Pope Benedict

During the visit there will be much written about him, and this is one of the good ones, from National Review.

April 15, 2008, 6:00 a.m.
Ratzinger Road Map
Meeting the pope.
By Delia Gallagher

Rome — Pope Benedict suffers a very basic image problem; there is a wide gap between who he is and who he is perceived to be. If he were a candidate in the U.S. elections, someone would be running to get the pope an image consultant. But he is at the Vatican and here, what the world thinks is not a top concern. On the eve of his visit to the U.S., a “road map” to the pope might be useful: the first part a personal portrait of who Joseph Ratzinger is; and the second, one aspect of the pope’s larger vision of the Catholic Church that is often overlooked.

Reluctantly Pontiff

Less than a week after being elected pope, Benedict XVI revealed to a German audience at the Vatican what he had felt that morning in the Sistine Chapel:
“When, little by little, the trend of the voting led me to understand that, to say it simply, the axe was going to fall on me, my head began to spin. I was convinced that I had already carried out my life’s work and could look forward to ending my days peacefully. With profound conviction I said to the Lord: Do not do this to me!”
At every major step in his rise through the Catholic hierarchy, the pope admits he was reluctant. “I felt called to a life of study,” he says in his memoirs, Milestones, “I never had anything else in mind.”

In the same memoirs, he recalls St. Augustine, who was also called from a life of study to become bishop of Hippo: “He had chosen the life of a scholar, but God had chosen to make him into a ‘draft animal’ — a good, sturdy ox to pull God’s cart in this world. How often did he protest vehemently against all the trifles that continually blocked his path and kept him from the great spiritual and intellectual work he knew to be his deepest calling!”

The pope, then cardinal, called Augustine’s meditation on this predicament, “a portrayal of my own destiny.”

The pope has a little white house in Regensburg, Germany, bought in the hopes of retirement. He had it built in the seventies for himself and his sister Maria. He was teaching at the University of Regensburg; Maria helped him transcribe his writings. His brother, Georg, an important director of music in the same town, came by often. He transferred the graves of his parents to the nearby cemetery.

He describes his years in Regensburg as some of his happiest. He was teaching and surrounded by his family. “We were once again together,” he says, “in our own home.”

No one now lives in the house in Regensburg. His sister Maria has died; the pope’s cat Chico wanders in the garden and is looked after by the neighbors, Rupert and Terese Hofbauer, who also send jars of honey to the pope in the Vatican from the honeycombs in his garden. The calendar in the house is stopped at Friday, January 7, 2005, the last time the Joseph Ratzinger slept there, just a few months before becoming pope.

This frank portrait the pope paints of himself shows Benedict to be a sort of everyman; every man who thought his life might turn out differently.

It is a very different image than the one circulated in the media at the time of his election: that he wanted the job and indeed campaigned for it.