Beyond the Crises in the Church: The Pontificate of Benedict XVI
By Roberto Regoli
St. Augustine’s Press, 2024
350 pages, $28
To order: StAugustine.net

The paradox of Pope Benedict XVI is that a man widely regarded as a staunch defender of tradition ultimately broke with centuries of precedent by resigning from the papacy. This single act secured his place in history and transformed him into a reformer of the office itself, yet it was not the only instance in which Benedict, who died two years ago Dec. 31, was an innovator as well as traditional.

Father Roberto Regoli’s deeply informed and insightful study of Pope Benedict’s nearly eight-year tenure, originally published in Italian in 2016 and now available in an updated English translation, does not attempt to pronounce Pope Benedict’s pontificate as a success or failure. The author recognizes that such judgments require historical distance and notes that it will be decades before the Vatican archives from this pope’s reign are available to scholars. 

Drawing instead on published sources and his own observations as a priest of Rome and former director of the Department of Church History at the Pontifical Gregorian University, Father Regoli focuses on identifying major themes of Pope Benedict’s reign and its broader significance for the Church.

One of the book’s most compelling sections concerns Pope Benedict’s distinctive approach to building Church unity, an area where his thought and actions often defied conventional expectations.

Father Regoli treats the Pope’s outreach to the breakaway traditionalists of the Society of St. Pius X (SSPX) as fundamentally a work of ecumenism. The historian likens the Pope’s decision to rescind the excommunications of SSPX bishops to the historic decision in 1964 by Pope St. Paul VI and Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras I of Constantinople to lift the mutual excommunications that had led to the Great Schism between Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy more than a thousand years earlier. 

Pope Benedict’s lifting of restrictions on the celebration of the traditional Latin Mass — a liberalization undone by his successor Pope Francis in 2021 — reflected a pluralistic attitude toward liturgy within the universal Church.

Similarly, Pope Benedict’s establishment of personal ordinariates for former members of Anglican churches allowed them to enter communion with Rome while retaining their worship traditions in jurisdictions beyond the boundaries of territorial dioceses. Though widely seen as a conservative move — given that many former Anglicans were fleeing liberal practices on women’s ordination and homosexuality — it exemplified the Pope’s willingness to transcend standard models of ecumenism and ecclesiology.

In both cases, Pope Benedict chose to work through the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), which he had led under Pope St. John Paul II, rather than the Vatican’s Council for Promoting Christian Unity, signaling his preference for doctrinal unity as a basis for reconciliation. Talks with the SSPX foundered when they did not agree to accept fully the teachings of the Second Vatican Council and all subsequent popes.

Father Regoli also highlights Pope Benedict’s approach to the Russian Orthodox Church. Aware of Moscow’s historic wariness toward Rome, Benedict encouraged cooperation on shared concerns such as bioethics, family values, and the defense of Christian minorities in Muslim-majority countries.

While recognizing the Pope’s strengths as a theologian and teacher, Father Regoli does not ignore his weaknesses as an administrator. Pope Benedict himself acknowledged his managerial deficiencies, placing considerable trust in his secretary of state, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone. This reliance, Father Regoli argues, allowed a narrow circle of loyalists to dominate key positions in the Curia, leading to missed opportunities for wider support among the hierarchy for the Pope’s initiatives, including a reform of the Vatican Bank that stalled before being later revived under Pope Francis.

An international wave of clerical sex-abuse scandals in 2010 cast a shadow over the pontificate, and no major reforms were launched thereafter. By the time of the 2012 “Vatileaks” scandal, which revealed evidence of corruption and incompetence within the Vatican, Pope Benedict’s sense of exhaustion was clear. The pontificate’s diminished momentum likely contributed to Benedict’s recognition that he lacked the strength to carry on.

Father Regoli explores the Pope’s broader intellectual contributions, including his cultural dialogue with nonbelievers, even with a group of thinkers dubbed the “Ratzingerian Marxists.” The compatibility of faith and reason was the central theme of his papal teaching, laid out in many texts including his controversial 2006 lecture in Regensburg, Germany. Intended as an academic discourse, the Regensburg speech made headlines for its quotation of a Byzantine emperor’s denunciation of Islam. 

The episode epitomized the Pope’s uneasy relationship with the modern media. While he wrote lucidly — his Jesus of Nazareth trilogy, published during his pontificate, remains a masterful effort to convey theological insights to nonspecialists — Pope Benedict struggled to communicate in an age dominated by sound bites.

Pope Benedict’s establishment of the role of pope emeritus, which Father Regoli presents as a natural extension of that of bishop emeritus introduced at Vatican II, has been the subject of sometimes-heated debate. While some have called for norms for papal retirement to prevent confusion about where supreme leadership of the Church lies, Pope Francis has played down the need for such rules, insisting instead that time and experience will provide clarity.

In retirement, Father Regoli argues, Pope Benedict continued to live out a contemplative dimension of the papacy, as distinct from the active ministry reserved for his successor. This provocative idea stirred controversy when Archbishop Georg Gänswein espoused it in 2016, even prompting a question during a papal news conference. 

Pope Francis reassured the world that “there is only one pope,” yet his gestures of respect for the retired pontiff — such as leading new cardinals to him for a blessing and addressing him as “Your Holiness” — acknowledged his predecessor’s unique importance.

For all his achievements as a priest, theologian, cardinal and pope, Pope Benedict’s defining act for the history of the Church was his retirement, which reshaped the papacy itself as a divine institution capable of evolving in response to human limitations.