The Associated Press described him as the reluctant pope and, given that he was the first head of the Church in 600 years to give up the role, then it can be easily said that the assessment is correct.

Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, born Joseph Ratzinger, died on New Year’s Eve, aged 95. At 78, he was the oldest pope elected in 275 years, the first German in nearly 1,000 years. His funeral will be held today and he will be buried at the Vatican.

The AP goes on to say that he was a shy bookworm who preferred solitary walks in the Alps and Mozart piano concertos to the public glare and majesty of Vatican pageantry. When was thrust in the footsteps of his beloved and charismatic predecessor, he said he felt that a guillotine had come down on him.

So it really did not come as a surprise when, just after eight years of his pontificate, he chose to move out of the limelight, and spent the rest of his days far away from the crowds.

In its report, the AP said that the intellectual German theologian, whose mission was to reawaken Christianity in a secularized and indifferent Europe, was forced to shoulder the brunt of the sex abuse scandal that festered unattended under St John Paul II.

Then, as he planned to make a quiet exit from the papacy, another scandal erupted when his own butler stole his personal papers and gave them to a journalist — leading to revelations that laid bare the need for a reformer pope to clean up the Vatican’s act.

His style could not have been more different from that of Pope John Paul or Pope Francis. He was not a globe-trotting pilgrim, nor a media darling, and neither was he populist. He spoke in paragraphs, not sound-bites, and this was his way of getting through to the people of the Church. Maybe this is why the media did not love him as much as it loves Pope Francis.

In between crises, Pope Benedict pursued his single-minded vision to rekindle faith in a world that he frequently lamented seemed to think it could do without God.

“In vast areas of the world today, there is a strange forgetfulness of God,” he had told 1 million young people gathered on a vast field for his first foreign trip as pope, to World Youth Day in Cologne, Germany, in 2005. “It seems as if everything would be just the same even without him.”

His decision to quit, in 2013, has probably made it easier for his successors to resign if they feel they are no longer in a position to give their all in their role. Most of us remember how John Paul II trudged on in spite of his illness, spending his last years as the pontiff slowly fading away with those close to him, and the millions around the world who loved him, watching helplessly in pain.

The current incumbent, Pope Francis, could be himself heading in that direction. A few days before the death of Pope Benedict, Pope Francis said that he had written a resignation letter soon after he was elected pope, saying that if he should become impaired for medical reasons, he was ready to go. Given that, in the last few months it is clear that Pope Francis’ mobility problems have increased, there is a good possibility that he might also call it a day in the not too distant future.