Joseph Ratzinger, an undiscovered treasure in Germany and throughout the world

"His faith, his intelligence, his wisdom and his human modesty have always made a deep impression on me”. This is how the President of the Federal Republic of Germany, Frank Walter Steinmeier, describes Joseph Ratzinger, who is undoubtedly the most important German of the 21st century that Germany is likely to have.

The election of a German Pope 60 years after the Second World War was a historic moment in which the Church (guided by the Holy Spirit, I have no doubt) placed at the head of the Church a person who came from a country that was an aggressor in the world. This sign of forgiveness and reconciliation must be understood.

We are all familiar with the Gospel saying that "no one is a prophet in his own land". This is also the case with Ratzinger in Germany. That is why Ratzinger is a treasure to be discovered. It is true that Germans do not follow a Pope by shouting "long live the Pope". They do it in a different way, they read him. And I could see that especially Protestant Christians started reading Benedict after his election.?

If there is one thing that can be said about Benedict's intellectual stature, it is his ability to synthesise. He was a good listener and as a university professor he paid great attention to the discussion of ideas, not discarding any on principle. After listening, he knew how to memorise and summarise what he heard very well. This is what I have heard many people say who have had the good fortune to be close to him, for example during his appointment as Doctor Honoris Causa by the University of Navarra in 1998. From his biographer, Peter Seewald, whom I also know personally, I have heard it said that Benedict has the character of a Father of the Church and that he saved the Church from schism during the rise of Liberation Theology.

I myself have not been so fortunate. I only remember that at Easter 1991 I was in Rome at the UNIV university congress and with a German friend we were in St. Peter's Square and suddenly we saw Cardinal Ratzinger, who crossed the square several times a day, and we greeted him very briefly. I was also able to listen to him live on his three trips to Germany during his pontificate to Cologne, Bavaria and Berlin. But above all, I had the good fortune to be able to read him in German: not only the encyclicals but also his book Jesus of Nazareth. His command of the German language is prodigious.

I have met and coincided on several occasions with his secretary and Prefect of the Pontifical Household, Archbishop Georg G?nswein, who has helped me to understand many things about the pontificate of both Benedict and Francis.

Benedict XVI's Spiritual Testament has just been published. I would like to highlight this paragraph: "What I said before to my compatriots, I say now to all those in the Church who have been entrusted to my service: Remain firm in the faith, do not let yourselves be confused! It often seems as if science - the natural sciences on the one hand, and historical research (especially the exegesis of Sacred Scripture) on the other - were capable of offering irrefutable results at variance with the Catholic faith. I have lived through the transformations of the natural sciences for a long time, and I have seen how, on the contrary, the apparent certainties against faith have vanished, proving to be not science, but philosophical interpretations that only seem to be the province of science. For sixty years I have been following the path of theology, especially of the biblical sciences, and with the succession of different generations, I have seen theses that seemed immovable collapse and turn out to be mere hypotheses: the liberal generation (Harnack, Jülicher, etc.), the existentialist generation (Bultmann, etc.), the Marxist generation. I have seen and I see how out of the confusion of hypotheses the reasonableness of faith has emerged and is emerging again. Jesus Christ is truly the way, the truth and the life, and the Church, with all her inadequacies, is truly his body".

There is a little-known text by Joseph Ratzinger from 1958 which could well be described as prophetic entitled: "The New Pagans and the Church". I offer only this sample: "The phenomenon of the Church of modern times is essentially determined by the fact that, in a completely new way, it became a Church of pagans, a process which is ever increasing: not as before, a Church from pagans who became Christians, but a Church of pagans who still call themselves Christians, but who, in reality, became pagans. Today, paganism is in the Church itself, and precisely this is the distinctive feature both of the Church of our day and also of the new paganism: that it is a paganism in the Church, and a Church in whose heart paganism lives. Therefore, in the normal case, the man of today can assume the faithlessness of his neighbour."

Much can and should be written to lift up this treasure that Benedict has bequeathed to us. What I have tried to do is to encourage all readers to discover Benedict by personally reading his writings.