He will be remembered for… his resignation.
It was February 11, 2013, he had done it – in Latin – in front of flabbergasted cardinals, leaving them seventeen days to turn around.
Long guardian of dogma under John Paul II, whom he succeeded, Benedict XVI, the other pope living in the city of Saint-Pierre, is no more.
At 95, the German pontiff emeritus died this Saturday in his apartments at the Mater Ecclesiae monastery, where he had retired.
We knew his health was increasingly fragile.
Last summer, it was very moved that his confidant and secretary the German archbishop Georg Gänswein, nicknamed the handsome Georg, had given his news.
They weren't good.
Very affected, four years ago, by the death of his brother, Joseph Ratzinger was no longer able to speak: "His voice is increasingly weak, incomprehensible", explained the prelate.
“The Cardinal Panzer”, as it had been nicknamed, had surrendered.
“Cardinal Panzer”, “Rottweiler of God”… epithets, he did not miss any to qualify this 265th pope propelled on the seat of Saint-Pierre, in spite of himself.
The story of Benedict XVI is first of all that of a "man who did not want to become pope", as Nicolas Diat recalls, in his book with the eponymous title (Ed. Albin Michel).
When Benedict XVI was elected on April 19, 2005 after only twenty-four hours of conclave, the Vatican was still in mourning.
The death of John Paul II, two weeks earlier, is still being felt, but the 115 cardinal electors will hardly hesitate.
Two choices are offered to them: that of reform with the Argentinian Jorge Bergoglio or that of continuity with the very influential Joseph Ratzinger, whose weight has continued to grow throughout the interminable agony of Jean- Paul II, suffering from Parkinson's disease.
“I asked God to spare me the guillotine of my election”
At 6:47 p.m., he appears, white hair, bright eyes, wearing the tabarro (a cape), in front of 100,000 faithful massed under the balcony of Saint Peter's Basilica.
He is just 78 years old, takes the name of Benedict XVI.
Advisor to John Paul II, outgoing prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, he is known as the leader of the conservative camp.
He was elected after only four ballots, one of the fastest elections in the history of the Church.
"During the conclave, I asked God to save me from the guillotine of my election, but he did not listen to me", admitted Benedict XVI, a few days after the vote of the Sacred College.
Simple witticism or real dread?
How to take over from John Paul II, with his twenty-six and a half years of pontificate?
Man of the written word, theologian, hating the crowd, solitary by nature, Joseph Ratzinger is in a way the antithesis of it when the curia needs to be taken in hand, governed.
Flattering, consolidating, getting rid of inconveniences, spotting rising stars, that's also the Pope's job.
The task promises to be tough for Benedict XVI and it will be for this intellectual, born on April 16, 1927, in Bavaria at the time of the emergence of Nazism.
His father, very Catholic, archivist then policeman, hates Hitler.
At home, one reads Der gerade Weg, the conservative Catholic magazine, warning against pagan ideas.
In 1939, 12-year-old Joseph went to the seminary with his older brother Georg.
Enlisted in the Hitler Youth, the Ratzinger brothers are distinguished by their lack of zeal.
After having been briefly a soldier of the Third Reich and then taken prisoner by the Americans, Joseph returns to the seminary and falls… in love.
"There was a love during his studies that was very serious," his biographer, Peter Seewald told Die Zeit, confident that it "caused him a lot of torment".
The scandal of the pedophile priests
Finally, Joseph chooses celibacy.
Ordained a priest at the same time as his brother, he became professor of theology, before being appointed bishop of Munich in March 1977 and created cardinal three months later by Paul VI.
Thirty years later, here is the child born in the midst of the torments of the Old Continent who has become pope.
The Church is in bad shape.
Obsessed by the need to maintain his unity, Benedict XVI renews the dialogue with the fundamentalists of the Society of Saint Pius X.
It gives pride of place to old lace and traditional papal vestments.
Ah, his bright red shoes, in ruby goatskin, without seams, from Adriano Stefanelli, the “Vatican bootmaker”!
He will wear them until his resignation, the pair will end up sold in a charity sale in Germany.
While the new pope tries to rectify his image of "hawk" during trips whose success surprises him himself, the scandal of pedophile priests - superbly ignored by John Paul II - gradually overwhelms his pontificate.
Benoit XVI met Pope Francis on August 27.
AFP/VATICAN MEDIA/Handout
Hearths light up everywhere in the United States, in Ireland, in Australia, but also in Italy and Germany, where Georg, his own brother, had not been able to detect the abuses committed on the little singers of his Bavarian choir.
He attacks it, without ever yielding anything in parallel on the ground of morals.
Recognition of de facto couples, biological testament, euthanasia, assisted procreation, communion of divorced Catholics, it was "niet"
and it will remain so!
In March 2009, it was the drop of water too many: the use of condoms was "counter-productive for the fight against AIDS", he said during a trip to Africa.
Outcry from the global medical community.
“The pope lives in total autism”, then reacts, angry, the Prime Minister and Mayor of Bordeaux, Alain Juppé.
The excommunication of a Brazilian woman, guilty of having aborted her pregnant 9-year-old daughter following a rape by her stepfather, also shocked him: "It is an extraordinary absence of Christian charity “, Continues the former head of government denouncing “a deep malaise”.
Church business is going down the drain.
Vatileaks case of leaks of documents signed by him, financial scandals, battle of clans between rival cardinals: the end of the pontificate is like a long shipwreck for this manipulable and manipulated ecclesiastic whose health is declining.
When he disappears, Benedict XVI can only see out of one eye, wears a Pacemaker.
On February 11, without telling anyone, he resigned, dropping the guillotine on himself and placing it on Jorge Bergoglio.
