Passau (dpa / lby) - Passau Bishop Stefan Oster has the deceased Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI. recognized as "one of the greatest and most important theologians of the 20th and 21st centuries". Benedict is a witness to the history of the church over the past decades and above all one of the last witnesses to the Second Vatican Council, which he had a decisive influence on. In an obituary distributed on Saturday, Oster described Benedict as the "great son of our homeland and our diocese", he was a "thinker with the heart".
According to Bishop Oster, the pope emeritus has always surprised, for example "with the way he deals with his own mistakes or misjudgments and the wounds of the church, with his ability for genuine dialogue". His resignation showed how little he was attached to power and how much he cared about the good progress of the church.
Bishop Oster said on the subject of abuse: "We are losing a man who still had to see in the last years of his life and who also admitted that, as Archbishop of Munich and Freising, he did not pay enough attention to those affected by sexual abuse in the church." As prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Benedict made a decisive contribution "to recognizing the problem of abuse in the church in all its drama and therefore initiating significant changes".
