UNITED STATES
San Francisco Chronicle
Flavia Krause-Jackson, Bloomberg News
Friday, March 1, 2013
March 1 (Bloomberg) — Pope Benedict XVI’s life began in a picturesque Bavarian hamlet near Adolf Hitler’s birthplace. He will see out his days at a small Vatican monastery called “The Mother of the Church.”
Joseph Ratzinger, who at age 5 told his father he wanted to be a cardinal, will leave a mixed legacy after becoming the first Roman Catholic pontiff in 600 years to relinquish power, religious scholars from Rome to the U.S. said. The pope left the Vatican by helicopter for the papal summer residence in Castel Gandolfo. His pontificate came to an end at 8 p.m. in Rome yesterday, when his Swiss guards were replaced by Vatican police at the palace and the Holy See’s flag was lowered.
While celebrated for theological tracts including books on the life of Jesus Christ, Benedict’s leadership of the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics was also scarred by scandals involving priestly child abuse and leaked papal documents. His parting gift to the next pontiff is a secret file on the case called “Vatileaks,” which Italian media say divulges a network of sex and graft in the church. The reports “don’t correspond to reality,” according to the Holy See.
“He leaves a church in crisis in various ways: from internal governance, to low morale, the sexual abuse, the loss of young people, all the older ones that have left, the evangelicals encroaching and secularists all over,” said historian R. Scott Appleby, director of the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame.
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