From left, Fr Stangl, B16, Fr Schweiger, and Manfred Hartl.
Once again, thanks to Beatrice....
A visit to Benedict XVI
As a 90th birthday treat, a Bavarian parish sends
its former pastor to visit his colleague from
the Munich archdioceses’s ‘class of 1951’ ordinands
Translated and adapted from
November 6, 2017
Ruhpolding – As we reported in October on his 90th birthday, the parish’s spiritual adviser, Fr. Bernhard Schweiger, received many good wishes. But as a special gift, his parish came up with something truly memorable: they enabled him to travel to Rome to visit Emeritus Pope Benedict XVI.
Schweiger was among the 41 men who were ordained priests along with Joseph Ratzinger in 1951. During the almost quarter century that the latter was Prefect of the CDF, his classmates often travelled to Rome to visit him, and Schweiger was among those visited most often. As pope and even after his retirement, Benedict XVI continued to receive his classmates in private. But the circle of survivors from the class of 1951 has steadily declined until only Schweiger came to visit him last year.
[The other well-known survivors of that class are, of course, Georg Ratzinger, and the Ratzinger brothers’ good friend, Rupert Berger.] And when he came back to Ruhpolding at the time, he told himself, “This is the last time – it is a very strenuous trip for me now”.
[He looks very well and fit in the photo, though.]
But on his 90th birthday, it was thought the parish should make it possible for him to return to Rome. Thus, current parish priest Otto Stangl and the chairman of the parish council Manfred Hartl travelled with Schweiger to Rome, having earlier received an invitation to Mass and breakfast at Mater Ecclesiae.
Fr Stangl said, »It was a beautiful journey, with wonderful autumn weather, pleasant experiences, where we were in a neighborhood very close to St. Peter's Square«.
The day after they arrived was the day for their visit to Mater Ecclesiae. Fathers Schweiger and Stangl were able to concelebrate Mass with Benedict XVI, after which, they had breakfast together.
"It was a special experience for me to see how happy they were together, Fr. Schweiger and Pope Benedict,” Fr.Stangl said. Before they left, the emeritus Pope asked them to extend his greetings and blessing for everyone in Ruhpolding.
Any Bennadict who has tried to collect as many photographs as one could of Joseph Ratzinger especially in his early years would immediately have recognized the place name Ruhpolding, which is a mountainous municipality in the Traunstein district of southeastern Bavaria. Traunstein was, of course, Joseph Ratzinger’s favorite childhood home, because it is also where the Ratzinger lived the longest, from when Joseph was just a schoolboy to when he was ordained a priest.
A few photos from 1952 show the fairly new priest Ratzinger visiting Ruhpolding to say an outdoor Mass on a mountaintop with the village folk.
Today, Ruhpolding remains a tiny town of 6,400 people, but since 1948, it has been a famous spa and tourist resort, especially for winter sports.
I thought I would put in this other 'early Ratzinger' photos I came across while rummaging online for the Ruhpolding photos:
It's the 20-year-old still seminarian Joseph Ratzinger who was invited by his friend and former seminary mentor Alfred Laepple (center in right photo) to be his master of ceremonies at the latter's first Mass in his hometown of Partenkirchen, an even more famous winter resort than Ruhpolding, as it was once the site of a pre-war Winter Olympics. (It boggles the mind that at that time, he had already translated Thomas Aquinas's treatise on love from Latin to German, as one of the assignments Laepple had given him in the seminary. It was also Laepple who introduced Ratzinger to the work of John Henry Newman.)