Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI is an inexhaustible source of surprises. His well-known attachment to tradition hides an independent spirit. He demonstrated this in February 2013 when presenting his resignation. Quite a ballot for the Vatican, which had not faced the resignation of a Pontiff in the last 600 years. And he has demonstrated it again now, on a small scale, embarking at 93 years of age on his first international voyage as emeritus.
Benedict, who lives in seclusion in a small monastery within the Vatican Gardens, does little in public. For the Holy See it must not have been easy to organize a new status for him that would not make the coexistence of two popes too absurd. Hence the very low profile of German.
But after the confinement ended, on June 18, Joseph Ratzinger, dressed in his impeccable papal cassock, took a flight to Munich. In their perfect outfit they only kept black sandals instead of their famous red loafers. Emeritus but Pope at last, the Italian Republic made the aircraft available to them, and the Holy See, a small entourage (a nun, a doctor and a nurse and the deputy commander of the Vatican Gendarmerie), to reinforce their faithful secretary Georg Gänswein.
If in 2013 no one understood his resignation, everyone has now understood the reasons for his trip. His older brother Georg was dying in a Regensburg hospital. Ratzinger wanted to say goodbye to someone who, according to his own confession, has always served as his guide. A few days after the meeting, Georg died at the age of 96. Director of the Regensburg Cathedral Children's Choir, his image was tarnished in 2017 when a scandal of sexual abuse and abuse at the choir school was uncovered that he had not been able to detect.
The trip, of just four days, has also provided Ratzinger with the opportunity to say goodbye to his native Bavaria. Make a final pilgrimage to the house where he was born, to the cemetery where his parents and sister are buried. Stepping on the cathedral and, perhaps, the university where he was professor of Dogmatic Theology. A farewell made official by the monumental new biography ( Benedict XVI, a life ) of the writer Peter Seewald that has just been published in Germany. A 1,200-page volume which, according to Seewald's statements to the National Catholic Register , includes unpublished interviews with the Pontiff in which he insists that his resignation had nothing to do with the Vatileaks scandal - the dissemination of letters and documents stolen from the Pope. carried out by his butler - who embittered the last leg of his pontificate. He made the decision because he lacked the necessary strength to continue leading the Church. Benedict XVI, who prepares a doctrinal testament that will only see the light of day at his death, claims to maintain excellent relations with Pope Francis.
Some critical voices have lamented the hagiography of the book. In addition to being his official biographer, Seewald admires the German Pope. But lately the praise does not come only from the conservative field. The writer and journalist Christine Pedotti, co-author of a very hard book on the legacy of John Paul II, recognized in the newspaper Le Monde the great level of theologian of the Pope Emeritus and maintained that Ratzinger was "much better intellectually armed" than Wojtyla. And if the Polish Pope showed his mettle by touring the world almost paralyzed by illness, Benedict, also undermined by age, has been able to imitate him on this last trip.
