I feel like Benedict/Ratzinger is a really underrated figure in all of this. Online discussion of philosophy and theology was really taking off in the 2010s and Benedict was there to kickstart a lot of discussions that are still taking place to this day. Now, 10 or 15 years later, it's kind of reaching maturity and escaping into the normalfag sphere, hence the turn towards serious discussion of Christianity after atheism was the default mode of online for so long.

Benedict is also fairly important since he's basically a lifelong refutation of the idea that you have to be stupid to be a Christian. The man was one of the great minds of the 20th Century.