BENEDICT XVI: NEWS, PAPAL TEXTS, PHOTOS AND COMMENTARY

My remarks in the 4/13/post about Benedict XVI who Georg Gaenswein says will not step into the AL controversy at all because he feels,
as unbelievable as it sounds, that 'it is all so far removed from him', must henceforth be part of the unavoidable context of all
subsequent posts I make about the emeritus Pope. I will continue to post the positive accounts of him, without glossing over the
inevitable instances of negativity when they are expressed fairly and without malice.




The pope emeritus up close
By Fr. Antonio Tarzia
Former Director of Edizioni San Paolo
Translated from

April 13, 2017

Edizioni San Paolo is a major Cahtolic publishing house that is par t of the Italian multimedia empire run by the male order of Society of St. Paul, a congregation founded in 1914. Its female branch runs a similar publishing house called Edizioni Pauline. Famiglia Cristiana, founded in 1931, is the society's weekly general magazine, reputed to be Italy's most widely circulated in its genre.

Ninety years of grace, ninety years of Christian testimony and a life lived in the service of the community and the Church.

Among the exceptional gifts attributed by friends and his closest co-workers to the man Joseph Ratzinger, we always find his perfect mental lucidity, his impressive ability to synthesize ideas and the charity he lives daily. Of the Beatitudes cited in Matthew (5,3-10), thosewhich he embodies best are: Blessed are the meek, blessed are the pure in heart, and blessed are those who work for peace.

I can attest to all this personally, having had the honor to know him for more thn 30 years now, and to have worked with him a long time when, as a l Cardinal, Joseph Ratzinger became one of the principal and most appreciated authors of Edizioni San Paolo, during the years when I was director of the publishing house.

Of his gentleness, I remember the minor contretemps at the presentation of his book RAPPORTO SULLA FEDE (later published in English as THE RATZINGER REPORT), published by us in 1985. It was a dialog with journalist Vittorio Messori, who was at the time the editor of the San paolo magazine JESUS. The book was a great publishing success. We had organized the presentation with Mons. Josef Clemens,then secretary to the cardinal, later Bishop and secretary of the Pontifical Council for the Laity [I wonder what Clemens’s position is ,now that the council has been absorbedd into the super-dicastery headed by the ultrahyperBergoglian Cardinal Farrell], with a gathering of journalists, photographers and the general public at the Augustinianum congress center in Rome.

We had a full house, including the upper levels, with many bishops and cardinals present. Uninvited but arriving preceded by a uniformed motorcycle escort was the Hon. Oscar Luigi Scalfaro, then minister of the Interior. He said good-humoredly, “I was told by the law enforcement people that there is a gathering here of cardinals and bishops. I wanted to check for myself that it was not a conclave…” Cardinal Ratzinger smiled, shook his hand and returned his greeting, but he appeared to be very uneasy about the exaggeration. [Who would have thought then that 20 years later, the cardinal would emerge pope from the first Conclave of the 21st millennium?]

His shyness was quite evident a few years later in Anacapri where we had travelled to receive the Premio San Michele for snother Ratzinger book. In the city’s Piazza Boffe, on a sunny morning, two boys were playing when the younger of the two noticed the arrival of a group of people, in the mmdist of who was Cardinal Ratzinger dressed in red with his pectoral cross.

“Who is that man? Who is he?”, the boy asked. And the older one cried out, “It is the Pope! The Pope is here!” And perhaps intimidated, they scampered away into an alley.

Psalm 8 came to my mind: “O Lord, our Lord, how awesome is your name through all the earth! I will sing your majest above the heavens with the mouths of babes and infants!” The cardinal was red with embarrassment and sought to change the subject. But an enthusiastic discussion had developed among the group accompanying him (author Marco Roncalli, grandson of John XXIII; journalist Donatella Trotta of Il Mattino; Mons,. Clemens, and Raffaele Vaca, sponsor of the prestigious literary prize given annually). With the conclusion that if the boy’s ‘prophecy’ should ever come true, then Prof. Vaca would be obliged to put up a memorial on a wall in the piazza to commemorate the occasion.

And that was exaclty what happened in 2006, one year after the cardinal was elected Supreme Pontiff. The mayor of Ancapri surrounded by his townspeople put up the commemorative plaque in Piazza Boffe.

For over 20 years, a partnership developed between our publishing house and the cardinal. Almost every year, we published a new Ratzinger book not just for the bookstores but also for the annual Frankfurt Book Fair, the Buchmesse. Among these, we published his many official lectures given around the world ,as well as the homilies that the cardinal gave every Thursday at the weekly Mass he offered at Santa Maria della Pieta, the church of the Collegio Teutonico (German College) inside the Vatican. [Well, imagine that! Here I have been wondering all these years if anyone ever tape recorded those homilies or at least compiled the texts – and it turns out that Edizioni San Paolo did. How many, and for how long, I must now research, because I had estimated that in 22 years, assuming the cardinal as in Rome 40 weeks of every year, that would have been more than 800 homilies. I doubt any cardinal can boast of a similar record!]

His minute handwriting in perfect German was always clear and profound, well documented, and oriented towards a future of Christian peace and holiness. All these books were translated into many languages, some in an incredible number of languages. RAPPORTO SULLA FEDE in more than 15, and his autobiography LA MIA VITA (published in English as MILESTONES), published in 1997 in at least 45 languages. [On his 70th birthday, he decided to recount the first 50 years of his life, ending the account at the time he was asked by John Paul IIto come to Rome to head the CDF].

Every year, his royalties from the books were invested in charitable causes and institutions, in missions, and in orphanages and cloistered convents in Eastern Europe. One year, he failed to deliver a book as expected. He said he had made a vow because as CDF Prefect, he had just asked a priest to keep silent about a controversial teaching for one year, and he offered his vow so that the priest might have the strength to obey the order in charity and sincerity. That priest, it turns out, was the Brazilian theologian Leonardo Boff. [Does it mean the cardinal made a vow not to write anything himself for a year because he had asked that of Boff? Wow!]

In 1992, I was with Cardinal Ratzinger in Bassano del Grappa when he receive an International Prize for Catholic Culture ,which came with a gold medal. Enrico Scalco, president of the prize-giving organization, also gave him, by statute, a case of grappa with personalized labels. [ [Grappa is an Italian brandy distilled from everything left over after grapes are pressed for winemaking and has 35-60 percent alcolhol by volume.]

With a complicit smile, the cardinal accepted the grappa, saying, “I will share it with my co-workers because I do not drink alcohol. But I know that the grappa of Bassano is very good”. [ [Bassano in northern Italy is where grappa was first distilled in the first century AD.[ We all knew that the cardinal only drank orange juice or tea at table, although he does drink a sip of wine or beer at official functions.

The pope’s fondness for cats is well-known. I remember that in his house in Pentling, there were two – one in bronze is on a pedestal in the garden near the fountain with the Madonna and the ‘barque of the Church’, also in bronze, with three persons on board. “They are not apostles,” the cardinal’s sister Maria told me. “They are the Ratzinger siblings – George, Joseph and me. A gift from the artist Cristina Stadler”.

The other cat, of white ceramic, is in the house, sitting guard over the piano which the cardinal plays now and then for relaxation – liturgical hymns or pieces by Mozart or Beethoven. One day, coming back from Mass, the cardinal placed his zucchetto on the cat’s head, and thereafter, the cat was referred to as ‘His Eminence, the White Cat”.

My most recent encounter with His Holiness was last March 23. I visited him at Mater Ecclesiae, where he spends his days listening to the Wrd of God and praying in thanksgiving and supplication for the Church and mankind. After an hour of affectionate chatting, over memories, current events and future projects, he asked me, “So when shall I see you again?”

“Whenever you wish, Holiness. Just have someone call me and I will come. But for sure, I will ask you for an audience in two years for a special blessing”.

“In two years --- I do not know if I will still be around,” I heard him murmur, and it seemed to me he also closed his eyes.

“Holiness, in two years, I will mark 50 years of saying Mass and I will need a special blessing”.

Looking serene, with a smile and great tenderness, he said to me: “Fifty years as priest! In that case, I will wait for it!” I kissed his hands enfolded in mine, and I left the monastery very moved and very happy.

So now, Holiness, I wish to greet you on your 90th birthday with the beautiful Jewish greeting, “May you live t0 120 like Moses!” And I might add, going beyond Leo XIII, the longest-lived pope in history, who returned to the Father;s house at the age of 93. All the best, Your Holiness!


What Fr. Tarzia does not mention is that, in fact, Edizioni Paoline has come out with a new biography of the Emeritus Pope in time for his 90th birthday. It was written by the Vaticanista of RAI's TG-2 (the primetime newscast of Italian state TV's second channel)...



Benedict XVI: The faith and prophecy
of the firs Emeritus Pope in history
by Giovan Battista Brunori
Translated from his Preface to the book

To write a book on Benedict XVI also means to answer the question: Who is Joseph Ratzinger really? Who is this man who left the papacy after having led the Church through terrible crises for almost eight years?

The idea each of us may have had of Joseph Ratzinger-Benedict XVI may have shattered somewhat on February 11, 2013. His renunciation of the Papacy – one of the most dirompenti gestures ever in the history of the Church – projected into the modern age that which has been called ‘the last absolute monarchy on the planet’.

It was a revolutionary act, a genuine act of reform executed bu a pope who had been called ‘the standard bearer of Tradition’, also the Panzerkardinal [with its connotation of imperviousness to external attack], throwing into confusion both his progressivist adversaries as well as ‘Ratzingerians’ themselves.

It is not a simple task to write the biography of a pope who is still alive, made more difficult in that he is also the first Emeritus Pope in history, still active [???] in his retirement at the Mater Ecclesiae monastery inside the Vatican…

Therefore I have sought to attentively re-read his what has been written about his life and person, as well as his formidable body of writings, and have spoken to many personages who have known him from up close and have worked closely with him, in order to lay down the multiple pieces of a mosaic in order to show the face of a man who for years has inspired and continues to inspire lively debate – much loved and esteemed by so many faithful but who has also had many enemies.

A brilliant European intellectual who has stimulated the circulation of ideas and indicated a path to the future, relying on the sources upon which Catholic identity rests – Sacred Scriptures above all, and the Fathers of the Church, especially St. Augustine.

To a world that is increasingly uncertain and fearful, driven into a crisis of identity by mass migrations [that are changing national cultures in the West dramatically and over the short run], a world turned evil and forced to defend itself from the active hatred of terrorists who have turned their right to believe into a right to kill as their duty to that belief, Joseph Ratzinger has responded by presenting to everyone ‘the Christian difference’: that love is the true face of Christianity.

God is love, he reaffirmed in his first encyclical Deus caritas est. He sought dialog with other religions but without excluding their essential differences in [unspoken] parentheses, without renouncing the Christian identity and to the Christian claim “to have received as a gift from God, in Christ, the definitive and complete revelation of the mystery of salvation”.

But above all, he has shown what truly matters – what is both the horizon and the future of the Church – is quaerere Deum, seeking God, which was the ulterior motive of the Benedictine monks who in the difficult circumstance of the Early (Dark) Middle Ages, became the points of light – with their prayer and work in the fields and their legendary libraries which conserved the treasures of classical culture, transmitting love for culture, for the study of Scriptures and literary classics, for music and song, while promoting a spirit of welcome for strangers and collaboration among all members of society, thus laying the basis for a culture that became the roots of European and Western civilization – a Christian civilization that has now become increasingly fragile.

This is a man who changed and innovated the Church with his constant exhortation for a return to the essentials of faith, to dust off the ashes laid by time over the Christian experience that had made it more opaque, that had suffocated the original fire that had made it irresistible for most of the past 2000 years.

The clarity and linearity of the doctrine he reaffirmed was conveyed to the world by the Holy See which, however, appeared tp be a giant with feet of clay as the Roman Curia, in crisis after crisis, showed itself weak and inadequate in its task of assisting the Pope in the governance of the Church.

Thus, I have also sought to identify and describe the common thread that runs through the many acts and writings of a pope of ideas rather than gestures, of a theologian-pope and a professor-pope rather than an administrator-pope. He is a complex figure who is at the same time simple and linear, an expression of that evangelical simplicity which is the opposite of superficial simplicity but is rather the fruit of authentic spirituality.

I have sought to write the biography of a man who was ever aware he was not a ‘charismatic’ figure in the media sense, one not able to dominate the stage as his predecessor did, but who could and did move the hearts and minds of his audience with the depth of his thinking, his crystalline faith, his spiritually rich words that proposed ideas and values disseminated by the force of reason, but without arrogance nor timidity.

Therefore this is a biography of facts, of events and encounters that have marked the personal history of Joseph Ratzinger-Benedict XVI, but also the narration of his thoughts, his reflections on the Church and the world today, his prophecies of the future, the studies into which from his seminary days he had plunged himself with enthusiasm (which I have tried to follow through its rapid and passionate course over the years) – from his Bavarian origins to his speedy rise in his academic career, and to the vertiginous succession of the prestigious offices he was called on to fulfill in the Church.

Loved by countless admirers, author of worldwide best-sellers on the faith, promoter of an ‘innovative restoration’ as historian Robert Regoli describes in his 2016 biography of the emeritus Pope, many have also feared, opposed, defamed, misinterpreted, misunderstood [or not understood at all] him.

Joseph Ratzinger has been himself ‘a sign of contradiction’, but even in the human ‘contradictions’ during his short and often difficult Pontificate, he has sown seeds destined to flourish, as will no doubt be seen more clearly when time has dispelled the fog of polemic that has often obscured [and continues to obscure] the very real achievements of his Petrine ministry.

A Pope considered by many as destined to be a Doctor of the Church. A man who held his hand firm on the tiller of the Church through stormy waters as Arcbishop, Prefect of the CDF and then as Supreme Pontiff.

A Pope who led the Barque of Peter on a course of transparency, reforming the IOR and battling priestly sex offenses, thus starting the arduous process of cleaning up the filth in the Church that he had denounced on world TV during his Good Friday Via Crucis meditations and prayers just two weeks before the death of John Paul II.