Papa Ratzinger died on 31 December 2022.
I was privileged to have known him well before his election. His loss is a personal loss.
Apart from his contributions as a priest, prefect and theologian, two of his accomplishments as Pope stand out for me.
Summorum Pontificum – This monumental document sparked the beginning of a liturgical renewal in the Church, as one can tell from how some still fear and still fight it.
Anglicanorum coetibus – earned for Benedict justly to be known as the “Pope of Christian Unity”. In one gesture he did more for Christian unity than pretty much everyone else with all their talk and dialogue.
Shall we see his like again?
Clearly not.
For example, it is likely that, soon, the Pontiffs elected will have no life experience from the time before the Second Vatican Council. They will certainly not have personal experience of WWII. It is highly unlikely that they will have close to the intellectual and cultural formation of a Joseph Ratzinger.
Benedict’s passing is the end of an era in many respects.
Right now we are in an era of eroding identity, doctrine and praxis, endless obsession with process over concrete results, and even bullying of those who simply want the faith and prayer life of our forebears.
That didn’t start with his death.
Pray for him. While I am confident that through his final sufferings and unquestionable reception of the last sacraments and Apostolic Blessing, Joseph Ratzinger now enjoys the Beatific Vision, it is nevertheless good to pray for him and to commit him to God’s mercy, particularly on an anniversary of death.
Finally, consider your own death and judgment, which is inevitable.
May we all have the grace of a death which is “provided” for, that is, with access to the last sacraments and Apostolic Blessing. In the meantime we should be making good examinations of conscience and regular confessions of all mortal sins in both kind and number. Kind and number.
Please, go to confession.
Loading ...
A man misunderstood by many to be something he was not and is one of the few people who in this era of alternative facts was actually unjustly portrayed by many in the press in a way that obscured his life’s work and legacy: showing others what it means to be friends with Jesus Christ.
Pray for us, Holy Father. Thank you for the gift of yourself to the Church.
When Benedict XVI was elected, I remember several priests who were assigned to a Cathedral identified by the Pheonix in a Windy City at the time.
One was very involved with the Neocatechumenal Way. He was ordained in the mid-1970’s and thought this was going to be the destruction of the New Springtime.
Another was a raging post-Vatican II New Springtime “guy” who on the Feast of the Dedication of the Lateran asked an older woman in her 90’s what she liked about the 1960’s renovations. She responded with, “Oh Father, I preferred the Cathedral before the renovations.”
Yet another who was also ordained in the mid-1970’s was so dismissive, disrespectful and demeaning to seminarians who were sacristans at the Cathedral, after Benedict’s election that he was pulled off to the side by two priests at the time and told to adjust his attitude or find another parish to find lodgings.
Funny enough they all shared a common charactaristic… For as much as they put on the psychobabble, church of nice and all are welcome, they were the meanest, nastiest, unpleasant and self-hating priests I knew at the time.
The first one had to go on retreat, i.e. “missing”, for six weeks after the election, he was so distraught and bereft that Vatican II would be suppressed and the church would revert to the misery of the “Latin Mass”.
The second one just moaned and complained that the “conservatives” had won. He continued to use a large glass plate out of spite as a paten until someone “dropped” it… Opps.
The third was as described above convinced that seminarians who liked Benedict were horrible people and deserved to be treated as such.
Of course, I was lucky enough to be there when there were also very happy, holy and supportive priests who made a far greater difference in my spiritual life and later career. I had a great privilege to serve and be trusted by a Cardinal-Archbishop who was an intellectual giant and in someways, like Benedict, misunderstood. Goodness both of them sorely missed.
The gratitude to God I have for the good priests and bishops I have met, far outweighs the residual gripes I have about the mediocre ones.
OMNIUM IN MENTEM helped me greatly in dealing with family and friends trying to get “married” outside of the Church.
Benedict’s instinct seemed to be to eliminate confusion. So many Church “leaders” seem to have an instinct to create confusion.
There is no “formal act” of separation from the Catholic Church. If one is baptized, one is Catholic. Pretty simple.
The best of the Vatican II popes. Or, for the 58 sede readers, the best of the Vatican II antipopes.
“It is highly unlikely that they will have close to the intellectual and cultural formation of a Joseph Ratzinger.”
Father, all I can find disagreeable there is the “highly unlikely” part. My money’s on “virtual certainty”. But, party, because the Lord works in mysterious, miraculous ways.
In the spirit of Alan Rickman’s Hans Gruber – you ask for miracles, I give you the Right Reverend [insert local ordinary here].
Party?? PRAY!
I’m glad that you had a chance to know him. I imagine that those who knew him personally knew him well enough to know his good qualities. From a distance he just seemed very … benign. Not really someone you would go to for help in a real scrap. Intercede for us now Papa Bene! Confession gets harder all the time. On one hand the priest will criticize you for not taking enough time, and when you explain that you’re a daily Mass/daily Rosary/daily Lauds & Vespors kind of person, they just change gears and say you’re trying to hard … but you cannot get any help (after all … can’t be too long in the confessional!) and you cannot win. They might as well come out and say, just take it somewhere else will you?
I thank you for your lovely remembrance of our dear Pope Benedict, Father. Indeed, he was a fine and faithful man. As a woman, it was easy for me to see he was also a gentleman, which is a rare and valuable quality in any man.
I hope that we will see his like again. He is worthy of inspiration for both men and women, in his faithfulness, humility, courage, and conduct.
I have high hopes for our good Pope Leo, who shares the virtue of thinking before he speaks and acts with Pope Benedict. He isn’t perfect all the time, but he takes his vocation and Faith seriously, and I am proud he is an American Midwesterner like me. We need to pray hard for Pope Leo and for *all* our priests and seminarians, from the parish level all the way to the Vatican.
Best blessings and optimistic hope for peace and good to all in 2026!
To Chicagiensis_Indianapolitana – My parish had a brush with the Neocatechumenal Way about 10 years ago. I and many of my fellow parishioners were not at all comfortable in knowing they had the ear of our pastor of that time.
They seemed more than a bit odd. We are a very faithful Novus Ordo parish. As an inner-city downtown parish which is also home to the local Newman Center (which has been recognized by that organization as being exemplarily faithful), we are used to welcoming visitors to our beautiful antique parish church.
They insisted that our pastor preside at private Masses for their group, at which they were seated around a table, rather than in our splendid church. Their reception of Holy Communion also seemed lacking in reverence to my uneducated eyes – they received Jesus while seated, although they were not disabled in any way. They did not interact much with us, to the extent of being exclusionary and ungracious. Which did not stop them from actively seeking new recruits and asking us for funding.
To put it mildly and politely, they were not a good fit in our parish, and most of us were delighted when they moved on.
Peace to you and all here in 2026.
Pope Leo may not be in the league of Pope Benedict (few ever were), but there are many things that show he’ll do fine. He is humble and well mannered, thinks before he speaks, shows respect to the patrimony of the Church (the return of the classical concerts of sacred music is a good sign), he vests properly, and exudes authority in a mild and benevolent way. In short, he seems to master the art of “poping.” Things we have never seen in his predecessor. He may not be perfect and is likely to make his fair share of mistakes, but at least for now, I’m happy with him.
EAW – I second your comments, and you put it all so much better than I.
I see our good Pope Leo as a great blessing, even though he is not the scholar Pope Benedict was. They both are good pastors. They both possess/possessed fine qualities, such as thinking before speaking and acting, spending time as teachers, being courteous gentlemen, being humble and gracious, and not hesitating to defend the teaching of the Church and taking their responsibilities in protecting the souls entrusted to them very seriously.
He is still becoming accustomed to the papacy, I expect. But I fully trust Pope Leo will be one of our greatest popes – and *exactly* who we need to lead us at this time. Peace to you and all here!
Joseph Ratziner in his books expressed Catholicism with an extraoardinary combination of holiness, fine insights, and deep erudition. No one in the press or elsewhere in public life could lay a finger on him substantively. That is why the press and the secular culture had to turn him into a caricature — “God’s Rotweiller,” etc.
When he was elected I naively expected the press and secular world of culture to engage with what he was saying. It was when I saw what they instead did that I completely and permanently wrote them off.
Chiara, you don’t express yourself poorly at all. You add some excellent points I omitted.