Vatican’s doctrinal office, to be secretary of state, even though Bertone had no diplomatic experience. Bertone was later caught up in a financial scandal over the refurbishing of his Vatican apartment.

Benedict supported Christian unity but other religions criticised him in 2007 when he approved a document that restated the Vatican position that non-Catholic Christian denominations were not full churches of Jesus Christ.

Critics saw his papacy as a concerted drive to turn back the clock on reforms of the 1962-1965 Second Vatican Council, which modernised the Church in sometimes turbulent ways.

Benedict recast some Council decisions to bring them more in line with traditional practices such as the Latin Mass and highly centralised Vatican rule.

One of the themes he often returned to was the threat of relativism, rejecting the concept that moral values were not absolute but relative to those holding them and the times they lived in.

Benedict wrote three encyclicals, the most important form of papal document, including the 2007 “Spe Salvi” (Saved by Hope), an attack on atheism. The 2009 “Caritas in Veritate” (Charity in Truth) called for a rethink of the way the world economy is run.

Despite the difficulties that emerged from having two men wearing white in the Vatican, Francis developed a warm relationship with the man who was once nicknamed “the Panzer Cardinal” and said it was like having a grandfather in the house.

“He speaks little … but with the same profundity as before,” Francis once said.

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When Pope Benedict shocked the Roman Catholic Church in 2013 by announcing he would resign instead of ruling for life, he promised to stay in the Vatican “hidden from the world”.

He kept only half that promise. Benedict may not have been seen much, but he certainly was heard.

Benedict wrote, gave interviews and, unwittingly or not, became a lightning rod for opponents of Pope Francis, either for doctrinal reasons or because they were loath to relinquish the clerical privileges the new pope wanted to dismantle.

Despite Francis’ insistence that Benedict was like a “grandfather living in the house”, and that an emeritus pope was now an institution in the Church, the result was a sometimes cumbersome co-habitation that caused more than one headache.

Between the time he announced his resignation on Feb. 11, 2013 and the time it took effect on Feb. 28, Benedict and his secretary, Archbishop Georg Ganswein, unilaterally decided that he would be called “pope emeritus” and continue to wear a white cassock, albeit a slightly modified one.

There was no broad consultation with canon lawyers and no real precedent to go by – the last pope to abdicate was Gregory XII, who stepped aside in a political deal to end a schism in 1415 and spent the rest of his days in obscurity 300 km (190 miles) away from the Vatican.

Celestine V was pope for five months in 1294 before he quit, concluding there was far more holiness in his previous life as a mountain hermit than in the Vatican with its clerical and political intrigue.

Church law says a pope can resign if he does so with no outside pressure, but it lacks specific rules on his status, title and prerogatives.

It was last updated in 1983, when Pope John Paul was a robust, globe-trotting 63-year-old and a papal resignation was the furthest thing from anyone’s mind.

Benedict received visitors, many from Germany, who were eager to have their picture taken with him. They sometimes disclosed what he said, feeding a conservative, nostalgic Catholic faction bent on weaponising his words.

In 2016, he published a memoir “The Last Conversations”, the first time a former pope had judged his own pontificate after it was over.

In a 2019 article for a Catholic magazine in Germany, Benedict linked the Church’s child sexual abuse scandal to the sexual revolution of the 1960s, which he said had spawned a general collapse in morality.

Many theologians called his reasoning deeply flawed and accused him of trying to blame society in general for what was a structural problem within the Church.

The situation became so ideologically polarised that he once had to tell those who pined for his pontificate there was only one pope and it was Francis.

Leaked letters showed Benedict told a German cardinal who was part of a public assault on Francis’ legitimacy to sheathe his ideological sword.

As late as 2021, eight years after he resigned, Benedict still had to chide “some of my more fanatical friends” who never accepted his decision to step aside and who rejected the legitimacy of Francis.

The biggest imbroglio revolved around a book about priestly celibacy in early 2020 written primarily by Cardinal Robert Sarah, a conservative African who holds a senior Vatican post.

The book defended priestly celibacy in what some saw as an appeal to Francis not to change the rules after a proposal that he allow older married men to be ordained on a limited basis in the Amazon to deal with a shortage of priests.

Sarah said Benedict was co-author. Benedict demanded that his name be removed from the cover, saying he was a contributor not a co-author. The American publisher refused and Sarah rejected media accusations that he had taken advantage of the frail ex-pope.

Commentators said Benedict was being used by the Church’s right wing in a power play against Francis to influence the election of the next pope.

“The emeritus papacy has proved a disorderly institution, one vulnerable to manipulation,” wrote papal biographer Austen Ivereigh.

Ganswein, a conservative, was widely seen as having mismanaged the book episode. Pope Francis later removed him from a top job in the Vatican. No explanation was given.

The episode brought calls for clear rules.

“In the Catholic Church, symbols are important,” said Father Tom Reese, a Washington-based Catholic author and commentator for Religion News Service.

“Symbols communicate, they teach. If you are not the pope, you should not be wearing white. Having two men wearing white sitting next to each other makes them look like they are equals, when they are not,” he wrote.

Reese said an ex-pontiff should not be called pope, should wear either the red or black garb of a cardinal or priest and should return to using his own name – in Benedict’s case, Joseph Ratzinger.

Reese, a Church liberal, found agreement from an unusual source – conservative Australian Cardinal George Pell, a former Vatican treasurer and close associate of Benedict in his retirement.

“The protocols on the situation of a pope who has resigned need to be clarified, to strengthen the forces for unity,” Pell wrote in a book in 2020.

“While the retired pope could retain the title of ‘pope emeritus’, he should be re-nominated to the College of Cardinals so that he is known as ‘Cardinal X, Pope Emeritus’, he should not wear the white papal soutane (cassock) and should not teach publicly,” Pell wrote.

A pope is also bishop of Rome. Reese and others have suggested that a former pontiff be called “bishop emeritus of Rome” and be subject to the rules that cover retired bishops.

Those rules say any bishop emeritus “will want to avoid every attitude and relationship that could even hint at some kind of parallel authority to that of the diocesan bishop, with damaging consequences for the pastoral life and unity of the diocesan community”.

Francis, 86, has said several times he would readily resign instead of ruling for life if his health made it impossible to run the Church. He has said he would want to be called Bishop Emeritus of Rome and live not in the Vatican but in a home for retired priests in the Italian capital “because its my diocese”.

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Former Pope Benedict, who in 2013 became the first pontiff in 600 years to step down, died on Saturday aged 95 in the Mater Ecclesiae Monastery in the Vatican where he had lived since his resignation, a spokesman for the Holy See said.

“With sorrow I inform you that the Pope Emeritus, Benedict XVI, passed away today at 9:34 in the Mater Ecclesiae Monastery in the Vatican. Further information will be provided as soon as possible,” the spokesman said in a written statement.

The Vatican said his body will lie in state from Monday in St.Peter’s Basilica. The Vatican has painstakingly elaborate rituals for what happens after a reigning pope dies but no publicly known ones for a former pope.

Earlier this week, Pope Francis disclosed during his weekly general audience that his predecessor was “very sick”, and asked for people to pray for him.

For nearly 25 years, as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, Benedict was the powerful head of the Vatican’s doctrinal office, then known as the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF).

Conservatives in the Church have looked to the former pope as their standard bearer and some ultra-traditionalists even refused to acknowledge Francis as a legitimate pontiff.

They have criticised Francis for his more welcoming approach to members of the LGBTQ+ community and to Catholics who divorced and remarried outside the Church, saying both were undermining traditional values.

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Former pope Benedict, who died on Saturday, was the first pontiff in 600 years to resign from the post rather than rule for life.

Here are some facts about 95-year-old Benedict and his papacy.

– Benedict, the first German pope in 1,000 years, was elected on April 19, 2005 to succeed the widely popular Pope John Paul II, who reigned for 27 years. Cardinals chose him from among their number seeking continuity and what one called “a safe pair of hands”. For nearly 25 years, as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, he was the powerful head of the Vatican’s doctrinal office, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF).

– An uncompromising theological conservative, Ratzinger left Germany and his post as archbishop of Munich in 1982 to head the CDF. His disciplining of Latin American priests who promoted Marxist-influenced Liberation Theology bestowed him with the sobriquet “God’s Rottweiler”.

– A weak administrator who admitted a “lack of resolve in governing and decision taking,” his eight-year papacy was marked by missteps and a leaks scandal. He antagonised Muslims by appearing to suggest that Islam was inherently violent. He angered Jews by rehabilitating a Holocaust denier and prompted international dismay by saying the use of condoms in the fight against AIDS only worsened the problem. The 2012 “Vatileaks” scandal helped unravel his papacy. Paolo Gabriele, Benedict’s butler, leaked secret documents that revealed corruption and feuding within the Vatican. Benedict said he stood down because bad health prevented him from bearing the full weight of the papacy.

– Child abuse scandals hounded most of his papacy but he is credited with jump starting the process to discipline or defrock predator priests after a more lax attitude under John Paul II. He ordered an inquiry into abuse in Ireland, which led to the resignation of several bishops. He disciplined the late Father Marcial Maciel, founder of the Catholic order the Legionaries of Christ and one of the Church’s most notorious predators. The Vatican under Pope John Paul II had failed to take action against Maciel despite overwhelming evidence of his crimes.

– In 2022, an independent report in Benedict’s native Germany alleged that he had failed to take action in four cases when he was Archbishop of Munich between 1977 and 1982. The frail former pope acknowledged in an emotional personal letter that errors had occurred and asked for forgiveness. His lawyers argued in a detailed rebuttal that he was not directly to blame.

– Although he promised to keep a low profile after his retirement, Benedict wrote, gave interviews and, unwittingly or not, became a lightning rod for conservatives who opposed Pope Francis. Some loyalists failed to accept that he had resigned the papacy willingly and continued to consider him “my pope”. The “two popes” confusion was compounded because he chose to continue wearing white and be known as “pope emeritus”. The resulting polarisation led to calls from both conservatives and liberals for changes in Church law to regulate the functions and status of former popes.

– Benedict produced more than 60 books between 1963, when he was a priest, and 2013, when he resigned. “In reality I am more of a professor, a person who reflects and meditates on spiritual questions,” Benedict said after his resignation.

– He played piano and had a preference for Mozart and Bach. As a classicist, he frowned on rock and roll as an “expression of base passions” and once called popular music a “cult of banality”. Pope Francis, by contrast, also loves classical music but appreciates Italian pop songs from the early 1960s and also likes tango music from his native Argentina.

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The post ‘Strong possibility’ Ukraine retakes all territory by end of 2023 – apart from Crimea | World News appeared first on Ukraine Intelligence.

In some ways, playing identity bingo is the ultimate cheat code to life these days. Pull a straight, and you can get away with anything.

Get caught carrying out one of the largest leaks of classified records in U.S. history? Not a problem—the president will spring you from prison, provided you change your name and mutilate your genitals. Want to manage America’s nuclear waste by day and get your rocks off stealing women’s clothes by night? You do you, as long as you’re a “genderfluid” spanking fanatic who ties your partners up like dogs in your sex dungeon. Do you identify as a wolf and howl at the moon? That will land you a fat monthly paycheck in some California cities.

But real heroes don’t take the easy way out. They find the strength to persevere and stay the course even in the face of unimaginable hardship.

Take for example Paul Whelan, the white, cisgender, heterosexual former Marine who has been held hostage in a Russian gulag since late 2018 on trumped-up espionage charges. President Joe Biden had the opportunity in December to release Whelan from his wrongful imprisonment. Instead, he swapped murderous arms dealer Viktor Bout, known as “The Merchant of Death,” for Brittney Griner, the America-hating black lesbian basketball player best known for being one of only six WNBA players to ever throw down a dunk.

It matters not that Whelan has maintained his innocence since his wrongful arrest and that Griner immediately confessed to violating Russian drug laws. American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten said the quiet part out loud: Griner is black. And a woman, but also gay. Biden had no choice.

What a great relief!!! Extraordinary news, a basketball star, but also a gay, black woman is released. And yes of course we want other prisoners like Paul Whelan released.

— Randi Weingarten (@rweingarten) December 8, 2022

The Washington Free Beacon knows a grave injustice when it sees one. Griner will soon return to the basketball court to entertain a handful of WNBA fans while Whelan continues to rot in a Russian gulag, abandoned by his government.

Whelan, understandably, was utterly dejected upon learning Biden failed to secure his release. But the former Marine has maintained his innocence and stayed true to himself throughout a hellish ordeal that would have broken most men, and for that, Paul Whelan is a Washington Free Beacon Man of the Year.

The post 2022 Man of the Year: Paul Whelan appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

Kyiv Post New Year’s Editorial

Ukraine proved herself as a country in 2022. The Ukrainian political nation, together with its national and democratic identity, was finally established.