Vatican City • On Monday, April 4, 2005, a priest walked up to the Renaissance palazzo housing the Vatican’s doctrine department and asked the doorman to call the official in charge: It was the first day of business after Pope John Paul II had died, and the cleric wanted to get back to work.
The office’s No. 2, Archbishop Angelo Amato, answered the phone and was stunned. This was no ordinary priest. It was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, his boss, who under the Vatican’s arcane rules had technically lost his job when John Paul died.
"It tells me of the great humility of the man, the great sense of duty, but also the great awareness that we are here to do a job," said Bishop Charles Scicluna, who worked with Ratzinger before he became Pope Benedict XVI, inside the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
In resigning, Scicluna said, Benedict is showing the same sense of humility, duty and service as he did after the Catholic Church lost its last pope.
"He has done his job."
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When Benedict flies off into retirement by helicopter on Thursday, he will leave behind a church in crisis — one beset by sex scandal, internal divisions and dwindling numbers.
But the 85-year-old pope can count on a solid legacy: While his very resignation was his most significant act, Benedict — in a quieter way — also set the church back on a conservative, tradition-minded path.
He was guided by the firm conviction that many of the ills afflicting the church could be traced to a misreading of the reforms of the Second Vatican Council.
He insisted that the 1962-65 meetings that brought the church into the modern era were not a radical break from the past, as portrayed by many liberals, but rather a continuation of the best traditions of the 2,000-year-old church.
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Benedict was the teacher pope, a theology professor who turned his Wednesday general audiences into master classes about the Catholic faith and the history, saints and sinners that contributed to it.
In his teachings, he sought to boil Christianity down to its essential core. He didn’t produce volumes of encyclicals like his predecessor, just three: on charity, hope and love. (He penned a fourth, on faith, but retired before finishing it.)
Considered by many to be the greatest living theologian, he authored more than 65 books, stretching from the classic "Introduction to Christianity" in 1968 to the final installment of his triptych on "Jesus of Nazareth" last year — considered by some to be his most important contribution to the church. In between he produced the "Catechism of the Catholic Church" — essentially a how-to guide to being a Catholic.
Benedict spent the bulk of his early career in the classroom, as a student and then professor of dogma and fundamental theology at universities in Bonn, Muenster, Tuebingen and Regensburg, Germany.
"His classrooms were crowded," recalled the Rev. Joseph Fessio, a theology student of Ratzinger’s at the University of Regensburg from 1972-74, and now the English-language publisher of his books.
"I don’t recall him having notes," Fessio said. "He would stand at the front of the class, and he wasn’t looking at you, not with eye contact, but he was looking over you, almost meditating."
It’s a style that he’s kept for 40 years.
"If you hear him give a sermon, he’s speaking not from notes, but you can write it down and print it," Fessio said. "Every comma is there. Every pause."
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Benedict never wanted to be pope and he didn’t take easily to the rigors of the job. Elected April 19, 2005, after one of the shortest conclaves in history, Benedict was, at 78, the oldest pope elected in 275 years and the first German in nearly a millennium.
At first he was stiff.
Giovanni Maria Vian, editor of the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano, recalled that in the early days Benedict used to greet crowds with an awkward victory gesture "as if he were an athlete."
"At some point someone told him that wasn’t a very papal gesture," Vian said. Benedict changed course, opting for an open-armed embrace or an almost effeminate twinkling of his fingers on an outstretched hand as a way of connecting with the crowd.
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