Joseph Aloisius Ratzinger was born on Holy Saturday 1927 at Marktl am Inn, Bavaria — son of a Bavarian rural police constable and a hotel cook — and was ordained priest with his brother Georg at Freising on June 29, 1951. He pursued doctoral studies in theology at Munich (1953) and a Habilitation thesis on St. Bonaventure (1957), and from 1958 served on the theological faculties of Freising, Bonn, Münster, Tübingen, and finally Regensburg (1969–77), becoming one of the most influential German Catholic theologians of the post-Vatican II generation.
He served as peritus (theological consultant) to the Cardinal of Cologne during the Second Vatican Council (1962–65) and helped draft significant portions of its conciliar documents. Appointed Archbishop of Munich and Freising in 1977 and created cardinal the same year, he was summoned by John Paul II to Rome in 1981 as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith — a position he held for twenty-three years until John Paul II's death in 2005, becoming during that period the principal theological collaborator of John Paul II and the most-published theological writer of any modern Vatican prelate.
Elected pope on April 19, 2005 at seventy-eight as Benedict XVI, he served eight years until his unprecedented February 11, 2013 announcement of resignation — the first papal resignation since 1294 (St. Celestine V — see the 13th-c. catalogue) and the first modern voluntary papal renunciation in history. He retired to the small Mater Ecclesiae Monastery in the Vatican Gardens, where he lived as Pope Emeritus for the remaining nine years and ten months of his life, continuing to write theological essays and respond to consultations from John Paul II's successor Francis. He died at the Mater Ecclesiae Monastery on December 31, 2022 (the feast of St. Sylvester, the last day of the civil year) at ninety-five.
He was buried in the Vatican Grottoes on January 5, 2023 after a funeral Mass celebrated by Pope Francis at St. Peter's Square attended by an estimated 200,000 — the first funeral of a Pope by another reigning Pope in modern history. His five-volume Jesus of Nazareth (2007–12), his three encyclicals (Deus Caritas Est 2005, Spe Salvi 2007, Caritas in Veritate 2009), and his theological corpus more broadly are widely regarded by Catholic theologians as the most substantial single theological output of any modern pope. The cause for beatification has not yet been formally opened; the standard five-year waiting period (which may be waived by the reigning pope as it has been for several recent figures including Jacques Hamel) expires December 31, 2027.