Pope Benedict XVI Pope Benedict XVI Pope Benedict XVI (; ; ; born Joseph Aloisius Ratzinger; ; 16 April 1927) served as Pope of the Catholic Church and as sovereign of the Vatican City State from 2005 until his resignation in 2013. Benedict's election as pope occurred in the 2005 papal conclave that followed the death of Pope John Paul II. The Vatican announced his withdrawal by bestowing him the title Pope Emeritus shortly after his resignation. Ordained as a priest in 1951 in his native Bavaria, Ratzinger had established himself as a highly regarded university theologian by the late 1950s and was
Joseph Ratzinger as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith Cardinal Archbishop of Vienna Christoph Schönborn, speaking on Austrian television in March 2010, Ratzinger in 1995 pressed Pope John Paul II to mount a special investigation against Hans Hermann Groër, Schönborn's predecessor as Archbishop, after Groër was accused of molesting young monks. But other Curia officials persuaded John Paul that the media had exaggerated the case, and an inquiry would only create more bad publicity. In July 2007 Pope Benedict XVI (Ratzinger) visited the Vatican Secret Archives, and said that upon In August 2010 Raffaele Cardinal Farina, archivist and librarian of the Holy Roman Church, said that Pope John Paul