So remember people from Hanover
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When the Pope praised Leibniz: This is how people from Hanover remember encounters with Pope Benedict XVI.
Audience in Rome: Library Director Georg Ruppelt (right) in 2008 with Pope Benedict.
© Source: HAZ archive
Hanover. It was a memorable encounter. On a November day in 2008, Leibniz’s successor in office met Peter’s successor in office. Georg Ruppelt, director of the Leibniz Library at the time, still remembers his meeting with Pope Benedict XVI.
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“I was in Rome with the board of directors of the German Cultural Council to hold cultural-political talks,” says the 75-year-old. As a guest gift, Ruppelt had a facsimile of the Leibniz manuscript “Of the true theologia mystica” placed on the desk of the Pope. Highly complex trains of thought, written down in the German of the year 1695, which took some getting used to, by a scholar with a pig’s claw.
At the general audience, the Pope walked straight up to the visitor from Hanover, who was standing in the first row, and spoke to Ruppelt with beaming eyes about the “wonderful document that is so wonderfully easy to read”. Benedikt found words of praise for Hanover’s greatest spirit: “Leibniz towers above us all,” he said – which he was absolutely right about.
conversations at breakfast
The Hanoverian history professor Hans-Georg Aschoff often had to do with the pope when he was still a minor cardinal. They often met in the Vatican in the small church at the German cemetery, the Campo Santo: “Every Thursday he celebrated mass there at 7 a.m., and then he often stayed for breakfast,” says the expert on church history. “I always found him to be a likeable, approachable, modest person,” says the 75-year-old. “Conversations with him were always very exhausting.”
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Conversations in the Vatican: historian Hans-Georg Aschoff met the former pope several times in Rome.
© Source: Philipp von Ditfurth (archive)
Once the historian reported to the cardinal about his research in the Vatican archives on the Hanoverian politician Ludwig Windthorst. “When we met again the next year, he remembered exactly how the Windthorst Edition was progressing,” says Aschoff, “his memory was impressive.”
Sermon in Regensburg
Gisela Reinke met the former professor of theology Joseph Ratzinger back in the 1970s. She lived with her family in Regensburg at the time, where he was teaching at the university. “His sermons were very demanding – he was just a learned man,” remembers the agile 90-year-old, who has been living in Hanover for some time.
She attended his services in Regensburg: Gisela Reinke experienced the future pope as a learned person.
© Source: Barbara Krueger
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In the summer of 2020, the Pope Emeritus traveled to Regensburg again to visit his terminally ill brother Georg Ratzinger, the renowned cathedral conductor, for the last time. He also visited his parents’ grave, which the brothers had had buried in the Regensburg-Ziegetsdorf cemetery.
Gisela Reinke visited the small church at Ziegetsdorfer Friedhof in the 1970s. “The brothers were very close, and Joseph Ratzinger was also very good at playing the piano,” she recalled. The later Pope was never a man of power: “He would have preferred to only deal with his books,” she says. “He only accepted the papal office out of a sense of duty.”
Bishops pay tribute to Benedict
Hildesheim Bishop Heiner Wilmer met Benedict in Rome when he was already retired. “I was very impressed that, despite his advanced age, he was always wide awake and intelligently analyzed the questions of faith and the challenges of the church in our complex world,” he says. He is very saddened by the death of the Pope, says Wilmer: “With him, the Catholic Church in Germany and throughout the world has lost an outstanding representative with enormous mental strength. We are all losing an excellent personality, an example of faith, a great theologian and a sensitive person.”
Hanover’s Protestant regional bishop Ralf Meister also praised Benedict “as a profound thinker and theologian, as a pious person whose whole endeavor was to live in the footsteps of Jesus”.