Benedict’s lasting mark on papacy will be his resignation

VATICAN CITY (AP) — Although Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI had a long and illustrious career as one of the Roman Catholic Church’s pre-eminent theologians, he will forever be known as the first pope in 600 years to resign. Elected in 2005, he continued the conservative course charted by St. John Paul II. He disciplined errant theologians, particularly those who espoused the Liberation Theology popular in Latin America in the 1970s and ’80s. But his eight-year papacy was marred by a series of communications blunders, missteps and scandals. His outreach to Jews was tainted when he rehabilitated a Holocaust-denying bishop. He roiled the Islamic world by quoting a Byzantine emperor who characterized some of the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad as “evil and inhuman.”