Pope Benedict XVI led the worldwide Catholic Church.
==== Pope Francis ====Pope Francis, the current pope of the Catholic Church, succeeded Pope Benedict XVI in 2013 as the first pope from the Americas, the first from the Southern Hemisphere, and the first Pope from outside Europe since the Syrian Gregory III, who reigned in the 8th century
In August 2014, Benedict celebrated Mass at the Vatican and met with his former doctoral students, an annual tradition he had kept since the 1970s

