Pope Benedict’s full history with Vladimir Putin

In his six-year reign as leader of the Catholic Church, Pope Benedict XVI left behind a complicated legacy—a professed reformer presiding over an institution in tumult, seeking to reaffirm its value and relevance to a changing and hastily-modernizing world.

It only made sense that he would meet with the people who had helped shape it.

With news of the former pope’s ailing health this week, many around the world began to revive discussions of his legacy, both around his work within the church as well as outside of it—including his meetings with world leaders like Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose war with Ukraine has earned him the rebuke of the church’s present leader, Pope Francis.

At the start of Benedict’s tenure in 2007, the newly-installed pope met with Putin for what was considered at the time to be the highest-level Kremlin-Vatican talks in more than three years, with the pair focused on easing tension between Roman Catholics and Orthodox Christians in the country.

While there had been movement toward common ground at the time, the Vatican maintained an uneasy relationship with the Kremlin dating back to the persecution of Catholics during the years of Soviet control, with many killed or imprisoned for their faith.

Though post-Soviet leaders like Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin sought closer relations with the church, tensions between the two sects remained tense into the 21st century, with Orthodox leaders accusing Roman Catholics of improperly seeking to convert residents of areas that would traditionally belong to the Russian Orthodox Church.

While Pope John Paul II fielded invitations from Russian leaders, Putin never offered one. The 2007 meeting with Benedict was considered a significant step toward attempting to reconcile those differences.

According to a release at the time, the pair discussed foreign policy in the Middle East, as well as potential solutions to “the problems of extremism and intolerance, which constitute grave threats to the civilized coexistence of nations, highlighting the need to preserve peace and to favor negotiated and peaceful solutions to conflicts.”

That meeting, it turned out, would be a key flashpoint in improving relations between the Catholic Church and Russia. In his outreach to Russian Orthodox Church Patriarch Kirill—who took the reins of his church in 2009—Benedict sided several times with the cultural positions of Russian society and the church. The two reportedly maintained warm relations over their shared opposition to secular Western influence and same-sex marriage.

Kirill also made a 2012 visit to Benedict’s native country of Poland, strengthening ties between the Russian Orthodox Church and the Catholic hierarchy there.

Benedict’s successor, Pope Francis, would aim to build on that momentum, seeking cooperation from the Kremlin for the protection of Christians in the Middle East and meeting several times with Putin in efforts to bolster that relationship. However, in 2015, the pair experienced their first signs of tension amid Putin’s invasion of the Ukrainian region of Crimea, where Francis urged him to respect a ceasefire agreement between the two countries and to allow humanitarian workers access to the region.

After a 2019 meeting over Ukraine and Francis’ initial reluctance to denounce the Russian invasion at the start of the war in February, the Vatican eventually took a firm posture against the Kremlin, with Francis in June describing Russian troops as brutal and cruel in an unjust campaign against the Ukrainian people.

“The Russians thought it would all be over in a week,” he said in a transcript published by the Jesuit journal La Civiltà Cattolica. “But they miscalculated. They encountered a brave people, a people who are struggling to survive and who have a history of struggle.”

Newsweek reached out to the Kremlin for comment.