Yet another 'dated' translation that nonetheless I must post -
Paul Badde's beautiful memoir of his friend, the cardinal...
A last farewell:
Joachim Meisner, RIP
By Paul Badde
Translated from the German service of
CATHOLIC NEWS AGENCY
VATICAN CITY, July 6, 2017 (CNA- Deutsch) – "You must always have your bags packed", Cardinal Joachim Meisner said to me once, in March 1978, when I met him at St. Peter's Square after I had a small accident that he had heard of.
Yesterday, he surely had his bags packed, as we learned from the circumstances of his unexpected death. The weekend before, Archbishop Gaenswein had met him by chance in Bad Fuessing, a Bavarian resort, a bit tired but firm as ever. And day before yesterday, we learn from Gaenswein, Meisner had spoken by phone with the Emeritus Pope, and then he was found dead early the next morning, with his breviary in hand, apparently preparing for his daily Mass ,which he was destined to celebrate in heaven.
A passionate priest like Cardinal Meisner could not have had a more beautiful death – while in prayer! Even so, the mourning for the loss of this giant among German bishops is great. A few weeks ago, he had called me because he wanted to have a photograph of Benedict XVI that he had seen in Vatikan-Magazin. He said not a word about the fact that Pope Francis still refused to grant an audience to him and his fellow DUBIA cardinals. It never occurred to me that this would be our farewell conversation!
He was a close friend of John Paul II, who loved and praised his "Slavic soul". But that did not keep him from frankly contradicting the Polish Pope when he disagreed with him. Likewise, he also contradicted Benedict XVI when he felt he had to. Which is exactly what he did, too, with Benedict's successor [
over the DUBIA].
But before and immediately after Cardinal Ratzinger was elected pope in April 2005, Cardinal Meisner had categorically and insistently told him that it was his absolute duty to accept his election as the Successor to Peter, after Meisner had discovered and hastened to counteract a conspiracy by the so-called Sankt-Gallen group to stop Ratzinger's election. In this way, he was a pope-maker - alongside the Holy Spirit, of course.
"Today I fought as I never have in my whole life," he said to me as we walked from the Sistine Chapel to his lodgings on the Janiculum Hill that night. He would not say more. But the fierceness of that fight was still to be seen on his face. He could be very vehement in German, but without the necessary language skills, it was something else to pursue a passionate campaign among the polyglot cardinals of the world . And the toll it took on him is visible in a remarkable photograph taken right after the election, as the cardinals gathered in the Sala Ducale next to the Sistine Chapel, with the new white-clad Pope in the center - to his right about a meter away, was Joachim Meisner, as if he did not dare bother the new pope, while the rest of the cardinals appeared to press around the duo.
We had become particularly close when on April 4, 2005 – two days after the death of John Paul II - we undertook a trip that had been planned in January and which the cardinal really wanted to make : A visit to Manoppello to see the remarkable icon called Il Santo Volto (The Holy Face of Christ). It seemed like a crazy trip! While the media from all around the world were gathering in Rome for the pope's funeral, we were traveling at seven a.m. on the autostrada to northeast Italy to visit a rather forgotten shrine on the Adriatic coast. My colleagues in Berlin
[then, as now, Badde writes for the Berlin-based newspaper Die Welt] were stunned when they heard of this.
In Manoppello, the cardinal, despite his normal coolness, was overwhelmed by the experience.
"The Face is the monstrance of the Heart. The heart of God is visible in the Holy Face".
+ Joachim Card. Meisner, Erzbischof v. Köln
Pax vobis!
4.4.2005
he wrote on the guestbook of the shrine, with the reliquary holding the Precious Veil next to him.
"Today I met the resurrected Lord," he said later that day to Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, dean of the College of Cardinals. That day was the precursor of the latter's own 'visit to the authentic image of the human face of God' that, after his election, Benedict XVI would not stop praising. Then he himself – following in Meisner's footsteps – visited Manoppello on September 1, 2006, the first pope to do so in 400 years.
That summer of 2005, if my memory serves me right, Cardinal Meisner sent half of the German bishops' conference members on a bus from Rome to the Abruzzo to venerate the Veil with the Holy Face. Though all of them shared the same Episcopal dignity as Meisner, not everyone shared his firm faith in every word of the Christian creed, that was considered even by some Catholic bishops 'unbelievable' [
in the literal sense of 'not to be believed']. But he believed the Creed simply and purely. Many of his colleagues often smiled at his childlike belief, and in secret, they considered him 'one of those unenlightened pastors from East Germany' who had not yet assimilated the new theological novelties in the West.
There was something to that. He never looked at Sacred Scripture with clever skepticism. He lived in Scripture, and in the world of saints, especially in the world of his much-beloved Mother of God. And it is doubtless she who welcomed him at the door to heaven, perhaps along with John Paul II, who like Joachim of Breslau, had dedicated his life to Mary: TOTUS TUUS.
I had been with the cardinal at the Holy Sephulcher in Jerusalem, at the chapel of Golgotha, in the Abbey of the Dormition on Zion hill, in Bethlehem, on the Lake of Galilee – and always in Rome. In Toronto in the summer of 1972, he said to me one early morning that the next World Youth Day in Cologne would be 'a holy carnival'. At the Salesian convent in Beit Jallah near Bethlehem 17 years ago, he was so impressed with the faith of the students that he thought at any moment, St. John Bosco himself would walk through the refectory door.
How many times he had been for me a kind of last resort, whenever I had written an article for
Die Welt and I had doubts – Can I really, in full conscience, write what I did? Are my sources reliable? And he would almost always encourage me, "Go ahead!", and sometimes jestingly, "You described it just right, even if it was really more dramatic!"
In St. Peter's Basilica, for a long time, we had the same confessor (whom he thought was generally too liberal about the rather conservative sins that he - and me, as well - confessed). And once, in front of Peter's tomb, he confided to me that one of his closest associates in priest formation had just confessed to him that he was homosexual and wanted to live so openly.
Nothing human was alien to him. "Joachim, you did well!" was the title of the last article we devoted to him in Vatikan-Magazin. They were words his beloved mother would say to him when he was a child, and we gladly say it to him this last time.
After our trip to Manopello on April 4, 2005, we prayed the rosary together an arm's length away from the bier of the deceased Holy Father in the Sala Clementina. It was the third and final rosary we prayed together that day – earlier we prayed it during the trip to Mannopello, and then once again on the return trip.
On that day, despite the trip he and I made, I became the only journalist in Rome who was able to see the deceased Pope so near since he died, and I reported it for my paper.
And now, that great saint, without hesitation, must have received the cardinal in audience right away in the heavenly Jerusalem, an audience denied to him to the end by a successor to John Paul in a Rome that has become too restrictive.
These two friends who both served the beleaguered Church of Christ on earth are together again, but in the choir of angels and saints, closer than they could ever be before.
I would be happy to see him again. Already, I miss him very much.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 23/07/2017 13:24]