Benedict

I wrote about him at his retirement: "I never met Benedict 16, and probably never will this side of eternity. I'm not Catholic either. But I read a little of what he wrote over the years, and he seemed a kindred spirit. His disciplines were quite different from mine, and I gather he is far better in his than I in mine, but something about his approach seemed familiar, though exactly how is hard to make explicit."

Robert Barron helped explain some things about him--it's worth watching/reading-the-transcript (a very nice YouTube feature I should have learned about long ago). One thing Barron picked up on was that Benedict was more Augustinian than Thomist--in other words his thought was based more on a church father that both Catholics and Protestants share.