VATICAN CITY — Long before entering Vatican life, Pope Benedict XVI won renown as a theologian and a German university professor, penning more than 40 books and winning a devoted following of students who respected his prodigious memory and brilliant mind.

One thing absent from his resume? Significant time as a parish priest.

Joseph Ratzinger, the future pope, only worked 15 months tending to a flock in the 59 years since taking his vows, instead closing himself in the ivory tower of academia — a background that may help account for his troubled handling of the sex abuse crisis engulfing the church.

For one, it adds to the impression of an out-of-touch pontiff who simply doesn't grasp the enormity of the fury around the world over mounting evidence of sex abuse by priests, and inaction on the part of the Vatican and Benedict himself.

Benedict's very legacy will be shaped by whether this aging pontiff, who recently turned 83, can embrace a new openness and express remorse in straightforward language free of the stilted defensiveness of many Vatican pronouncements to date.

"Pope Ratzinger, more lucid than many of his defenders, must keep from being suffocated by Professor Ratzinger," Marco Politi, a veteran Vatican reporter, wrote in a column last week in the daily Il Fatto.

But in his native Germany, the prominent Der Spiegel magazine has already declared his papacy a failure, speaking in its most recent issue of "the tragedy of a man who had set out to write books and, only near the end of his life, was summoned to assume the Herculean office at the Vatican."

Even the pope's staunchest admirers say he's not the best manager.

Some of Benedict's critics, however, say the pope's real problems lie mainly with a practice of surrounding himself with unqualified advisers.