Post by Tulameen on Jun 10, 2005 11:16:26 GMT -5
Life Story of New Pope
TRAUNSTEIN, Germany, April 19 - It was 1964, and the young theologian Joseph Ratzinger felt a deep unease as he shuttled between his native Germany and Rome for the groundbreaking sessions of the Second Vatican Council.
The 37-year-old priest, serving as a cardinal's aide, found all the talk of change exciting. But he couldn't shake the feeling that things had slid out of control. "More and more the impression took shape, that in fact nothing was steadfast in the church," he later wrote.
That fear has stayed with Ratzinger - now Pope Benedict XVI. Only Monday, at services opening the conclave that chose him as John Paul II's successor, he warned of "a dictatorship of relativism, which does not recognize anything as certain."
Yet his former students of theology say they know a different Ratzinger from the one who became the Vatican's unbending doctrine chief.
They describe a collegial professor who encouraged wide-ranging seminar discussions and was reticent about pushing his own views on students, whose group included a student from Africa interested in the relationship between Roman Catholicism and voodoo, and another researching the novelist Franz Kafka - whose works paint the barrenness of established orders.
"The negative image arises from something I think goes against the grain for him, and that is having to say no all the time," said the Rev. Vincent Twomey, who studied under Ratzinger at the University of Regensburg and now teaches at Pontifical University in Maynooth, Ireland.
The Rev. Stephan Otto Horn, another former student from Regensburg, recalled that one of the seminar participants once objected strenuously to remarks Horn had made about Christians in Germany during the Nazi period. Ratzinger stepped in immediately to defend his right to speak.
"In my circle," Horn remembered Ratzinger saying, "one must be able to say what one thinks."
Two major threads in Ratzinger's makeup - wide-ranging intellectual activity and a highly traditional Roman Catholic piety - became part of him early on.
He was born on April 16, 1927, on the Saturday before Easter - to parents named Josef and Mary - and was baptized the same day in the small Bavarian town of Marktl Am Inn. The baptismal font is now displayed proudly by the town's small museum.
The future pope did not see his birth date as coincidence. "That my life from the beginning was in this way immersed in the Easter mystery has always filled me with gratitude," he said in his German autobiography, "Aus Meinem Leben," published in English as "Milestones: Memoirs 1927-1977."
The family moved often due to his father's work as a policeman, and eventually settled in Traunstein, a town in Germany about 30 kilometers (20 miles) from the Austrian cultural center of Salzburg.
The church was a constant in small-town Bavarian life, and even as a small boy, Ratzinger was deeply impressed by the ritual of the Roman Catholic Church - candlelight services during Advent in the early morning dark, the Easter service where the Resurrection was announced by suddenly dropping curtains and letting in the light.
The family lived in an 18th century farmhouse surrounded by an oak forest. Ratzinger considers the town his real home, and locals view him as one of their own. He returns regularly, says the head of St. Michael's seminary where he studied, the Rev. Thomas Frauenlob.
"I like the cardinal very much, I admire him, and it looks like he's coming under attack as very conservative,'" Frauenlob said. "But he is really dedicated, and he wants to preserve the church."
Ratzinger's studies were interrupted at age 14 in 1943 when he was drafted by the Nazis to assist flak batteries and dig anti-tank ditches. After release from a POW camp in June 1945, he attended another seminary in the town of Freising, a place where the students were driven by pent-up hunger for reading and learning after the disruption of the war
He read widely - not just Catholic thinkers such as St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, but novelists such Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Paul Claudel, and Jewish thinker Martin Buber. The priest in charge, Michael Hoeck, had just survived five years in the Dachau concentration camp.
Ordained in 1951, on the same day as his brother Georg, Ratzinger took a doctorate in theology from the University of Munich. But not before a devastating rejection of his doctoral dissertation, on the medieval theologian St. Bonaventure.
Ironically for a man known today as a theological purist, Ratzinger was deemed to have propounded a dangerous relativism by suggesting that "revelation," or God's revealed message to humanity, depended on individuals' perception of it. To this day, he says he was misunderstood.
Shaken, Ratzinger survived only by dropping the offending chapters and spending months on revisions. He said it made him resolve to take the side of the underdog from then on in such disputes.
Accordingly, as he taught theology in the universities of Bonn, Muenster, Tuebingen and Regensburg, he built a reputation for welcoming far-ranging discussion, even with members of other faiths such as Eastern Orthodoxy or Protestantism. He was named bishop of Munich in 1977, and served there until being summoned to the Vatican by John Paul II as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in 1981.
Ratzinger's career is closely entwined with that of Hans Küng - an outspoken theologian who is today perhaps the foremost critic of the Church's swing toward conservatism under John Paul II. In the early days, Küng considered Professor Ratzinger a liberal and pushed hard for his hiring at Tuebingen, a renowned center of progressive theology.
Küng remembers Ratzinger as friendly but not overly welcoming - even "timid" - when they first met, in a cafe on the Via della Conciliazione in Rome, where both were serving as advisers at the start of the Second Vatican Council.
"All in all, he was a quite sympathetic contemporary, with whom one could argue over any question that came up on an equal footing," Küng wrote in his memoirs.
Later, however, Ratzinger would attack Küng's writings, and in 1979 - before Ratzinger made his way to the Vatican - the church authorities deprived Küng of the right to officially teach Catholic theology, though he has gone on teaching and writing at Tuebingen.
Later, Küng would wonder at what he considered Ratzinger's transformation: "It's often wondered at, how such a gifted, friendly, and open theologian could make such a transformation, from advanced Tuebingen theologian to Roman Grand Inquisitor."
Ratzinger increasingly became dismayed by the atmosphere at Tuebingen during the turbulent 1960s. Küng and Ratzinger both had lectures interrupted by student radicals who heckled them and occupied their lecture halls, Küng recalls.
Ratzinger left in 1969 for Regensburg, but he said his time at Tuebingen wasn't wasted. Küng gave him the time and freedom from lecturing to write "An Introduction to Christianity," which has been translated into 17 languages and became one of his most popular books.
Ratzinger has continued to meet once a year with former students from his days as a teacher. There's no word on whether the meetings will continue now that he is pope.
"There was, as there always is when we get together, a kind of a freedom to express your opinion," Twomey said of the most recent gathering.
www.konkaniworld.com/news/index.asp?ID=826&next0=826
TRAUNSTEIN, Germany, April 19 - It was 1964, and the young theologian Joseph Ratzinger felt a deep unease as he shuttled between his native Germany and Rome for the groundbreaking sessions of the Second Vatican Council.
The 37-year-old priest, serving as a cardinal's aide, found all the talk of change exciting. But he couldn't shake the feeling that things had slid out of control. "More and more the impression took shape, that in fact nothing was steadfast in the church," he later wrote.
That fear has stayed with Ratzinger - now Pope Benedict XVI. Only Monday, at services opening the conclave that chose him as John Paul II's successor, he warned of "a dictatorship of relativism, which does not recognize anything as certain."
Yet his former students of theology say they know a different Ratzinger from the one who became the Vatican's unbending doctrine chief.
They describe a collegial professor who encouraged wide-ranging seminar discussions and was reticent about pushing his own views on students, whose group included a student from Africa interested in the relationship between Roman Catholicism and voodoo, and another researching the novelist Franz Kafka - whose works paint the barrenness of established orders.
"The negative image arises from something I think goes against the grain for him, and that is having to say no all the time," said the Rev. Vincent Twomey, who studied under Ratzinger at the University of Regensburg and now teaches at Pontifical University in Maynooth, Ireland.
The Rev. Stephan Otto Horn, another former student from Regensburg, recalled that one of the seminar participants once objected strenuously to remarks Horn had made about Christians in Germany during the Nazi period. Ratzinger stepped in immediately to defend his right to speak.
"In my circle," Horn remembered Ratzinger saying, "one must be able to say what one thinks."
Two major threads in Ratzinger's makeup - wide-ranging intellectual activity and a highly traditional Roman Catholic piety - became part of him early on.
He was born on April 16, 1927, on the Saturday before Easter - to parents named Josef and Mary - and was baptized the same day in the small Bavarian town of Marktl Am Inn. The baptismal font is now displayed proudly by the town's small museum.
The future pope did not see his birth date as coincidence. "That my life from the beginning was in this way immersed in the Easter mystery has always filled me with gratitude," he said in his German autobiography, "Aus Meinem Leben," published in English as "Milestones: Memoirs 1927-1977."
The family moved often due to his father's work as a policeman, and eventually settled in Traunstein, a town in Germany about 30 kilometers (20 miles) from the Austrian cultural center of Salzburg.
The church was a constant in small-town Bavarian life, and even as a small boy, Ratzinger was deeply impressed by the ritual of the Roman Catholic Church - candlelight services during Advent in the early morning dark, the Easter service where the Resurrection was announced by suddenly dropping curtains and letting in the light.
The family lived in an 18th century farmhouse surrounded by an oak forest. Ratzinger considers the town his real home, and locals view him as one of their own. He returns regularly, says the head of St. Michael's seminary where he studied, the Rev. Thomas Frauenlob.
"I like the cardinal very much, I admire him, and it looks like he's coming under attack as very conservative,'" Frauenlob said. "But he is really dedicated, and he wants to preserve the church."
Ratzinger's studies were interrupted at age 14 in 1943 when he was drafted by the Nazis to assist flak batteries and dig anti-tank ditches. After release from a POW camp in June 1945, he attended another seminary in the town of Freising, a place where the students were driven by pent-up hunger for reading and learning after the disruption of the war
He read widely - not just Catholic thinkers such as St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, but novelists such Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Paul Claudel, and Jewish thinker Martin Buber. The priest in charge, Michael Hoeck, had just survived five years in the Dachau concentration camp.
Ordained in 1951, on the same day as his brother Georg, Ratzinger took a doctorate in theology from the University of Munich. But not before a devastating rejection of his doctoral dissertation, on the medieval theologian St. Bonaventure.
Ironically for a man known today as a theological purist, Ratzinger was deemed to have propounded a dangerous relativism by suggesting that "revelation," or God's revealed message to humanity, depended on individuals' perception of it. To this day, he says he was misunderstood.
Shaken, Ratzinger survived only by dropping the offending chapters and spending months on revisions. He said it made him resolve to take the side of the underdog from then on in such disputes.
Accordingly, as he taught theology in the universities of Bonn, Muenster, Tuebingen and Regensburg, he built a reputation for welcoming far-ranging discussion, even with members of other faiths such as Eastern Orthodoxy or Protestantism. He was named bishop of Munich in 1977, and served there until being summoned to the Vatican by John Paul II as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in 1981.
Ratzinger's career is closely entwined with that of Hans Küng - an outspoken theologian who is today perhaps the foremost critic of the Church's swing toward conservatism under John Paul II. In the early days, Küng considered Professor Ratzinger a liberal and pushed hard for his hiring at Tuebingen, a renowned center of progressive theology.
Küng remembers Ratzinger as friendly but not overly welcoming - even "timid" - when they first met, in a cafe on the Via della Conciliazione in Rome, where both were serving as advisers at the start of the Second Vatican Council.
"All in all, he was a quite sympathetic contemporary, with whom one could argue over any question that came up on an equal footing," Küng wrote in his memoirs.
Later, however, Ratzinger would attack Küng's writings, and in 1979 - before Ratzinger made his way to the Vatican - the church authorities deprived Küng of the right to officially teach Catholic theology, though he has gone on teaching and writing at Tuebingen.
Later, Küng would wonder at what he considered Ratzinger's transformation: "It's often wondered at, how such a gifted, friendly, and open theologian could make such a transformation, from advanced Tuebingen theologian to Roman Grand Inquisitor."
Ratzinger increasingly became dismayed by the atmosphere at Tuebingen during the turbulent 1960s. Küng and Ratzinger both had lectures interrupted by student radicals who heckled them and occupied their lecture halls, Küng recalls.
Ratzinger left in 1969 for Regensburg, but he said his time at Tuebingen wasn't wasted. Küng gave him the time and freedom from lecturing to write "An Introduction to Christianity," which has been translated into 17 languages and became one of his most popular books.
Ratzinger has continued to meet once a year with former students from his days as a teacher. There's no word on whether the meetings will continue now that he is pope.
"There was, as there always is when we get together, a kind of a freedom to express your opinion," Twomey said of the most recent gathering.
www.konkaniworld.com/news/index.asp?ID=826&next0=826