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
Christian Schaller Christian Schaller Christian Schaller is a Roman Catholic theologian from Munich, Germany. In June 2013, he was co-recipient, with Richard A. Burridge, of the Ratzinger Prize. Christian Schaller was born in Munich, Bavaria, in 1967. He studied at the faculty of theology of the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. Already during his "Diplomarbeit" (Licence thesis), he dealt with one aspect of the theology of Joseph Ratzinger, soon to be Benedict XVI:"The Eucharistic Ecclesiology in the context of the sacramentality of the Church" was the title of the paper presented by Prof. Dr. Gerhard Ludwig Müller. From 1997 to 2000, he