Pope Francis, in first public comments since death of Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, praises his kindness, faith.
Benedict stunned the world on Feb. 11, 2013, when he announced, in his typical, soft-spoken Latin, that he no longer had the strength to run the 1.2 billion-strong Catholic Church that he had steered for eight years through scandal and indifference.
Tributes poured in from political and religious leaders around the world. Francis himself praised Benedict's "kindness" and thanked him for "his testimony of faith and prayer, especially in these final years of retired life." Instead, he was forced to follow the footsteps of the beloved St. John Paul II and run the church through the fallout of the clerical sex abuse scandal and then a second scandal that erupted when his own butler stole his personal papers and gave them to a journalist.Nevertheless, he set about the job with a single-minded vision to rekindle the faith in a world that, he frequently lamented, seemed to think it could do without God.
Benedict's style couldn't have been more different from that of John Paul or Francis. No globe-trotting media darling or populist, Benedict was a teacher, theologian and academic to the core: quiet and pensive with a fierce mind. He spoke in paragraphs, not soundbites. He had a weakness for orange Fanta as well as his beloved library; when he was elected pope, he had his entire study moved -- as is -- from his apartment just outside the Vatican walls into the Apostolic Palace.
Like his predecessor, Benedict made reaching out to Jews a hallmark of his papacy. His first official act as pope was a letter to Rome's Jewish community and he became the second pope in history, after John Paul, to enter a synagogue. Benedict's relations with the Muslim world were also a mixed bag. He riled Muslims with a speech in September 2006 -- five years after the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States -- in which he quoted a Byzantine emperor who characterized some of the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad as "evil and inhuman," particularly his command to spread the faith "by the sword."
But Benedict's legacy was irreversibly colored by the global eruption in 2010 of the sex abuse scandal, even though as a cardinal he was responsible for turning the Vatican around on the issue. And once he became pope, Benedict essentially reversed his beloved predecessor, John Paul, by taking action against the 20th century's most notorious pedophile priest, the Rev. Marcial Maciel. Benedict took over Maciel's Legionaries of Christ, a conservative religious order held up as a model of orthodoxy by John Paul, after it was revealed that Maciel sexually abused seminarians and fathered at least three children.
He made his last public appearances in February 2013 and then boarded a helicopter to the papal summer retreat at Castel Gandolfo, to sit out the conclave in private. Benedict then largely kept to his word that he would live a life of prayer in retirement, emerging only occasionally from his converted monastery for special events and writing occasional book prefaces and messages.
"Thank you for having given us the luminous example of the simple and humble worker in the vineyard of the Lord," Benedict's longtime deputy, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, told him in one of his final public events as pope.