“Against me a fury and a murderous shout”
AND’ published a posthumous book by Benedict XVIwhich collects published and unpublished texts of the period in which he was Pope emeritus. He himself asked the curators, Elio Guerriero and Msgr. Georg Gaenswein, with a letter dated May 1, 2022: “This volume, which collects the writings I composed in the Mater Ecclesiae monastery, it must be published after my deathIn a letter to Guerriero Ratzinger he explained his choice as follows: «For my part, in life, I no longer want to publish anything. There fury of circles against me in Germany it is so strong that the appearance of my every word immediately causes a murderous shout from them. I want to save this for myself and for Christendom,” it reads “What is Christianity” (Mondador).
“There were individual bishops, and not only in the United States, who rejected the Catholic tradition as a whole, aiming in their dioceses to develop a kind of new, modern catholicity. Perhaps it is worth mentioning the fact that, in quite a few seminaries, students caught reading my books were considered unfit for the priesthood. My books were disguised as harmful literature and were, so to speak, read only in secret.”
Benedict XVI talks abouthomosexuality and of the fact that there are gay “clubs” in seminaries who acted more or less openly and who clearly transformed the climate in the seminaries. In a seminary in southern Germany, candidates for the priesthood and candidates for the lay office of pastoral contact person live together. During common meals, the seminarians were together with married pastoral representatives, partly accompanied by their wives and children and in some cases by their girlfriends. The atmosphere in the seminary could not help priestly formation“.
Benedict XVI talks about his resignation in 2013 and says that at that time was “exhausted”. “When on February 11, 2013 I announced my resignation from the ministry of the successor of Peter, I had no plan for what I was going to do in the new situation. I was too exhausted – in his words – to be able to start other jobs. Furthermore, the publication of the Childhood of Jesus seemed a logical conclusion to my theological writings”. “After the election of Pope Francis I slowly resumed my theological work. Thus, over the years, a series of small and medium contributions, which are presented in this volume“, explains Benedict XVI in the book which, at his behest, is published after his death.