It seems impolite to say so, given Pope Benedict XVI’s chastened retreat to the shadows of the Vatican, back in 2013, but his papacy was a failed one. For nearly eight years, he led the Catholic Church in the broad collapse of its moral authority, from the crisis of criminal priests to the further alienation of women to the blatant dysfunction of the Church’s own bureaucracy. Still, there is one sense in which Benedict succeeded. After a career spent railing against relativism, he relativized the world’s last divine-right office, becoming the first Pope since 1415 to resign and giving his successor, Francis, the sway that he so astonishingly exploits today. At the end, the self-styled Pope Emeritus, still dressed in his white robes, lifted off from the Vatican in a white helicopter, which took him to Castel Gandolfo, the papal vacation palace on a lake outside Rome. He assumed the quiet, cloistered existence of a retired prelate. Today, he has broken his silence with “Last Testament,” a late-in-life attempt at personal reckoning that amounts, instead, to a reiteration of the ethical detachment that undercut him from the start.

The new book is drawn from a series of interviews with the German journalist Peter Seewald. Throughout it, the former Pope displays an astounding emotional and religious indifference. If I reiterate a litany here of Benedict’s well-known controversies—if I seem to be rehashing hackneyed debates—it is only because he himself revisits them in this book, but always to defend, never to reëxamine, much less to regret. Seewald gets to the root of Benedict’s problems about a third of the way through the book, when he asks him why his voluminous writings seldom address Nazism. “Well, the eyes are always looking to the future,” Benedict replies. “And it was not specifically my topic.” Really? The Pope Emeritus, né Joseph Ratzinger, came of age wearing the uniform of a Wehrmacht soldier; he was conscripted at the age of seventeen, served in an anti-aircraft unit, deserted shortly before Germany’s surrender, and was captured by Allied forces, then briefly held as a P.O.W. His assessment of the Nazi years should, as a result, have special gravity, yet he blithely says that such a reckoning is “not my task.” That distancing reply—from a German who feels no need to look back—meshes with his impulse to absolve Catholic authorities of any failure during the Holocaust.

Benedict remembers the war-era Church as a “place of resistance,” and in important ways that was true. (Pius XII, the Pope at the time, may have been secretly supportive of an early plot to overthrow Hitler.) In “Last Testament,” Benedict lingers on the figure of Michael von Faulhaber, the longtime Cardinal Archbishop of Munich, who ordained young Ratzinger to the priesthood, in 1951. Faulhaber often receives praise for a series of Advent sermons he gave in 1933, which the Vatican has characterized as an exemplary “rejection of the Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda.” But Faulhaber’s real task, as he himself made clear, was to defend not living Jewish persons but Jewish texts—namely, the Old Testament, which Hitler-friendly Christians wanted expunged from the Bible. Faulhaber’s own secretary insisted that, in speaking of ancient Israel, the cardinal “had not taken a position with regard to the Jewish question of today.” In response to a priest who wanted the Church to forthrightly condemn the Nazis’ persecutions, Faulhaber wrote, “The Jews can help themselves. Why should the Jews expect help from the Church?” Benedict, in looking back, explains that some Catholics, including his own father, wanted more from the cardinal. But his present assessment of Faulhaber and other prelates is wholly uncritical. For Benedict, the defense of Jews against the genocide was, and continues to be, a moral mandate of no significance to Catholicism. If there was official Church resistance, it was only for the Church itself.

The same aloofness marks the rest of Benedict’s account, from his start as a young-turk theologian to the tumultuous years of his pontificate. At the Second Vatican Council, he was party to the liberal overthrow of the entrenched bureaucracy of the Curia. But no sooner did the Council end, in 1965, than Ratzinger aligned himself with those insisting that no substantial change—what he calls elsewhere “a hermeneutic of discontinuity and rupture”—had taken place. Subsequently, as Cardinal Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Ratzinger was “God’s Rottweiler,” the bête noir of liberal Catholicism, cracking down on liberation theology, nuns regarded as “radical feminists,” and the “intrinsic moral evil” of homosexuality. Amazingly, he writes, about his time as Cardinal Prefect, “I deliberately never wrote any of the documents of the office myself, so that my opinion does not surface; otherwise I would be attempting to disseminate and enforce my own private theology.” As if anticipating the reader’s inevitably incredulous reaction, he adds, “Of course, I was a co-worker and did some critical redrafting.”

And yet Ratzinger’s theology was evident in the many fierce promulgations that were issued above his signature. In 1995, he went beyond Pope John Paul II’s rejection of women’s ordination to declare that the prohibition was “set forth infallibly,” a doctrinal solemnizing that has tied the hands of the otherwise liberalizing Pope Francis, who issued his own reiteration of the ban early this month. The Cardinal Prefect even scowled at John Paul II for organizing the first World Day of Prayer for Peace, in 1986, in which more than a hundred and fifty religious leaders were invited to Assisi. “This cannot be the model!” Ratzinger told a newspaper reporter at the time. Now he tells Seewald, with surprising equanimity, that John Paul “knew that I took a slightly different line.”

Once he was Pope, Ratzinger’s different line led him, in 2009, to lift the excommunication of the traditionalist cleric Richard Williamson, a notorious Holocaust denier, sparking a controversy he now dismisses as “stupid,” and to denigrate Islam just after the fifth anniversary of 9/11, repeating a medieval slur that led to worldwide protests by Muslims, and about which Benedict now seems cavalier. (“I just found it very interesting to bring up this part of a five-hundred-year-old dialogue for discussion,” he says.) Benedict should get credit for defrocking four hundred sexually abusive priests during his papacy, although, again showing a present failure to appreciate the moral scale of past mistakes, he describes to Seewald his dread of “premature intervention” in abuse cases and the need to “go about it slowly and cautiously.” More to the point, he seems utterly disconnected from the consequences of his instruction, as Cardinal Prefect in 2001—just as the Boston Globe was laying bare the scandal—that priestly sex-abuse cases “are subject to the pontifical secret,” a ruling that prompted bishops to quietly bring such matters to the Vatican, not to civil authorities. That, of course, was the bishops’ essential failure.

The very end of Pope Benedict’s pontificate was marked by a storm of controversies, from the Vatileaks scandal, perpetrated by his personal valet, to revelations of grievous Vatican Bank corruptions to insinuations about the influence of a “gay lobby” inside the Vatican bureaucracy to whispers about rebellions against the Pope from within the Curia itself. At a time when the captain of an Italian cruise liner ran his vessel aground and jumped ship, Benedict was widely seen as the captain of a vessel (the bark of St. Peter?) dangerously adrift. But that is not his assessment. “That I was, so to speak, the problem for the Church, this was not and is not my view,” he tells Seewald. About the crises that all but destroyed the moral authority of Roman Catholicism, he calmly says, “One has to reckon with such things in human beings. I am not aware of any failures on my part.”