ROME — Legacies are partly in the eye of the beholder, and that’s certainly true of popes. Academics may remember Benedict XVI as the most impressive intellectual to occupy the Throne of Peter in centuries, while victims of sex abuse may recall him as a symbol of the church’s unfinished business.
Whether either perception is fair is, for now, beside the point. Both ways of seeing Benedict, and many more, are in the air.
At first blush, however, it would seem that the way in which Benedict is stepping off the stage may be reframing his legacy – not in the sense of resolving debates over his papacy, but perhaps providing a more generous optic for assessing the pope.
When he first announced his resignation on Feb. 11, the reaction was surprisingly positive across the usual divides.
Some longtime critics were a bit catty about it; the left-of-center German newspaper Die Tageszeitung, for instance, ran the headline “Thank God!”