Archbishop Gänswein says he cannot explain mystery of Pope Benedict's abdication

After the interview book by Archbishop Georg Gänswein with Saverio Gaeta, which the Mondadori publishing house began to aggressively market immediately after the death of Pope Benedict XVI, a new book on the late pontiff has now been published in Italy by Orazio La Rocca at San Paolo Edizioni. It is entitled "Ratzinger. La Scelta. Non sono scappato' - I dieci anni di Benedetto XVI da Papa emerito" ("Ratzinger. The Decision. 'I have not fled' - The ten years of Benedict XVI as Pope Emeritus"). Gänswein wrote the author a preface to it last September 2022, which we publish here exclusively in our own translation. Last autumn's word is the first public pronouncement by Pope Benedict's former private secretary after his burial next to the tomb of the Apostle Peter in St Peter's Basilica on 5 January 2023.

Approaching a mystery

by Georg Gänswein

On the occasion of the presentation of this book by Orazio la Rocca, allow me to make a brief autobiographical digression. The most important date in my life is 12 August 1956, when, 13 days after my birth in our parish church of St. Leodegar in Riedern am Wald in the archdiocese of Freiburg, I became a Christian through the sacrament of baptism and a member of the Roman Catholic universal Church. Therefore, 31 May 1984, when I was ordained to the priesthood by Archbishop Oskar Saier, became similarly significant. Both days were formative. They are the sacramental cornerstones of my existence.

On the other hand, the 19 April 2005 was more spectacular to the outside world, when Pope Benedict XVI confirmed me as his personal private secretary only a few minutes after his election and still in the Sistine Chapel, that is, in the office I had already held for Cardinal Ratzinger since 2003.

After that, however, it was 11 February 2013. That was the day on the evening of which lightning struck the dome of St Peter's Basilica, after my employer had resigned in the morning as the first Pope to do so in over 800 years. But here I must make a distinction. For I was not surprised by this but had already been informed by the Pope of his intention beforehand under the seal of absolute secrecy and was severely shocked. But he had made the unshakeable decision in prayer, he explained to me in a personal conversation and justified it on 11 February 2013 before the cardinals. February 2013 before the cardinals in the Sala Clementina in Latin in a few lines with the historic words: "Having repeatedly examined my conscience before God, I have come to the certainty that, as a result of advancing age, my strength is no longer suitable for me to exercise in an appropriate manner the ministry of Peter ... But in order to steer the little ship of Peter and to proclaim the Gospel, both the strength of the body and the strength of the spirit are necessary - a strength which has diminished in me in recent months to such an extent that I must recognise my inability to continue to carry out well the ministry entrusted to me. "

For this reason, he said, he wished to renounce the office of Bishop of Rome and Successor of Peter "from 28 February 2013 at 8pm". The decision was so serious that I personally assumed at the time that Benedict XVI's life expectancy was perhaps an additional year as the last remaining period of time. Therefore, when we left the Apostolic Palace together on 28 February 2013, the whole world witnessed how I could no longer control my tears.

But in the meantime, the whole world knows that nine years have now passed and that his tenure as pontifex maximus is daily outstripped by the time he has spent in retirement as "Papa emerito". So it is not surprising that after the millennium of his resignation after exactly "7 years, 10 months and 9 days in office", the Pope emeritus was much and often criticised and also sharply attacked, as if he were a second Celestine V and had also "pronounced the great refusal out of cowardice", as Dante Alighieri wrote in his bitter commentary on this Pope's abdication on 13 December 1294. Others - belonging to a large camp within the Church - have made Benedict XVI a hero precisely because of his abdication.

I need not say that I belong to either of these camps. In any case, the move remained unheard of. Only once, as I recall, was he compared to Emperor Charles V, the great Habsburg at the beginning of the modern era, in whose world empire "the sun never set", who abdicated as Emperor in 1555. But there have been many emperors on this earth: in Rome, Byzantium, Moscow, Vienna, in China, Mexico, Japan, and for a short time even in Paris.

The Papacy, on the other hand, has only ever existed as an idea and in practice in the singular!

The attempts at ever new explanations of his resignation over the years are therefore not surprising, of which the work by Orazio la Rocca presented here is, after the extensive biography of Peter Seewald, perhaps the most ambitious and remarkable of late. And it will certainly not be the last to revolve around the mystery of this man who wrote church history in such a striking way.

Orazio la Rocca last met Joseph Ratzinger in person on the morning before the conclave in April 2005, when the cardinal - still all in black and "with a beret on his head like Che Guevara" on his way - was on his way from his flat to St. Anne's Gate and asked for the author's prayer. Of course, it is quite different for me, who has been sharing the table, the altar, life and common prayer with "Papa emerito" day after day for so many years now. Nevertheless, it is also fascinating for me to read and leaf through this book for lovers from the hand of a passionate lover, in which the Italian observer tries to approach the Pope from Germany from ever new angles in order to fathom his incomprehensible "decision", as he calls the book in its title. How could I have read it other than curiously and most attentively?

It is a meticulously researched book for all those who want to know even more precisely what it was like before 11 February 2013, and how this inexplicable moment of shock came about. Of course, even the many pages of this research cannot really answer why this happened. I know what Father Benedict said about it but don't know the answer in depth myself. The only thing that seems clear to me after this book is that the pontificate of Benedict XVI was, at its beginning and end, God's choice, which he twice obediently accepted. The mystery remains.

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