Angela Ambrogetti, in her blog today on the unexpected death of her colleague, Giuseppe De Carli, shares an anecdote that he had shared with her about Cardinal Ratzinger.
Ciao, Giuseppe!
And a parting anecdote
he shared about the cardinal's cat
Translated from
July 13, 2010
It was 2004. For some time, there had been talk of an imminent conclave because John Paul II's health appeared to be worsening alarmingly. Each of us Vaticanisti started compiling biographies of the
papabili.
Giuseppe De Carli made his own list of 'eminences' and started to interview each of them - both the influential cardinals of John Paul's Pontificate as well as the 'provocateurs'.
[I suppose Cardinal Ratzinger would have fit both categories!]
"I no longer make distinctions between 'conservatives' and 'progressives'", he said then. "Such categories do not make sense anymore".
We were to speak at length about the book that he eventually wrote [
Eminenza, mi permette?: La Chiesa e il mondo raccontati dai cardinali di Papa Wojtyla (Eminence, allow me!: The Church and the world according to Papa Wojtyla's cardinals)], especially his interview with the very reserved Cardinal Ratzinger.
For the interview, Giuseppe was invited to the home of then Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Marked, he said, by simple hospitality that also had to do with a tiny and sympathetic... cat!
Giuseppe, who is allergic to cat's hair, had requested beforehand that the cat not be present in the room where the interview would take place. The cardinal agreed.
With Bavarian courtesy, he dispensed for the time being with a cat having the run of the house and hopping on to his lap.
Giuseppe was telling me this at a time when no one among us imagined that Joseph Ratzinger would ever become Pope. It had been a small incursion into the intimacy of the man who was to become Benedict XVI.
And who, later as Pope, would also allow Giuseppe to 'violate' the intimacy of the papal apartment in the Apostolic Palace for his TV special on the occasion of the Pope's 80th birthday. With images of the Pope's day from his morning Mass to watching the evening news on TV.
But there was no sign of a cat this time. And Giuseppe never did solve the continuing mystery of whether there is a feline presence in Benedict's papal apartment.
I cannot possibly review all the many things Giuseppe did and the many conversations we had over many yearts of friendship. I will greet him now with the same embrace that we used to exchange whenever we met each other in the Borgo Pio while shopping and stopping for a little chat.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 14/07/2010 21:49]