Pope Benedict XVI is not the first person to have won praise for quitting his job. What is unusual in the Pope's case is that the praise is sincerely meant – it isn't a backhand way of saying that he didn't do his job well.
Benedict has his critics. But fans as well as critics hailed his announcement last month that he would step down to allow the College of Cardinals elect his successor. Both fans and critics meant something very specific by that praise.
Papal resignations have been extremely rare: the last time a pope resigned was in 1294, when after a brief pontificate Celestine V decided to become a hermit. (By some reckonings Gregory XII was the last pope to resign, in 1415, but he was forced to do so. Benedict's announcement, like Celestine's, was his own choice.)
As is sometimes the case with announcements from the Vatican, the Pope's decision caused a flurry of media speculation: did he jump or was he pushed? All sorts of conspiracy theories have appeared, to do with the state of Vatican finances, rivalries between cardinals, the theft of documents by Benedict's butler, or some combination of these things.
As is the way with conspiracy theories, however, notably few facts have been cited in support of them. There is no reason not to accept the reason offered by the 85-year-old Benedict: that he was keenly aware of becoming frail as he grows older, and wanted to relinquish the papacy before it became an intolerable mental and physical burden.
Hence the chorus of praise. By his announcement, Benedict, who has mostly been seen as a staunch conservative since he was elected to succeed Pope John Paul II in 2005, has become a great papal innovator. Hitherto, the presumption has been that the papacy is a job for life, and that with it may well come suffering, including the sufferings of age. Popes were expected to put up with it, without complaint.
As modern medicine extends life expectancy, however, that expectation has raised the prospect not only of frail popes but of senile ones, unable to function and with the government of the Church paralysed around them. Benedict has junked that prospect, and his example paves the way for his successors to resign, too.
Among other things, it may mean that conclaves will be less reluctant to elect younger men, because now choosing a comparatively young pope is less likely to mean electing someone who will be in the job for a very long time. So Benedict the conservative confounded expectations. (Though perhaps the announcement should have caused less surprise: during his pontificate he twice prayed at the tomb of Celestine V, which in retrospect may be seen as a broad hint about his intentions.) It was not the first time he had done so.
Benedict's reputation as a hardline upholder of traditional teaching was forged under John Paul II, whom he served as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Cardinal Josef Ratzinger, as Benedict was then known, kept theologians under close scrutiny, and some were censured.
This insistence on holding the line continued after Josef Ratzinger became pope, but he adopted a more pastoral approach that surprised many. Most famously, he invited the liberal theologian Hans Kung to the Vatican, where the two men, who had worked together as advisers to the bishops of the Second Vatican Council in 1962-65, discussed their differences over a leisurely lunch.
Those differences were not resolved, but by renewing his acquaintance with Kung in this way Benedict signalled that he did not want to make the Church's critics feel excluded from the mainstream of Catholic life.
Sometimes this desire to be inclusive worked less well. When Benedict welcomed back into communion with the Church four bishops associated with the ultra-traditionalist Society of St Pius X, what might have been an act of reconciliation turned into a public-relations disaster, when one of the bishops was revealed to be a Holocaust denier.
As a German who had grown to maturity during World War II, and had since many times condemned the Holocaust and the legacy of Christian anti-Semitism, Benedict was stung by the criticism. But he could hardly evade responsibility for the storm of bad publicity.
The clerical sex-abuse crisis that has spread through the Church in recent decades also plunged Benedict into controversy. More than once he publicly admitted that the church had made 'grave errors of leadership', and apologised to victims; yet victims and their advocates demanded to know why some of those who had made the 'grave errors' seemed to have gone unpunished.
That question will now have to be answered by Benedict's successor. However it is answered, Benedict XVI will be remembered as a Pope who did not easily fit the stereotype that both his critics and his admirers liked to prescribe for him.
For the great majority of Catholics, Benedict's most direct legacy will be experienced every Sunday, in the new translations of the Mass. His hope was that the new texts would, over time, foster a more fervent celebration of the liturgy. His critics fear that the opposite may be true. That remains to be seen, but predictions of a rush from the pews have not been fulfilled.