The official count, as of this writing, is 200,000 people having lined up – for hours – to pay their respects to Pope Benedict XVI, in just the first three days of his body laying in state.
Many in the Italian media are professing astonishment, perhaps because they are paying attention for the first time. After Ratzinger was elected pope in April 2005, progressive journalists, who are the majority in Italy, exerted themselves in depicting Pope Benedict as vastly unpopular, fully expecting him to be rejected by the masses that had flocked to see Saint John Paul II, his outgoing, charismatic predecessor.
But this never happened.
“Cardinal Ratzinger never wanted to be Pope,” said Cardinal Giacomo Biffi, Archbishop in Bologna, remarking that Ratzinger had long been looking forward to retiring to Germany and spending his days quietly “reading, playing the piano and stroking the cat.” The relentless scrutiny and continually negative press was certainly not an attraction. And yet the man derided as “God’s Rottweiler” and portrayed as a stern and distant intellectual, drew crowds because he connected with the people. This was evidenced by the large numbers of (free) tickets given out for the Wednesday Angeluses in St. Peter’s Square, and by the traditional summer appearances in Castel Gandolfo, for which Pope Benedict would quite often have to helicopter back to Rome since the village square could not hold the number of people who asked to be there.
Apparently, the man in the street could see through the derogatory propaganda he was subjected to. And countless ordinary Catholics appreciated the grace with which he handled the many serious challenges, which he anticipated when asked for prayers of intercession at his very first Mass as pope:
Pray for me, that I may learn to love his flock more and more – in other words, you, the holy Church, each one of you and all of you together. Pray for me, that I may not flee for fear of the wolves. Let us pray for one another, that the Lord will carry us and that we will learn to carry one another.
Throughout his stormy pontificate, Pope Benedict XVI often turned troubles into triumphs. This included the Convention of the Church in Italy, held at Verona in October 2006, which ended up a success despite the media’s ominous forecast of explosive divisions, and the controversies over the September 12, 2006 speech at Regensburg, which in fact produced meetings and inter-religious dialogue of the highest level.
His trips to North America, Australia, France, and especially the United Kingdom were all preceded by months of serious challenges. Benedict was the first pope to visit the land of Henry VIII, and he went ahead despite being preceded by loud calls for his arrest from atheist campaigners. The effect of his stay was summed up by Prime Minister David Cameron with the words: “You came to speak to 6 million Catholics and you have been heard by 60 million.”
Even the clerical sex abuse scandals turned into a boomerang of sorts when it was revealed that it had been none other than Cardinal Ratzinger who had insisted on rigorously cleaning house. Ironically, this fact might never have come to light had not part of the press insisted on pinning the blame on him.
But the fact remains that the attacks endured by Pope Benedict during his pontificate were often crass, ferocious, and unmoored from facts. From the barrage that prevented him from accepting an invitation to speak at Rome’s La Sapienza University, an institution originally founded by a Pope, to the invisible hand that prevented crucial information about Rev. Williamson to reach the pope’s ears before he revoked the excommunication of four Lefebvrian bishops; from the profanation of the tombs of two Belgian cardinals by the police while the entire Belgian Bishops’ Conference was held hostage for ten hours in a row to the roiling events at the Vatican bank; from the “Vatileaks” trial, which showed the world that the Pontiff didn’t even have his own apartment under control, to the mysterious disactivation of the banking automats that paralyzed all activity in the Vatican. One must wonder what matters must have been like in the final years of then very frail St John Paul II.
Not everyone is aware of how hard Pope Benedict fought, despite all this, to straighten things out, successfully weeding out a great deal of the “filth” that he once made reference to publicly, although apparently not enough, events over the past ten years have demonstrated.
The slurs and livid attacks on Benedict continued even after his startling abdication and silent withdrawal to the Monastery in the Vatican Gardens. The number and intensity of these unrelenting attacks from all quarters show how important it was for his opponents in the Church to silence him. Unfortunately for them, now that Josef Ratzinger is with Jesus, his voice may well be louder than ever.
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