The Legacy of Pope Benedict XVI

Pope Benedict XVI: A Retrospective

Marks of his Papacy

Pope Benedict XVI’s papacy testifies to a churchman of scholarship and pastoral sensitivity.

Born in a devout Catholic family and baptized the day he was born, he felt one with the Church from his earliest days.As a boy, with his parents and brother and sister, he visited the Bavarian Shrine of Our Lady of Altötting, a place he returned to as pope. There, he prayed before the Black Madonna (as the smoke-charred linden wood image of Mary is called) and left at its base the ring he had received from Pope Paul VI. His intense fervor for Mary showed clearly in 2008 at Lourdes, where he said, “When speech can no longer find the right words, the need arises for a loving presence: we seek then the closeness not only of those who share the same blood or are linked to us by friendship, but also the closeness of those who are intimately bound to us by faith. Who would be more intimate to us than Christ and his holy mother, the Immaculate One?”

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Citing Health Reasons, Pope Benedict Announces he will Resign

By Carol Glatz and Cindy Wooden
Catholic News Service

VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- Saying he no longer has the strength to exercise ministry over the universal church, Pope Benedict XVI announced Feb. 11 that he would be resigning at the end of the month after an eight-year pontificate.

"After having repeatedly examined my conscience before God, I have come to the certainty that my strengths, due to an advanced age, are no longer suited to an adequate exercise of the Petrine ministry," the pope told cardinals gathered for an ordinary public consistory to approve the canonization of new saints.   

Pope Benedict, who was elected in April 2005, will be the first pope to resign in more than 600 years.