My Brother, the Pope

by Georg Ratzinger

  One roommate of the future pope in Freising was Pavlo Kohut (1926-2006), a Ukrainian Greek Catholic who had fled to Germany from the Russians and now wanted to become a priest. When I interviewed Father Kohut in the summer of 2005, he no longer recalled where he had met Joseph Ratzinger for the first time, in the study hall or at a meal. Yet he still remembered vividly the impression he had of him: “I knew right away: this is a man who is not your peer, he is something quite special. He immediately took an interest in me and listened to me attentively. That meant a great deal to me in my situation at the time. As time went on, we became better acquainted and often went on walks together. I told him about my youth, my uncle, my parents, and about the fact that it was not possible for me to learn anything about them because of the political situation. The Iron Curtain had closed; it was impossible to send letters or receive news reports. He immediately offered to help me in my difficult situation, for which I am still grateful to him today. At that time I had some problems with the German language. He helped me to write letters, complete assignments, and corrected the results. He always looked after me, and you could tell that he did it gladly. He was never imposing, he was always very restrained. He was never full of self-importance, as is sometimes the case with young people, and he did not make himself the center of attention. . . . In everything he did, he showed the utmost concentration—whether he was studying, working, or talking with me, he never let himself be distracted by something else. He learned constantly; he was constantly hungry for new knowledge. Whenever I saw him, he was reading; he used every minute to learn. And he was always very orderly, very well organized. As you see, his diligence paid off.”

  I myself did not have much contact with Pavlo Kohut, but my brother was very good friends with him. He was a very sociable, nice man, and everyone knew that he came from the Eastern Church, about which he could tell us a lot. So he was generally well liked, and all of us had good memories of him.

  Above all, the candidates for the priesthood who had now returned home were hungry for learning and knowledge. After the dullness of the war years and the monotonous subjection to Brownshirt propaganda, they hungered and thirsted for literature, which helped them cope with what they had experienced and find answers to the questions that occupied their inmost thoughts. First and foremost was the question of guilt. What sins of omission had led to a situation in which the brown pied pipers were able to come into power? What share did they themselves have in the responsibility for the atrocities of the regime? How could men be capable of such things at all? Where was God; why had he remained silent? Had he long since forgotten men, or were they the ones who had turned their back on him? How could one show remorse and do penance for what had happened? And, above all, how could citizens make sure that the horrors of National Socialism could never be repeated? The seminarians read Gertrud von le Fort, Ernst Wiechert, and Dostoyevsky, whose novel Crime and Punishment went to the heart of the central question of those days; they flocked to the lectures of the moral theologian Steinbüchel, who introduced them to the philosophers Heidegger and Jaspers. Steinbüchel’s book Der Umbruch des Denkens (The revolution of thought) became key reading for Joseph Ratzinger, who made the title his motto. That was just what Germany, what the world needed now—a 180-degree turn back to God! Everyone had had an all-too-drastic experience of what happens when a society separates itself from God and declares man the measure of all things and master of life and death.

  In order to distinguish between us, our fellow students called us “Bücher-Ratz” (Bookish-Ratz), which of course was my brother, and “Orgel-Ratz” (Organ-Ratz), since I was more interested in music. In Freising we had the seminary library, a reference library, and finally the cathedral library, so really there was no shortage of books for him. He always read everything he considered worth reading. At that time, the custom was that when a priest had died, his library would be brought to the seminary. There the students who staffed the library culled anything that was still missing in the collection or might be valuable, and the rest was auctioned off among us seminarians. So we bought all sorts of valuable things at auction. For there were scarcely any books on sale at that time, and then they were printed on very cheap paper and were rather expensive.

  I cannot remember all the things we used to read in those days. The works by Alois Dempf about the philosophy of history were of course in use. Then the books by Romano Guardini, for instance, Sacred Signs and, naturally, his important book on Christ, The Lord. Many enjoyed reading Michael Schmaus’ Christus das Urbild des Menschen (Christ, the archetype of man), but also Joseph Bernhart’s Der Kaplan (The parish priest)—unfamiliarity with that work was considered to be almost a gap in one’s education. Bernhart (1881-1969) was a Swabian from Bavaria who had studied theology and taken an advanced degree before he was assigned to be an assistant pastor in a little village. He was bored there and became acquainted with a woman, fell in love with her, and even married her, which of course meant that he left the priesthood. For a time he was even excommunicated. During that critical time in his life, he wrote the aforementioned book. He later became a philosopher of religion and an author and published something about the Summa theologica by Thomas Aquinas—not an academic book, but a popularization for a wider public, written in a wonderful, very polished style and on a high level theologically, which we appreciated very much.

  In the library there were also books listed on the “Index of Forbidden Books”. They had been collected in a special bookcase that was usually locked, which we called “the poison cabinet”. Der Kaplan, which of course I read, too, was in it; other than that, not too much from that collection, because after all I spent a great deal of time practicing at the piano and the organ. My brother was different that way; he could never read enough.

  Yet while he was scaling the loftiest heights of philosophy and theology, Joseph Ratzinger always remained connected with the faith of his childhood. That, too, was a result of the experience with National Socialism. “In the faith of my parents I found the confirmation that Catholicism had been a bulwark of truth and justice against that regime of atheism and falsehood” (ST 56), he later wrote. It was a faith that had stood the test in the darkest hour of history. So, on the one hand, he discussed with his fellow seminarians the great Doctors of the Church, but he nevertheless remained a man of simple, downright rural piety. He highly esteemed Bishop Augustine of Hippo (354-430), a man of artistic sensibility and ardent passion, who also lived in a time of radical change, namely, the era of mass migration; he discovered that contemporary man can also identify with this “suffering, questioning man” (SE 61). He preferred “flesh and blood” theologians to lofty theoreticians. And he wholeheartedly agreed with Augustine that one cannot become a Christian by birth but only through inner conversion.

  My brother was enthusiastic about Saint Augustine from the start, even though we never spoke directly about it. No doubt this great Doctor of the Church is a fascinating phenomenon simply because of the depth of his ideas, but also because of his voluminous works. One key work, his autobiography, as it were, is of course The Confessions, in which he gives evidence about his life, which was by no means honorable in every respect and yet led him through many detours to Christ and his Church. Indeed, he initially led a rather materialistic life and then joined an elite sect. Only later, after countless prayers of his mother, Monica, did he meet Saint Ambrose of Milan and accept the Catholic faith. Then, of course, we should mention De civitate Dei, The City of God, his outline of an ideal society; his study of the Blessed Trinity, De Trinitate, which is considered his theological masterpiece, and also De doctrina christiana (which we also read), which contains a sort of theory of teaching Church doctrine.

  Naturally we were all interested in that, but only Joseph really took the time to deal with special topics above and beyond the assigned reading. In contrast, I used to read whatever was directly connected with the lectures and what was required for the examinations.

  Especia
lly the first exams after the war were rather suspenseful, since for some seminarians, after all those years at the front, the academic routine was an entirely new situation that seemed quite unfamiliar.

  I can still remember very well one of them who came from Engelsberg (near Garching) and so was a real warhorse, who in the military nonetheless had made first lieutenant. Beforehand, he used to say, “Gentlemen, we have been through a lot already, and no one thought anything of it, and now at exam time you are trembling!” He thought it rather undignified to be afraid of tests. And so for his first exam he went quite cheerfully into the examination room, having previously taken a shot of the liquor his parents had distilled. Therefore he already had some blood alcohol content. He went through the door and left it open, so we too could hear what happened there in the professor’s room. He related things we had never heard before! Finally our philosophy professor, Jakob Fellermeier, who always spoke somewhat stiltedly, although he came from a very simple Bavarian farming family, declared to him: “Well, that was nothing special, I do have to tell you, and strictly speaking I could not let you pass at all, but since you were a combatant for so many years during the war, I will let that suffice for now. . . .” Then we noticed that the two men were afraid of each other: the professor, that this old warrior would become violent and do him harm, and the other, that the professor would flunk him.

  It was like that with another ex-soldier from the vicinity of Waging, also a thickheaded farm boy, who was not very interested in philosophy and studied only what was absolutely necessary in theology. Then in his exam with our philosophy professor Johann Nepomuk Espenberger, he knew so little that the latter was beside himself and could only stammer in his best Bavarian dialect: “Ja, Herr Kandidat, Mr. Candidate, what am I going to do? That really wasn’t very bright, it wasn’t bright at all. What am I going to do? I’ll give you a two; are you happy with that?” Of course he was happy.

  Our first examination, therefore, was for all concerned a big adventure; those stalwart, brawny guys had already gone through all sorts of things in military operations when they were soldiers, and they were most certainly not squeamish. But since they now had to cram and reproduce so much knowledge as answers to rather difficult questions, many of them were simply overwhelmed. Thank God everything went well, both for them and for our professors!

  It was something quite special when Cardinal Faulhaber visited the major seminary in Freising. You could tell it from the meal alone; we would stand there in the refectory, facing the cross, and behind us was the “head table”, at which the Cardinal, too, was supposed to sit. Attentive silence prevailed in the hall when we suddenly heard his footsteps approaching. Then the Cardinal, his secretary, the rector, and the other dignitaries came in, and of course we turned around to see him. He always impressed us enormously; he was a phenomenon that automatically instilled respect. That was already the case in Tittmoning, when we were only little and saw him for the first time; but now, as grown men, we still felt the same reverence for that man. Meanwhile, we had both been confirmed by him also, I in 1935 at the age of eleven, and my brother three years later. But only now did we sense also the burden of sufferings that weighed upon him, for he had gone through a difficult time during National Socialism.

  Michael Cardinal von Faulhaber (1869-1952) came from Lower Franconia and was the son of a baker and farmer. After his studies and a professorship at the University of Strasbourg, he was consecrated Bishop of Speyer in 1911. In 1913, Prince-Regent Ludwig III of Bavaria raised him to the rank of nobility. This was followed in 1917 by his appointment as Archbishop of Munich and Freising, and four years later Pope Benedict XV summoned him to the College of Cardinals. As a Bavarian loyal to the king, he took a critical stance vis-a-vis the Weimar Republic, but he wholeheartedly rejected National Socialism. In 1930, he described it as a “heresy” that could “not be reconciled with Christian doctrine”. He reacted to the Nazis’ anti-Semitic agitation as early as 1923,1 but also in 1933 with sermons in the cathedral in Munich, in which he emphasized that the Christian faith is rooted in Judaism. In 1926, he joined the “Amici Israel”, a group of high-ranking Catholic clerics and theologians who were striving for a Christian-Jewish reconciliation, and ordered his priests in their sermons to avoid anything “that sounded anti-Semitic”. Even his episcopal coat of arms expressed this message. It showed the dove, the Holy Spirit, lighting the menorah, the seven-branched candlestick of the Jews—symbolizing the presence of the Holy Spirit even in the Old Testament, in Judaism. He explicitly supported the Catholic journalist Fritz Michael Gerlich, publisher of Der Gerade Weg and the strongest voice warning against the Nazis. As a close confidant of the apostolic nuncio in Bavaria at the time, the Cardinal Secretary of State, Eugenio Pacelli (later Pope Pius XII), in 1937, he composed the original text of the encyclical Mit brennender Sorge, in which Pope Pius XI would condemn National Socialism with a severity that is unique in papal documents of the modern era. In 1934, the Nazis made an attempt on Faulhaber’s life, followed in 1938 by an attack on the Archbishop’s palace, after it became known that he had offered shelter to the chiefrabbi of Munich during the Kristallnacht and had allowed him to hide the precious Torah scrolls from the synagogue in his residence. Even though from time to time he also had strived for mediation and moderation and was even willing to have a dialogue with Adolf Hitler, he never allowed himself to be exploited by the Brownshirt dictators. In 1940, in a public letter to the Minister of Justice of the Reich, he condemned the mass killing of the handicapped; in 1941, he publicly spoke out against the removal of crucifixes from the schools; in 1943, together with the other German bishops, he protested against the murder of people of other races and ancestry. This man of God, one of the last great princes of the Church in Germany, remained an imposing figure for his entire life; after the war, he led efforts to alleviate the sufferings of the populace and to distribute the humanitarian aid that Pope Pius XII generously placed at his disposal. “What moved me deeply about him was the awe-inspiring grandeur of his mission, with which he had become fully identified” (M 45), Joseph Ratzinger wrote about him in his memoirs.

  In the seminary many stories were told about him. One time the janitor, who also served at meals, inadvertently spilled gravy on his cassock. Then the Cardinal looked at him reproachfully, while the janitor, Herr Bartl, just stammered, “It doesn’t matter, Your Eminence, we still have enough gravy out in the kitchen.”

  One day we met him in the corridor of the seminary, and the rector was there too, who introduced us to him. He then spoke just a few words to us, very slowly and with an emphatic intonation. For us, though, it was as if we had met the dear Lord in person, his appearance was so dignified. At that time he still wore on liturgical occasions a large train about 23 feet long, the so-called cappa magna, and during his visits one of us was designated to carry that train, to which we replied, “ad caudam”, in other words, “at the train”. It was a great honor to be assigned to this duty “ad caudam” by our prefect for liturgy, and a few times my brother was chosen for it. We all admired him, and some also envied him, that he was allowed to carry the Cardinal’s train. But for me there was never any question of that; I had no time at all for it; after all, I had to sing in the men’s choir whenever the Lord Cardinal came to visit.

  With the summer semester in 1947, the two-year program of philosophy studies in Freising ended for the brothers. For his theology studies, Joseph Ratzinger transferred to the University of Munich, where the theological faculty had at that time been relocated in the former royal hunting lodge at Fürstenried. There the seminarians and staff lived, taught, and studied in extremely confined quarters, and occasionally he felt as though he had returned to the Flak battery. One and the same building housed the living quarters for two professors, the administrative office and the meeting room of the faculty, three seminary libraries, and the study halls and dormitories of the students, who slept in bunk beds. The food, too, was meager, because they could not rely on a far
m belonging to the seminary as in Freising. The lectures took place in the greenhouse, which in the winter was ice-cold and in the summer scorching hot. A large, beautiful park on the castle grounds, however, which was laid out partly in the English style and partly in the French manner, compensated for the inconveniences. There Ratzinger could walk for hours, immerse himself in his thoughts, and arrive at important decisions.

  In 1947, we both took the examination in philosophy and received the admissio, which made us candidates for the priesthood. My brother then went to Munich together with two other seminarians, our “compatriot” from Traunstein, Rupert Berger, and Hans Finkenzeller. All the others, myself included, remained in Freising.

  The reason for the change was obvious: despite the wretched conditions, renowned professors who had come from all parts of the country taught in Fürstenried: Professors Stummer, Maier, and Seppelt from Breslau, Egenter from Braunsberg, Söhngen from Cologne, Schmaus, Pascher, and Mörsdorf from Münster. They were the best theologians of their time, and Joseph Ratzinger listened to them with enthusiasm. “I found it wonderful”, he recalled. “Broad horizons of thought and faith opened up before me, and I was learning to ponder the primordial questions of human existence, the questions of my own life” (SE 55).

  Here the foundation for his own theology developed, the basic elements of which are Sacred Scripture and the Fathers of the Church. Yet he never wanted to “stop short in the ancient Church”. Rather, his constant concern was to “get below the encrustations, to expose the real kernel of the faith, and thus give it fresh power and dynamism” (ST 58). In 1950 he took part in a competition that was sponsored each year by the faculty. The theme was: “The People and the House of God in Augustine’s Doctrine of the Church”.