Benedictus XVI Resin Incense — Soft Liturgical Blend

A soft, gentle resin incense composed in homage to Pope Benedict XVI, built to give off a quiet fragrance with abundant smoke.

The character of the blend is the opposite of an intense aromatic: a low 1/5 fragrance carried by generous, slow-burning smoke. That balance was chosen deliberately, to suit solemn papal and pontifical liturgies in which the visual presence of incense matters as much as the perfume. It was this composition that Pope Francis used at the Mass marking the beginning of his pontificate in March 2013 — a quiet tribute, through scent, from one pope to his predecessor.

Joseph Ratzinger was born in 1927 in Marktl am Inn, Bavaria, and ordained a priest in 1951. A theologian of the Second Vatican Council, he served as Archbishop of Munich and Freising and as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith under John Paul II before his election as Pope Benedict XVI on April 19, 2005. His pontificate produced three encyclicals — Deus Caritas Est, Spe Salvi, and Caritas in Veritate — and his Jesus of Nazareth trilogy. He resigned the papacy on February 28, 2013, the first pope to do so in nearly six hundred years, and died on December 31, 2022.

• Intensity: 1/5
• Scent notes: Soft, gentle
• Type: Italian-style resin incense

"Cooperatores Veritatis" (Co-workers of the Truth) — his episcopal motto, taken from the Third Letter of John.