Benedict XVI Biography

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BENEDICT XVI by Helena Scott and Ethel Tolansky

All booklets are published thanks to the generous support of the members of the Catholic Truth Society

CATHOLIC TRUTH SOCIETY PUBLISHERS TO THE HOLY SEE

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CONTENTS The Bells Ring Out .........................................................3 Early Life ........................................................................9 Towards Priesthood .....................................................19 Academic Life and Vatican Council ...........................28 Archbishop, Cardinal and Prefect ..............................45 Pope Benedict ...............................................................62 Bibliography ..................................................................71

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THE BELLS RING OUT On Tuesday 19th April 2005, the atmosphere in St Peter’s Square was one of intense expectation. People’s eyes turned constantly to the chimney from which smoke appeared at long intervals. That morning the smoke had been black. Late in the afternoon, more smoke - but was it black or white? After a seemingly endless wait, the bells of St Peter’s rang out triumphantly, and as if by magic the square filled up with more and yet more people.

What was it that had brought all these thousands of people together? What were they waiting for? The silence was dramatic; the wait seemed endless.

Suddenly the curtains parted and Cardinal Medina Estevez appeared on the balcony. “Habemus Papam! We have a Pope!” By this time the television cameras of most of the world were trained on him. The crowd in the square cheered, but soon stopped to hear the vital words coming next. The suspense continued to the last possible moment. Finally the name rang out: “... Joseph...” and another long wait. “... Ratzinger, who has taken the name Benedict the Sixteenth.”

To some the name was already well-known. Others had not heard of him before the funeral Mass for Pope John Paul II. So where has Pope Benedict XVI come from? Who is he, and what will he mean for the Church?

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Harmonious personality Joseph Ratzinger, who started life as the son of a village policeman, has been Professor of Theology at several universities, Cardinal Archbishop of Munich, Prefect of the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in the Vatican, Dean of the College of Cardinals, and was elected Pope Benedict the Sixteenth on 19th April 2005.

He is a man with many different aspects to his character.

A list of these may suggest a man of sharp contrasts, yet they all seem to be unified into a harmonious personality.

Vittorio Messori, who interviewed him at length in 1984, says that he “is a man wholly rooted in a religious life, and it is only by viewing things from his standpoint that one will really understand the meaning of what he says.

From that perspective, all those schematic formulations, conservative/progressive, right/left, which stem from an altogether different sphere, namely, that of political ideologies, lose their meaning.”

Likewise, the label ‘pessimist’ which has sometimes been applied to him, shows a misunderstanding: again according to Messori, “The more the believing person makes his very own the event that absolutely substantiates optimism - namely, Christ’s Resurrection all the more can he summon up the realism, the clarity and the courage to call problems by their real name so as to tackle them without closing his eyes or viewing them

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through rose-coloured glasses.” Joseph Ratzinger has never been afraid to call things by their real name. As a theologian, he is always ready to raise difficult questions.

He tackles them honestly and squarely, basing his line of argument on a deep, broad knowledge of relevant studies and discussions in the past and today. And what he says is constantly enlightened and guided by his faithful loyalty to Christ and the Church.

Simple humble labourer In his first words to the faithful after being elected Pope, he called himself “a simple and humble labourer in the Lord’s vineyard,” and the words simplicity and humility, together with gentleness, are often applied to him by those who know him best. He is described as a very private, cultured and well-read person, and a priest whose faith overflows in the desire to share his certainty of a loving God with people who don’t know this love.

He is a great communicator through the written word and has written a very large number of books. He is also a gifted verbal communicator, and a student of his said that “when you talked with him, he made you feel you were intelligent.”

He is clear-minded: another acquaintance says that when he is asked a question, he thinks about it, and then answers in complete paragraphs. But he is not “just an intellectual”, not simply an abstract thinker. He is always

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able to see the current application and relevance of his teachings and thought, which is rooted in the experience of the Church and the experience of man. In one of his homilies about Our Lady, he described the process by which “faith becomes understanding, and so can be passed on to others: it is no longer a merely external word, but is saturated with the experience of a life, translated into human terms; now it can be translated, in turn, into the lives of others.” This process is part of his own life.

The able theologian He is a formidable theologian who has written about many aspects of the Church, the liturgy, the sacraments, morality, ethics, and catechesis, and is equally ready to discuss the concerns of everyday life - football, people’s summer holidays, and life as we live it. From the great heights he can come down effortlessly and quite naturally to the preoccupations of ordinary people. His faith has always been something he lived, not simply studied, and he said in his memoirs, “I know of no more convincing proof for the faith than precisely the pure and unalloyed humanity that the faith allowed to mature in my parents and in so many other persons I have had the privilege to encounter.”

As head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, his main job was to defend and explain the

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teaching of the Church. To many people the name ‘Ratzinger’ stands for little else than discipline against heresies, and countering attacks or criticisms of the Church. He was especially well known for putting a brake on liberation theology. He seemed to attract controversy. For example, one of the favourite slogans displayed on a popular website known as the “Cardinal Ratzinger Fan Club” was: “Putting the smackdown on heresy since 1981!”. Detractors would dub him ‘God’s Rottweiler’ while supporters suggested ‘the German Shepherd’. However, for those who read his writings, starting perhaps with the best-selling The Ratzinger Report (1985), there is an important discovery to be made: that his approach is not in any way negative. His defence of the Church comes from the heart, as a result of his clear thinking and knowledge. It is an affirmation of the truth about God and the richness of the teachings of the Church, based on his deep knowledge and love of the Old Testament and the New Testament, and the integral relation of one to the other. In the controversy over liberation theology, he re-stated and enriched the whole concept of Christian freedom and liberation.

Love of the Church Joseph Ratzinger has always had a deep love for the Church, down the centuries and today. His urgent concern to protect the Church and remind people of the

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deposit of Faith cannot be separated from his concern with the condition of man in the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries. He loves the Church as the sacrament of Christ’s love, and God’s chosen means of bringing salvation to mankind. He is hurt by the alienation, anonymity and loneliness of man in modern society. In his homily on the day of his solemn inauguration as Pope, he described the “many kinds of desert” in the world today - the “deserts of poverty, hunger and thirst, abandonment, loneliness, and destroyed love; the desert of the darkness of God, the emptiness of souls no longer aware of their dignity or the goal of human life.” And, he stressed, “the external deserts in the world are growing because the internal deserts have become so vast.”

At 78, he is the oldest Pope at his election for 275 years, but he is not old in the sense of living in the past.

He is a man very much in touch with this age, understanding its preoccupations and secularity and proclaiming with faith, vigour and vision that “the Church is alive!” The value of the human person and human freedom are an integral part of his teaching. His concept of progress is a deeply human one: true progress must be progress in being, not just in having, because “in the long run, a civilization without contemplation cannot survive.” He has spent a large part of his life learning and teaching others how to contemplate the truths of the Faith in an ever deeper and more fruitful way.

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EARLY LIFE Joseph Alois Ratzinger was the third child of Joseph and Maria Ratzinger, born on 16th April 1927 in the village of Marktl am Inn, Bavaria, Germany. Bavaria is in the south of Germany and is mostly farmland. It had always had a strong Roman Catholic tradition - he describes it in The Ratzinger Report as “a joyful, colourful, human Christianity” - with beautiful Catholic churches and shrines which were part of his childhood. Close to Marktl am Inn is the shrine of Our Lady of Altötting. The shrine meant a lot to his family, and, on speaking of it in his memoirs, Milestones: memoirs 1927-1977, published in 1997, Joseph referred particularly to the beatification and canonization at around that time of Brother Konrad of Parzham (1818-1894), a Capuchin who had been a porter at the monastery, a “humble and thoroughly kind man”.

He said that “these ‘little’ saints are a great sign to our time, a sign that moves me ever more deeply, the more I live with and in our time.”

His father, born in 1877, was a country policeman, and his mother, born in 1884, sometimes worked as a cook. Their oldest child, Maria, was born in 1921 and the second, Georg, in 1924. The day when Joseph Ratzinger was born was Holy Saturday that year. He was

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baptised on the day he was born - the first person to be baptised with the water newly blessed for Easter. He has always loved the significance of that fact: he sees himself, and the People of God, as not yet standing in the full light of Easter, but “walking towards it full of trust”.

In 1929, when Joseph was two, the family moved to Tittmoning, on the border with Austria. Tittmoning remained his childhood’s land of dreams. He would always recall the shop windows at Christmas time, lit up and sparkling with wonderful promise in the cold nights.

Every Christmas the family would build their own Nativity scene, gathering pine-cones, moss and branches for it from the surrounding countryside. He also remembered the ‘Holy Sepulchre’ that was built in the local church between Good Friday and Easter Sunday, with many flowers and colourful lights, bringing home the mystery of death and resurrection to his heart before he was old enough to understand them with his conscious mind.

Rise of Nazism Although Joseph was only five and a half when the family moved away from Tittmoning, he had become aware that the underlying atmosphere there was one of unrest and conflict for their parents, however delightful it was for the children. Germany was experiencing an economic crisis, and many people were living in terrible

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poverty. The government was helpless to remedy the problems. This was the time of the rise of National Socialism, or Nazism, under Hitler, who claimed to be the only person who could prevent Germany from sliding into chaos. The ‘brownshirts’, Hitler’s violent, thuggish supporters, were everywhere. Mr Ratzinger did not attempt to disguise his distrust for and contempt of the Nazi spirit and behaviour, and took a stand against their violence in public meetings whenever the opportunity arose. This made life difficult for him, and eventually, realising he had said too much against the brownshirts in Tittmoning for his own and his family’s safety, he decided they would have to move away.

In 1932, shortly before Christmas, they moved to nearby Aschau am Inn (still in Bavaria), a prosperous agricultural village consisting of large, imposing farms. A month later Hitler became Chancellor of Germany. The family stayed in Aschau for over four years, till Joseph was almost ten. During that time, as he commented later, one effect of Hitler’s new regime was the practice of spying and informing on priests who “behaved as enemies of the Reich”. Whenever Mr Ratzinger learnt that a priest was in danger from such spies, he would warn them and help them. The new authorities tried to change the school curriculum to instil National Socialist ideas into the pupils, but, at least in Catholic Bavaria, most people were very slow to accept such ideas.

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In 1935 Georg entered a school in nearby Traunstein, and then the minor seminary there. On their father’s retirement at the age of sixty, the family moved to an old farmhouse in Hufschlag, on the edge of Traunstein, at the beginning of April 1937. A few days later Joseph started school at Traunstein. The school was a half-hour walk from home, and he used the time for looking about him and reflecting, and also for reviewing what he learnt in school.

As in Aschau, the Nazi system had so far failed to make much of a difference to the Traunstein school despite the new government’s efforts to impose its ideas on education.

Joseph commented with hindsight that “an education in Greek and Latin antiquity created a mental attitude that resisted seduction by a totalitarian ideology.” For instance, the Nazi government provided school songbooks containing Nazi songs, or traditional songs with Nazi words inserted, as well as valuable old songs; but the music teacher, a convinced Catholic, told his pupils to cross out the hate-filled Nazi words and replace them with words expressing Christian devotion.

However, the government eventually began to impose its will by force, replacing the older teachers with others who were supporters of the Nazi regime, and changing the curriculum. They went on to ban religious instruction from schools, filling its place with physical education and sports.

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Minor seminary After two years at the Traunstein school, Joseph joined his elder brother at the minor seminary, at Easter of 1939, when he was just twelve. To begin with, he found it very hard indeed to adapt to the new conditions. Although he made good friends with others in his class, he had to study in a hall with sixty other boys, which turned study into something close to torture; and he found the two hours of compulsory sports equally unpleasant. He was not gifted at sports in any case, and was, moreover, the youngest of all and painfully conscious of being a burden to any team he was in. However, with the outbreak of the Second World War that September, the premises of the Traunstein minor seminary became a military hospital.

The seminarians ended up in Sparz, on a hill high over the city itself. For the boys it was a wonderful change: there were no playing-fields, so instead they would take group hikes in the afternoons in the surrounding woods, and play by the nearby mountain stream, building dams, catching fish, and having fun. Joseph, who had developed a liking for doing things on his own, now learnt how to fit in with the give-and-take of a group, and he was later deeply grateful for this.

He also plunged deeply into his studies, with special enthusiasm for Latin, Greek, mathematics, and above all, literature. He explored the history of literature, read

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Goethe with delight, and particularly loved some of the nineteenth-century German classical writers. He started writing and translating, and because the liturgy meant so much to him he tried to translate parts of it for himself in a more vital way than the translations given in the books.

He was to say later that the liturgy “expresses the mystery of the Holy.”

The Second World War begins The war itself seemed rather unreal to the boys at first, but their father saw from the start that a victory for Hitler “would not be a victory for Germany, but a victory of the Antichrist, which would usher in apocalyptic times for all believers, and not only for believers.” In 1941, on reaching the age of 14, Joseph was required to register in the ‘Hitler Youth’ like all other boys in Germany. This involved taking part in meetings, marches and parades, and doing regular military training in their spare time.

Although these were compulsory, Joseph stopped taking part in them as soon as he could, and a sympathetic teacher ensured that he was not penalised for his nonattendance. Almost every day the seminarians heard news of some local soldier’s death, and almost every day a requiem Mass was held for a young man who had been killed. The names came increasingly close to home, and soon they were of schoolmates and friends who had been part of their lives only a short time before.

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Schoolboys drafted By 1943 the German armed forces were so depleted that the government drafted schoolboys of sixteen and seventeen, seminarians or not, into the anti-aircraft defence force, and Joseph found himself moved with all his classmates to Munich, where they joined another group of secondary schoolboys at a regular barracks. Here they carried on with their classes and also had to fulfil anti-aircraft duties. They were moved around to different locations close to Munich, ending up in Gilching, north of Lake Ammer, where Joseph was put into a telephone communications group and, fortunately, exempted from military exercises. He was able to practise his faith with a fairly large group of other active Catholics.

In the midst of the increasing destruction caused by the war and the bombing, most of them looked on the Western Allies’ invasion of France in 1944 as a sign of hope, since they trusted that the Allies’ sense of justice would help Germany begin a new and peaceful existence. However, in September of that year, his group were released from their student service in anti-aircraft defence in order to be drafted into the army, since they were now, at 17, considered to be of full military age.

They were sent to a labour-camp at the point where Austria, Hungary and Czechoslovakia met. It was a time of tyranny, military drills and exhaustion. Joseph

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avoided being forcibly ‘volunteered’ into the SS (Schutzstaffel, an armed Nazi organisation separate from the army, with a reputation for vicious brutality) by saying that he was studying to become a Catholic priest.

He and the few others who said the same “were sent out with mockery and verbal abuse,” he wrote in Milestones.

“But these insults tasted wonderful because they freed us from the threat of that deceitful ‘voluntary service’ and all its consequences.”

Joseph deserts In November 1944 the work-group was disbanded and Joseph was sent back to Traunstein to join the infantry barracks there, though he was not involved in fighting at any stage. By this time everyone in Germany knew that the war was lost, but the sham of an all-conquering German Reich was kept up to the end. Hitler killed himself on 30th April 1945, but “the unhurried manner of the American advance deferred more and more the day of liberation.” At the end of April or the beginning of May, Joseph decided to desert from the army and go home. He walked out of camp, taking a little-used route to avoid the guards who had orders to shoot deserters on sight. He met two, but they had had their fill of war and did not want to become murderers, so seeing that he had his arm in a sling because of an injury, they made that their excuse to let him go.

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Prisoner of War His return home did not last long. Once the Americans finally arrived in Hufschlag, Joseph was identified as a soldier, compelled to put back on the uniform which he hoped he had abandoned for good, and sent to join the prisoners of war being collected from the village and its surroundings. His parents quickly packed a bag for him, and he added a big notebook and pencil. He spent about four weeks as a prisoner of war in a camp near Ulm, which lay between Munich and Stuttgart, about 128 miles away from Traunstein. During that time he wrote down thoughts and reflections of all kinds, and even tried composing Greek poetry. He also made many friends, and attended the open-air Masses celebrated by the priests among the prisoners. He found that the spire of Ulm Cathedral, which could be seen on the horizon, was “like a consoling proclamation of the indestructible humaneness of the faith.�

Homecoming Finally, on 19th June 1945, the Feast of the Sacred Heart, he was released. He arrived home that same evening, having got a lift in a lorry. His parents and sister welcomed him with open arms. There was still a shadow over the family - there had been no news from Georg since April of that year, and they naturally feared the

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worst. However, one hot July day Georg suddenly appeared back at home, safe and sound, and the first thing he did was sit down at the piano and start the hymn “Holy God, we praise thy name” in thanksgiving.

Joseph and Georg soon set to work with other returned soldiers to restore the seminary buildings, which were in a bad state after six years’ use as a military hospital. Germany was in total economic shambles after its defeat, and there was no way of buying any books. They were, however, able to borrow some to make a start on their studies of philosophy and theology. Georg also devoted himself passionately to music, for which he had an exceptional gift.