BENEDICT XVI: NEWS, PAPAL TEXTS, PHOTOS AND COMMENTARY

An even earlier tribute by Cardinal Ratzinger was published in the OR's special issue of June 21, 2013, to mark the 50th anniversary of Paul VI's election.

A Pope whose measure
was not success and approval
but his conscience and his loyalty
to truth and faith
Homily by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger
Archbishop of Munich-Freising
August 10, 1978
Translated from the 6/21/13 issue of


Editor's Note: Four days after the death of Paul VI, the Archbishop of Munich-Freising, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, celebrated a Mass for the late Pope in the city's cathedral. His homily on that occasion has to date been published only in the archdiocesan bulletin, Ordinariats-Korrespondenz. We publish it in its entirety to close the special issue which our newspaper has dedicated to Papa Montini on the 50th anniversary of his election on June 21 1963.

---

The Transfiguration
For 15 years, in the Eucharistic prayer during Holy Mass, we have said the words, "We celebrate in communion with your servant Pope Paul". Since August 7, this phrase has been missing. At this time, the symbol of the Church's unity has no name. He is now with those who have preceded him in the sign of faith and who rest in peace.

Pope Paul was called back to the house of the Father on the evening of the Feast of the Transfiguration, shortly after he heard Holy Mass and received the Sacraments.

"It is good for us to remain here," Peter had said to Jesus on the mount of the Transfiguration. He wanted to stay. What was then denied has been bestowed to Paul VI on this Feast of the Transfiguration in 1978 - he no longer has to descend to the routine quotidianity of history.Th

He can stay, where the lord sits at table for eternity with Moses, Elijah and so many others who have come from east and west, from north and south. His earthly pilgrimage is over.

In the Oriental Churches, which Paul VI loved so dearly, the Feast of the Transfiguration has a very special place. It is not considered just another Church event among many, a dogma among dogmas, but a synthesis of everything: Cross and Resurrection, the present and the future of all Creation.

The feast of the Transfiguration is a guarantee that the Lord will never abandon his creatures. He did not put on human flesh as if it were just a vestment, nor has he left history as if he had merely come to play a theatrical role. In the shadow of the Cross, we know that this is the way that creation moves towards transfiguration.

What we call Transfiguration is called in the Greek of the New Testament 'metamorphosis' - transformation - and this brings forth an important fact. Transfiguration is not a remote possibility that could happen in time.

The transfigured Christ reveals much more about what faith is: the transformation that takes place throughout a man's life. Biologically, life is a metamorphosis, a perennial transformation that ends in death. To live means to die - a metamorphosis towards death.

The account of the Lord's Transfiguration adds something new: to die means to rise again. Faith is a metamorphosis in which man matures definitively, and matures in order to be definitive. That is why the evangelist John defines the Cross as glorification, uniting transfiguration and the Cross. In the ultimate liberation from self, the metamorphosis of life achieves its goal.

The transfiguration promised by faith as a metamorphosis of man is above all a path of purification, a path of suffering. Paul VI accepted his papal service increasingly as a metamorphosis of faith into suffering.

The last words of the risen Christ to Peter, after having named him shepherd of his flock, were: "When you grow old, you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will dress you and lead you where you do not want to go” (Jn 21,19).

It was a reference to the Cross which awaited Peter at the end of his journey. It was, in general, a reference to the nature of the Petrine service. Paul VI always let himself be led where humanly, by himself, he would not have gone.

Increasingly for him, the Pontificate meant having to take on the garment of someone else and be nailed to the Cross. We know that before his 75th birthday, and again before his 80th, he struggled intensely with the idea of resigning.

We can imagine how difficult it was for him no longer to belong to himself. Never to have a truly private moment. To be chained to the very end, in an ever physically yielding body, to a task that demands, day after day, the full and vital commitment of every human force one has.

"None of us lives for oneself, and no one dies for oneself. For if we live, we live for the Lord"(Rom 14,7-8). These words from today's Reading literally marked his life. He gave new meaning to authority as service, carrying it as a suffering. He felt no pleasure in power, in position, in a career that had 'succeeded', precisely because authority was a responsibility that he bore. "It will lead you where you do not want to go" - that, to him, became hugely credible.

Paul VI carried out his service for the faith. From this derived both his firmness as well as readiness to compromise. For this, he had to accept criticisms, and even some comments after his death have not been lacking in bad taste.

But a Pope who does not undergo criticisms today fails in his task towards our time. Paul VI resisted telecracy and demoscopy, the two dictatorial tendencies of our time. He could do so because success and approval were not his parameters, rather his conscience, measured by the truth, by his faith.

That is why on many occasions, he sought compromise: faith leaves much that is open to an ample range of decisions, and only imposes love as the criterion, which is a duty to everyone and thus implies and imposes much respect.

Also because of this, he could be inflexible and decisive when the essential tradition of the Church was in play. In him, firmness did not derive from the insensibility of someone whose path is dictated by pleasure in power and despising others, but from the depth of his faith which made him able to bear all oppositions.

Paul VI was a spiritual Pope, a man of faith. Not mistakenly, a newspaper described him as the diplomat who left diplomacy behind. In the course of his career in the Roman Curia, he learned to master in a virtuoso manner the instruments of diplomacy. But these came to be relegated more and more to the backgreound in the metamorphosis of faith that he underwent.

In his intimate self, he increasingly followed the call of faith and its path - in prayer, in continuing encounter with Christ. In the process, he showed himself increasingly as a man of profound goodness, pure and mature.

Those who met him in his last years were able to experience directly his extraordinary metamorphosis through faith, its transfiguring power. One could see that this man, who was an intellectual by nature, consigned himself to Christ, day after day, allowing himself to be transformed and purified by him, and how this made him increasingly more free, more profound, more good, perspicacious and simple.

Faith is a metamorphosis to enter into authentic life, towards transfiguration. In Pope Paul, we saw all this. Faith gave him courage. Faith gave him goodness. And in him it was also clear that faith with conviction does not close us off, but opens us.

In the end, our memory keeps the image of a Pope who held out his hand. He was the first Pope who was able to visit all the continents, in an itinerary of the spirit that began in Jerusalem, fulcrum of the encounter and separation of the three great monotheistic religions. He went to the United Nations, in New York and in Geneva; he had an encounter with the largest non-monotheistic culture of mankind in India; he travelled among the suffering peoples of Latin America Africa and Asia. Faith holds out open hands. Its sign is not the fist, but the open hand.

In the Letter to the Romans from St. Ignatius of Antioch, we find the beautiful statement, "It is beautiful to sink in the world [like the setting sun[ for the Lord and rise again in him," (11,2). The bishop-martyr wrote this during his voyage from the East towards the land where the sun sets, the West, where, in the sunset of martyrdom, he hoped to achieve his rising again into eternity.

The path of Paul VI, became year after year, a journey that was increasingly aware of the burden of witness that he bore, a journey to the sunset of death which finally called him on the day of the Transfiguration of the Lord.

Let us entrust his soul confidently to God's eternal mercy and the dawn of eternal life. Let us allow his example to be a call that bears fruit in our souls. And let us pray that the Lord sends us a Pope who will carry on anew the original mandate of the Lord to Peter: "Confirm your brothers in the faith" (Lk 22,32).

---

Of course, at the time Cardinal Ratzinger delivered this eulogy for Paul VI, it would never have occurred to him - just slightly over one year a bishop and cardinal then, after 25 years of being a university professor - that 27 years later, he would be Pope himself and face the burdens of a position he describes here as somewhere in which "humanly, he would not gave gone by himself", much less face the struggle of deciding eventually to resign as Pope.