If Pope St John Paul II was the Philosopher-Pope who engaged the World and then the Church, then Pope Benedict XVI was the Theologian-Pope who engaged the Church and then the World.

When Pope Benedict XVI was elected he presciently said, during his inaugural Mass, the following words:

One of the basic characteristics of a shepherd must be to love the people entrusted to him, even as he loves Christ whom he serves. “Feed my sheep”, says Christ to Peter, and now, at this moment, he says it to me as well. Feeding means loving, and loving also means being ready to suffer. Loving means giving the sheep what is truly good, the nourishment of God’s truth, of God’s word, the nourishment of his presence, which he gives us in the Blessed Sacrament. My dear friends – at this moment I can only say: pray for me, that I may learn to love the Lord more and more. Pray for me, that I may learn to love his flock more and more – in other words, you, the holy Church, each one of you and all of you together. Pray for me, that I may not flee for fear of the wolves. Let us pray for one another, that the Lord will carry us and that we will learn to carry one another [https://www.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/homilies/2005/documents/hf_ben-xvi_hom_20050424_inizio-pontificato.html ].

But long before Benedict was Pope, he was the theologian and peritus at the Second Vatican Council. Later it was Pope John Paul II that made Joseph Ratzinger a Cardinal and as Cardinal he was the prefect of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith [CDF]; now demoted to a dicastery by Pope Francis!

Pope Benedict produced a variety of books that ranged from the Feast of Faith to the Spirit of the Liturgy; from Faith in the Future to Truth and Tolerance; from Introduction to Christianity to the two volume work of Jesus of Nazareth; from The Making of Europe to The Ratzinger Report; from Deus Caritas Est, Caritus in Veritate to Verbum Domini, all of which had a profound impact on me, as did the writings of Pope John Paul II.

But the big surprise and a challenge for many today was Summorum Pontificum promulgated in 2007. It granted greater freedom for priests to use the Tridentine liturgy in its 1962 form, stating that all priests of the Latin Church may freely celebrate Mass with the 1962 Missal privately. This act reminded us that the New Mass had a history and a patrimony that predates Vatican II in the Mass of ages that Pope St Pius V promulgated in the  papal bull ‘Quo Primum’ in 1570AD that Vatican II had not abrogated. The hope, I suspect, was that the Liturgical abuses of the Novus Ordo Mass could be stemmed and curtailed by an appreciation of the older Tridentine Rite and that the latter would inform the former as to how to celebrate Mass more reverently.

With the resignation of Pope Benedict XVI in 2013, a shock hit both the Church and the world just as lightning struck St Peter’s on the same day!

The last Pope to resign from the papacy was nearly 600 years ago and that was Pope Gregory XII in 1415. Pope Benedict spoke of his ill health as the reason for his resignation, although he lived longer than his 8 year papacy. For these last years he was called a new and unknown title, namely, Pope Emeritus until he died which was ten years after his resignation on December 31st 2022. Significantly, the day of his death is also the feast day of another Pope, Sylvester I, who died in 335AD.

Dr Taylor Marshall makes an interesting point that there maybe an historical significance to the date of Pope Benedict XVI’s death. Sylvester I was the Pope that presided over the change of a Martyr Church that had been forced to live underground to a Church that could now enter the public domain under the Emperor Constantine and establish a relationship with the Roman Empire which was to be the beginning of a relationship we call Church and State, a relationship that would eventually flower into Christendom.

But back in 1969 when the Pope was a young priest and theologian he was asked on German Radio a question “What will become of the Church in the future?” to which as usual, after an initial thoughtful pause, he gave a concise, considered and profound answer and it is worth giving the whole text so that we can all step back, pause and consider the journey from Pope Sylvester I to Pope Benedict XVI and what lies ahead; will it be what Pope Benedict XVI said as a young man below OR will it be what Pope Benedict XVI as an old man said in 2015 in a private letter to a friend where he speaks of ‘the power of the anti-Christ spreading’ ? [watch video about this private letter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0SA5VCC9VU&ab_channel=DrTaylorMarshall ] :

“The future of the Church can and will issue from those whose roots are deep and who live from the pure fullness of their faith. It will not issue from those who accommodate themselves merely to the passing moment or from those who merely criticize others and assume that they themselves are infallible measuring rods; nor will it issue from those who take the easier road, who sidestep the passion of faith, declaring false and obsolete, tyrannous and legalistic, all that makes demands upon men, that hurts them and compels them to sacrifice themselves. To put this more positively: The future of the Church, once again as always, will be reshaped by saints, by men, that is, whose minds probe deeper than the slogans of the day, who see more than others see, because their lives embrace a wider reality. Unselfishness, which makes men free, is attained only through the patience of small daily acts of self-denial. By this daily passion, which alone reveals to a man in how many ways he is enslaved by his own ego, by this daily passion and by it alone, a man’s eyes are slowly opened. He sees only to the extent that he has lived and suffered. If today we are scarcely able any longer to become aware of God, that is because we find it so easy to evade ourselves, to flee from the depths of our being by means of the narcotic of some pleasure or other. Thus our own interior depths remain closed to us. If it is true that a man can see only with his heart, then how blind we are!

“How does all this affect the problem we are examining? It means that the big talk of those who prophesy a Church without God and without faith is all empty chatter. We have no need of a Church that celebrates the cult of action in political prayers. It is utterly superfluous. Therefore, it will destroy itself. What will remain is the Church of Jesus Christ, the Church that believes in the God who has become man and promises us life beyond death. The kind of priest who is no more than a social worker can be replaced by the psychotherapist and other specialists; but the priest who is no specialist, who does not stand on the [sidelines], watching the game, giving official advice, but in the name of God places himself at the disposal of man, who is beside them in their sorrows, in their joys, in their hope and in their fear, such a priest will certainly be needed in the future.

“Let us go a step farther. From the crisis of today the Church of tomorrow will emerge — a Church that has lost much. She will become small and will have to start afresh more or less from the beginning. She will no longer be able to inhabit many of the edifices she built in prosperity. As the number of her adherents diminishes, so it will lose many of her social privileges. In contrast to an earlier age, it will be seen much more as a voluntary society, entered only by free decision. As a small society, it will make much bigger demands on the initiative of her individual members. Undoubtedly it will discover new forms of ministry and will ordain to the priesthood approved Christians who pursue some profession. In many smaller congregations or in self-contained social groups, pastoral care will normally be provided in this fashion. Along-side this, the full-time ministry of the priesthood will be indispensable as formerly. But in all of the changes at which one might guess, the Church will find her essence afresh and with full conviction in that which was always at her center: faith in the triune God, in Jesus Christ, the Son of God made man, in the presence of the Spirit until the end of the world. In faith and prayer she will again recognize the sacraments as the worship of God and not as a subject for liturgical scholarship.

“The Church will be a more spiritual Church, not presuming upon a political mandate, flirting as little with the Left as with the Right. It will be hard going for the Church, for the process of crystallization and clarification will cost her much valuable energy. It will make her poor and cause her to become the Church of the meek. The process will be all the more arduous, for sectarian narrow-mindedness as well as pompous self-will will have to be shed. One may predict that all of this will take time. The process will be long and wearisome as was the road from the false progressivism on the eve of the French Revolution — when a bishop might be thought smart if he made fun of dogmas and even insinuated that the existence of God was by no means certain — to the renewal of the nineteenth century. But when the trial of this sifting is past, a great power will flow from a more spiritualized and simplified Church. Men in a totally planned world will find themselves unspeakably lonely. If they have completely lost sight of God, they will feel the whole horror of their poverty. Then they will discover the little flock of believers as something wholly new. They will discover it as a hope that is meant for them, an answer for which they have always been searching in secret.

“And so it seems certain to me that the Church is facing very hard times. The real crisis has scarcely begun. We will have to count on terrific upheavals. But I am equally certain about what will remain at the end: not the Church of the political cult, which is dead already, but the Church of faith. It may well no longer be the dominant social power to the extent that she was until recently; but it will enjoy a fresh blossoming and be seen as man’s home, where he will find life and hope beyond death [https://aleteia.org/2016/06/13/when-cardinal-joseph-ratzinger-predicted-the-future-of-the-church/ ].

May the Lord have mercy on the soul of Pope Benedict and bring him speedily into his Kingdom, that he may behold the Lord face to face in the Beatific Vision, amid the company of Our Lady, all the angels and all the saints. Amen.

The New Revelations of Benedict's Secretary:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eIPOT8briVU&ab_channel=U.S.GraceForce

Death of Cardinal George Pell RIP:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQhyYDi163Y&ab_channel=PintsWithAquinas