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| Pope Benedict |
Pope Benedict has led the Catholic Abbey back 2005, and his papacy has reflected his acceptance that the Catholic Abbey should absorb its amount traditional, bourgeois ethics in an era of accelerated change.
He alone calls for a agitation on the affair of accounting celibacy, and reaffirmed the ban on Communion for afar Catholics who remarry. He has aswell said the Church's austere positions on abortion, afterlife and gay partnerships were "not negotiable".
This abrupt acquiescence has disconnected liberals and added acceptable Catholics, while the contempo aperture of claimed abstracts suggests a abridgement of ascendancy over the chicane of the Vatican.
How has Benedict XVI managed the world's better Christian community? We asked six advisers and analysts for their angle on key areas of the pontificate.
Governance - Clifford Longley
Pope Benedict was acutely abashed and aghast that one of those abutting to him, his butler Paolo Gabriele, had been a antecedent of the leaked Vatican abstracts that arise a accompaniment of agitation axial the axial government of the Catholic Church.
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Clifford Longley
Editorial adviser for The Tablet newspaper
Former adviser to the Catholic Bishops' Conference of England and Wales
The Curia - the axial government of the Abbey - appeared to be riddled with battling factions and there were accusations of bribery in top places.
Observers had continued labelled the Vatican a abortive academy - now the data were laid bare.
Many curial officials, men committed to the acceptable of the Church, acquainted balked and affronted by the institutional sclerosis they encountered.
Pope Benedict may able-bodied accept realised that in his 86th year he no best had the activity to do what bare to be done to array this all out.
That, and his disability to go on travelling the abundant distances that the job demands, may able-bodied accept been what abiding him to abandon - for the acceptable of the Church.
The ameliorate of the Vatican, which he had alone amorphous at the margins, has a continued way to go yet.
Decentralisation is now imperative. His almsman has a huge and unenviable task.
Evangelisation - Austen Ivereigh
In speeches, addresses and teaching abstracts Benedict XVI advised how to present the Gospel to cultures steeped in Christian ethics yet generally adverse to the Church.
This specific challenge, accepted as the "new evangelisation" ("new" apropos to the ambience rather than the message), was one of Pope Benedict's priorities: he created a new Vatican administration to advance it, and endure October declared calm the world's bishops to accede how to yield it forward.
The cardinals aggregate in Rome in March will attention the new evangelisation as one of the priorities for the next pope.
They accept no choice. Equality laws such as same-sex alliance accomplish Christians and abbey organisations accessible to lawsuits and anti-discrimination claims, and corruption to marginalise added the attendance of the Abbey in accessible life.
It is awful likely, in fact, that Benedict XVI's almsman will be one of those listed as associates of the Administration for the Promotion of the New Evangelisation.
Dr Austen Ivereigh
Co-ordinator, Catholic Voices
Former adviser to the Catholic Bishops' Conference of England and Wales
Women - Gemma Simmonds
There accept been apparent successes in Pope Benedict's pontificate, but advancing the role of women in the Catholic Abbey has not been one of them.
Dr Gemma Simmonds
Director, Religious Activity Institute
Sister of the Congregation of Jesus
Senior Lecturer in Pastoral and Amusing Studies and Theology, Heythrop College
The a lot of audacious abortion in this account has been the Apostolic Visitation of the nuns of North America. The US owes a huge debt to generous, ballsy sisters who accept committed their lives to alms education, healthcare and pastoral accouterment alone to be subjected to an intrusive, inherently adverse action of analysis for declared doctrinal errors. The adverse amid their analysis and that of paedophile clergy has acquired boundless scandal.
Some arresting women accept risen to posts in the Vatican, but others advised "difficult" accept been removed. Pope Benedict declared admirable Englishwoman Mary Ward (1585-1615) who wrote, "There is no such aberration amid men and women that women may not do abundant things." There has been little allowance for them to try in this pontificate.
In the post-mortems getting agitated out on his appellation of office, the media focus has accordingly been on Pope Benedict's administration of advancing issues such as gay alliance and adoption, homosexuality and added amusing issues. He is apprenticed to arise in a poor ablaze to those afraid to accede him in context.
The Catholic Abbey is never traveling to appearance alliance except from the angle of a sacrament, an adamantine band amid one man and one woman, accessible to the God-given allowance of children. In so far as this was the compassionate of Jesus Christ, it will be that of his abbey on Earth. But Scripture aswell teaches that "God is adulation and all who reside in adulation reside in God, and God lives in them".
The acquaintance of abounding Catholics is that this adulation in which God dwells can be begin in assorted forms, all alive appear the adherence and self-giving charge to which the commemoration of alliance points. What was bare was a ablaze apostolic apperception able to accommodate both these truths and accomplish faculty of them, but this did not appear acutely from Pope Benedict's writings.
What did appear repeatedly, and was shamefully under-reported, was his acute appraisal of all-around commercialism and its baneful amusing effects, his brave action to war and accepted apple conflicts, abnormally the war in Iraq, and his bull delivery of the ecological imperative. In its way his autograph on these issues is every bit as abolitionist as his resignation, if alone the apple could be agitated to look.
Foreign and interfaith relations - James Roberts
The Pope sparked corruption in some Muslim circles in 2006 when, in a abode discussing faith, acumen and violence, he quoted from a 14th-Century Byzantine emperor who labelled Muhammad "evil and inhuman".
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James Roberts
Adopted Editor, The Tablet
Former adopted editor, The Independent on Sunday
However, afterwards a time, the acknowledged Muslim-Christian dialogue, "A Common Word" was established, and is ongoing.
In added contempo years, the Pope has placed abundant accent on advancement of religious abandon - conspicuously in the face of alarming animality of Christians in Pakistan and Nigeria, and the abnegation by Saudi Arabia to acquiesce its Christian "guest workers" any religious rights at all.
He has pleaded with the Middle Eastern admiral to admission Christians the freedoms that will acquiesce them to stay, but the departure from that region, and the persecution, continues.
Little acclaimed a part of the successes of the Benedict XVI approach has been the advance in Catholic-Jewish relations. His papacy has been characterised by the "best relations anytime amid Abbey and Rabbinate", according to Israel's Chief Rabbi Yona Metzger.
Israel's Chief Sephardic Rabbi Shlomo Amar declared the Pope a "justice warrior" and said he should be commended for his "steadfast action adjoin any announcement of anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial, axial and alfresco the Church."
Sex corruption - David Clohessy
We were never admiring with how Pope Benedict handled the clergy sex corruption and covered up the crisis. That is why we filed clothing adjoin him and added Vatican admiral in the International Criminal Court.
David Clohessy
Executive Director of the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests (SNAP)
Since 1981, if he headed the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Benedict had primary albatross for ambidextrous with the clergy sex crimes.
His abnegation to actually abode the catching - and conduct Abbey admiral who adequate predator priests - was affronted if he became Pope.
The next abbey have to do added to aegis children.
He should stop arising affliction and authoritative gestures, and instead bench bishops who abide to burrow abhorrent crimes.
And he should assert that prelates plan with civil authorities to ability and canyon stronger adolescent sex laws beyond the globe.
Theology - Fr Stephen Wang
The key to Pope Benedict's canon is the abstraction of "connection" or "continuity".
Fr Stephen Wang
Dean of Studies, Allen Hall
Author - Aquinas and Sartre: On Freedom, Claimed Identity, and the Possibility of Happiness
How do you bottle the axiological access amid acceptance and reason, amid the accomplished and the present, amid the animal and the divine? How do you abstain a breach that would abandon the Christian eyes and blackmail accustomed life?
His aboriginal encyclical letter afraid anybody by getting a brainwork on love. The joy of animal adulation ("eros" or amative love) leads us to a deeper, sacrificial adulation ("agape"), that finds its accurate fulfilment in the adulation of Jesus Christ on the Cross.
The animal and the all-powerful connect; they are not in opposition.
The adoration of the Church, whatever new forms it takes, needs to affix with its 2,000-year history.
The moral ethics of the Church, even if they are bidding in new ways, charge to be abiding in the acumen of the Bible and the Christian tradition.
And Catholic teaching, which is consistently developing, should never abandon the abiding acceptance that has been handed down through the centuries. He believed in face-lifting and reform, but consistently in chain with the past.
He declared on Catholics to deepen their faith, through belief the Catechism. He encouraged the secularised West not to become trapped in a absolutism of relativism - area aggregate is accustomed but annihilation has any meaning.
For Pope Benedict, Christianity is a arise religion, not something we actualize for ourselves. It surprises and startles us.
No admiration that his endure appear plan was about advertent the face of God in Jesus Christ, the adolescent of Bethlehem.
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