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.
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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.
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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.
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