Pope Benedict's resignation brings end to paradoxical papacy |

 The abuse scandals dominated his seven years as leader of the world's Catholics.

 In 2006, he outraged Muslims when, in a scholarly lecture at his old university in Regensburg, he used a quotation to the effect that the contributions made by Muhammad were "only evil and inhuman".

Benedict offended indigenous Latin Americans by claiming that the colonisation of their continent had not involved "the imposition of a foreign culture". 

And he angered Jews by allowing wider use of the old, Tridentine liturgy, which includes a Good Friday plea that they be "delivered from their darkness". That decision stemmed from Benedict's keenness to heal the breach with the ultra-traditionalists of the Society of Saint Pius X. In 2009, another raging controversy erupted when he lifted the excommunication of four of the society's bishops. One was a Holocaust-denying Briton,

Yet another row blew up in 2009 when Benedict argued that the distribution of condoms in Africa, far from alleviating the problem, was actually making it worse

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