BENEDICT XVI: NEWS, PAPAL TEXTS, PHOTOS AND COMMENTARY

I'm heartbroken and deeply frightened.
Our rock has been replaced by somebody I can't seem to be able to understand.
Humility looks different to me. I feel it's more like an imposition of personal preference.
The wolves our wonderful Papa was referring to on his Inauguration Day are now openly snarling at him - including some cardinals.

Why does he have to carry the brunt of such strong hostility, while Francis is hailed as the true and only savior of the church!?
Joseph Ratzinger is such a beautiful person. Endlessly gentle and so truly humble and sensitive.
What's the purpose of the personal fouls being committed against him left and right!!?
It breaks my heart!!
Where is loyalty, decency and character!? What's with the circus?!
I dont inderstand the hype! Am I too European, or too Nordic? To me, all the simplifications are disrespectful and insulting.
Possibly BXVI is too intelligent for his own good! It might be, that many of his own cardinals didn't 'get' him.
But is intellectual downgrading going to be the answer? Is there enough substance?
I'm seriously scared!!!



I miss our beautiful, gentle Papa who gave his entire being to Christ and his church.
My heart and my prayers go out to him!



Dearest Heike...
Who among us cannot be brought to constant tears these days by the way that our beloved Benedict is being treated now? By almost everyone who has any means to speak or communicate through any of the mass media, but worse, by the cardinals.

I am still too furious to get to the stage where you are, but yes, I think the next stage has to be terror. Terror that the dictatorship of relativism has come to apply to judgments about our Popes, and it's all so arbitrary - it depends on the terms they are free to set and change at any time. And when they start to realize that Pope Francis is firmly against all the positions they stand for, perhaps they will all blame the 'hard line' on Joseph Ratzinger, just as in John Paul II's time, all their hostility to Catholic positions was dumped on his CDF Prefect, not on the Pope.

No one can doubt that the particular Cross God has asked our beloved Benedict to bear has been misunderstanding, misrepresentation, misjudgment and mockery by the most strident voices in the contemporary world - notwithstanding all his pre-eminent achievements as a person, as a priest and as Pope. Unfortunately, the world is too easily swayed by these voices especially if no one speaks up for B16, as no one is doing now, other than Peter Seewald. I feel physically sick every time I think of all the injustice being committed and fomented against our Benedict these days.

When he became Pope, he kept being compared unfavorably to his predecessor. Now that he has taken himself out of the way, he is compared even more unfavorably to his successor. Like you, one must ask - whatever happened to common sense, fairness and decency?

My only consolation is that it hurts us more who love him than it hurts him personally because he knows this is his Cross to bear, as physical affliction was John Paul II's, but even physical affliction too has started to take a heavy toll on him, or he would not have renounced his office.

He has not been spared this Cross, being nailed onto it over and over since he became Archbishop of Munich and all through the years at CDF. As I told a friend, he got it coming into the Papacy, he got it during his Pontificate, and he's getting it worse now that he has taken himself out of the picture.

So we continue to pray for him and love him - and hope he feels all our love in some way. May God give him many more years in joyful prayer and continuing service to the Church.