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 of the Catholic Church, along with José Manuel Estepa Llaurens, William Joseph Levada and Estanislao Esteban Karlic with Christoph Schönborn, O.P. serving as the secretary of the group. Many saw in a contrasting light Ratzinger's planning and overseeing of the opening of the long-sealed Inquisition archives, making available at the beginning of 1998 all materials up to the 1903 death of Pope Leo XIII. However, the lag behind availability of other Vatican archives (at that point open up to the 1922 death of Pope Benedict XV and, since Ratzinger became Pope himself, up to the 1939 death of Pope Pius