On a day like today Benedict XVI was created Cardinal by Saint Paul VI

On this day in 1977, Pope Benedict XVI was created Cardinal by Saint Paul VI. The Bavarian Pontiff was then 50 years old and had been serving as Archbishop of Munich and Freising, in Germany, for almost a month.

A few years later, in 1981, Saint John Paul II appointed him prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, where he served for almost 25 years until he was elected Successor of Saint Peter in the conclave held in April 2005.

After 8 years as Universal Pastor of the Church, he resigned in February 2013. Since then he lived in an atmosphere of prayer, study and meditation in the monastery. Mother of the Church of the Vatican until his death on December 31, 2022, at the age of 95.

On May 4, 2020, German journalist Peter Sewald published a new biography of the then Pope Emeritus titled “Benedikt XVI – Ein Leben” (A Life), in which Joseph Ratzinger claims that modern society is formulating an “anti-Christian creed” and punishing those who resist it with “social excommunication.”

In a wide-ranging interview at the end of the more than a thousand-page book, Benedict XVI noted that the greatest threat to the Church is a “global dictatorship of apparently humanist ideologies.”

A few days later and on the occasion of the centenary of the birth of Pope Saint John Paul II, Benedict XVI sent a letter to the Polish bishops, in which he reviewed the life of the pilgrim Pope and where he spoke about the possibility of calling him “Great ” to Karol Wojtyla.

In March 2021, the Pope Emeritus reiterated that “there are not two Popes”, that “the Pope is only one” and recognized that the resignation from the Petrine ministry was “a difficult decision”, but that he made it “with full conscience”.

In April of that year and within the framework of the premiere of a documentary about his life when he turned 94, it was learned that his personal secretary, Mons. Georg Gänswein, tried to dissuade him from resigning from the pontificate.