How I wish there had been more reactions to the Holy Father's wonderful reminiscence shared with his fellow Frisingians!
The Pope remembers -
and we are nostalgic for
the hope of his generation
by Marina Corradi
Translated from
January 21, 2009
We who were not there can try to imagine that January day in 1946 in Freising. The city's seminary had reopened its doors to students.
Outside, the war was over, Nazism defeated, and Hitler's bunker in Berlin a pile of rubble. The soldiers - those who survived - had returned from the fronts or were coming back from POW camps.
Those who had survived the concentration camps were starting to tell a stunned world what had really happened, and it was only then that the West was getting an idea of the abyss into which the West had fallen - but had now re-emerged, utterly drained but free.
And yet, despite the ruins, the mourning and the hunger, in that new year of 1946 in Europe, for millions of men, that is how it must have been: hell had caved in, and it was the dawn of a new beginning.
In the Freising seminary, the seminarians were back. In cold communal dormitories and bare rooms, but "happy because we were free", Benedict XVI said, reminiscing, to city officials last Saturday, speaking to them in their native German, off the cuff.
And from the heart. The faces of his fellow Bavarians stirred up his memories of that January in 1946 and later of his ordination as a priest. And his life as a young professor-priest, living with his parents once again.
He was a grandfather recounting the past to grandchildren who were not there, and did not know how it was.
But there was a passage, in this affectionate rush of memory, which is very actual: Joseph Ratzinger and his contemporaries knew, in that defeated and burnt-out Germany, that "time and the future belong to Christ, that he had called us, he needed us, that there was a need for us [priests]".
In Freising they had professors who were authoritative scholars "but also teachers", he stressed: men who gave us "the essential, the good bread that we needed in order to receive the into ourselves".
And whoever reads the Holy Father's reminiscence must feel stirred. By the certainty that shows clear and firm through his memories.
In the mourning and shame of a defeated Germany, among the ruins of the thousand-year Reich that had lasted only 13, those young men in Freising were certain of those two essential things: that time and the future belong to Christ, and that the Lord needed them in that place and time. And they had true teachers who shared with them the bread that nourishes the soul.
The only things left to these adolescent heirs of a folly that had plunged the country into an abyss were the essentials necessary to a Christian life: unwavering faith in a God to whom human destinies matter, and teachers to lead them by the hand.
What many of our children today do not have. That which, although we may have given them so much materially, we have often failed to provide.
"We knew that we were needed," the Pope said. How many 20-year-olds today have any such awareness or certainty! And how many - worn down perhaps by unemployment or precarious labor or lack of goals, feel useless, their hopes down to a minimum, unable to do anything positive!
No, it is not envy that stirs us up about the Pope's memories. Because how could we envy them who had been children thrown into in the deepest abyss of our history, and whose brothers and friends had not perhaps survived the abyss?
But what we feel is a nostalgia for the hopes they felt in that dawn of the postwar-era, the hope one feels so poignantly in the memories of one who had been a boy 64 years ago. It was as if, after a terrible storm, the storm clouds recede in defeat, and the skies clear up again, bright and calm.
One imagines it must have felt that way on January 3, 1946, for the seminarians of Freising. With hell behind them, yet in the chilly corridors, the excited voices of innocent youth, eager to begin a new and different era. Audacious in their one certainty: time and the future belong to Christ.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 23/01/2010 20:47]