Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, who will be remembered for being the first head of the Roman Catholic Church to resign in 600 years, has died on Saturday at his home at the Vatican. The retired pontiff’s health started to decline during the Christmas season and Pope Francis called faithful to pray for his “very sick” Read more
Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI’s personal secretary, Archbishop Georg Gänswein, has been in isolation for the past ten days after testing positive for COVID-19, according to German media. The German news agency, Katholisch.de, reported April 20 that Gänswein has been in isolation since April 11, a time period that included all of the Easter Triduum and Read more
Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI was born 94 years ago, April 16, in the town of Marktl, Bavaria. More than eight years after he announced his retirement from the papacy in 2013, Benedict continues to live a retired life in the Mater Ecclesiae monastery on Vatican grounds. Despite growing feebleness, the retired pope is in good Read more
Benedict XVI’s personal secretary Archbishop Georg Gänswein has said that the pope emeritus’ illness is “subsiding.” In an interview with the German newspaper Südkurier, Archbishop Gänswein is reported to have said that Benedict XVI’s “illness is subsiding” and that his medication has been reduced. Benedict XVI has been suffering from facial shingles, a bacterial infection Read more
Pope Francis’s advice to the Church’s 13 new cardinals is straightforward: “Proclaim the true word, not boring speeches no one understands.” Francis made the comments in his homily at the consistory Mass at St Peter’s Basilica last Saturday. All 13 of the new cardinals share Francis’s pastoral concerns at a time when conservatives within the Read more
Last week the Pope Emeritus met with a professor of moral theology who was recently dismissed from Rome’s Pontifical John Paul II Institute. His dismissal came amid ongoing controversy regarding recent changes to the Institute. Benedict XVI, who has had a long-standing relationship with the Institute that well pre-dates his papacy, invited Monsignor Livio Melina Read more
There is only one pope leading the Church, Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI emphasises. “The Pope is one, it is Francis,” Benedict said in an interview with an Italian magazine last week. “The unity of the Church has always been in danger, for centuries,” he continued. “It has been for all its history. Wars, internal conflicts, Read more
Pope Benedict XVI is not dead and did not recently suffer a stroke, the Vatican confirmed on Tuesday. On Monday, rumors circulated on Twitter and other social media platforms that the Pope Emeritus had suffered a “mild ischemia” – a kind of stroke. “The rumours are false,” Alessandro Gisotti, director ad interim of the Press Read more
The Pope emeritus, Benedict XVI, has published a 6,000-word essay blaming clerical sex abuse on the “all-out sexual freedom” of the 1960s. Cultural and historical change have led to a “dissolution” of morality in Catholicism, he claims. As an example, he says despite allegations of clerical sex abuse of children dating back to decades before Read more
Pope Francis says the Vatican archives on Holocaust-era Pope Pius XII will be opened next year. Pius’s role – helping or ignoring the plight of Jews during the holocaust – has been much debated. On the one hand, he has often been criticised by Jews for his apparent silence during the holocaust. On the other, Read more