Former pope Benedict XVI, first pontiff to quit in six centuries, dies
Former pope Benedict XVI has died at the age of 95, almost a decade after he became the first pontiff to resign in six centuries.
"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," the Vatican announced Saturday.
His body would lie in state from Monday in St.Peter's Basilica. Earlier this week, Pope Francis said in a weekly public address that his predecessor was "very sick" and asked people to pray for him.
Benedict XVI, who became the first pope in 600 years to step down in 2013, was the first pope to confront the scourge of clerical sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, but only after a career in which he himself was accused of covering it up.
He became the first pope to meet with victims of persecution and defrocked almost 400 priests in the last two years of his reign.
His final year was overshadowed by allegations that he knowingly failed to stop four priests accused of sexually abusing children while he was archbishop of Munich.
By way of background, the revelations of widespread sexual abuse of children by priests around the world, and the efforts of the Catholic Church to cover up the crimes, began in the second half of the 1980s.
However, when Benedict disappointed many in 2019, six years after retiring to live a quiet life at the Vatican, the then "pope emeritus" spoke out and blamed the abuse scandals on the sexual revolution of the 1960s.
In a fresh hit in 2022, his reputation suffered a severe blow when he was forced to apologize for failing to act on four cases of sexual abuse involving minors.
An independent investigation by a German law firm found that he had failed to dismiss pedophile priests in the 1980s - even though two of them had several proven cases of abuse.
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