Early life of Pope Benedict XVI

The early life of Pope Benedict XVI concerns the period from his birth in 1927 through the completion of his education and ordination in 1951.

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Background and childhood (1927–1943)

Joseph Alois Ratzinger was born on 16 April, Holy Saturday, 1927 at 11 Schulstrasse, his parents' home in Marktl am Inn, Bavaria and baptised on the same day. He was the third and youngest child of Joseph Ratzinger, Sr., a police officer, and his wife, Maria, whose family were from Bolzano-Bozen. His father served in both the Bavarian State Police ("Landespolizei") and the German national Regular Police (Ordnungspolizei) before retiring in 1937 to the town of Traunstein. The "Sunday Times" described the older Ratzinger as "an anti-Nazi whose attempts to rein in Hitler’s Brown Shirts forced the family to move several times." ref|timesonline_hj. According to the "International Herald Tribune", these relocations were directly related to Joseph Ratzinger, Sr.'s continued resistance to Nazism, which resulted in demotions and transfers.ref|iht_demotions The pope's brother Georg said: "Our father was a bitter enemy of Nazism because he believed it was in conflict with our faith," ref|nytimes_faith. The family had a sadder encounter with the Nazi regime, because of its euthanasia program for the handicapped. John Allen, Ratzinger's biographer, reports a revelation made by Cardinal Ratzinger at a conference in the Vatican on November 28th 1996: " Ratzinger had a cousin with Down's Syndrome who in 1941 was 14 years old. This cousin was just a few months younger than Ratzinger and was taken away by the Nazi authorities for "therapy." Not long afterwards, the family received word that he was dead, presumably one of the 'undesirables' eliminated during that time."ref|ncr_cousin

His brother, Georg, became a priest as well as a musician and medievalist and is alive in 2008. His sister, Maria Ratzinger, who never married, managed her brother Joseph's household until her death in 1991. Their great uncle Georg Ratzinger was a priest and member of the Reichstag, as the German Parliament was then called.

According to his cousin Erika Kopp, Ratzinger had no desire from childhood to be anything other than a priest. At the age of 15, she says, he announced that he was going to be a bishop, whereupon she playfully remarked, "And why not Pope?" ref|theage. An even earlier incident occurred in 1932, when Michael Cardinal von Faulhaber, the archbishop of Munich, visited the small town in which the Ratzinger family lived, arriving in a black limousine. The future pope, then five years old, was part of a group of children who presented the cardinal with flowers, and later that day Ratzinger announced he wanted to be a cardinal, too. "It wasn't so much the car, since we weren't technically minded," Georg Ratzinger told a reporter from the "New York Times". "It was the way the cardinal looked, his bearing, and the garments he was wearing that made such an impression on him."ref|nytimes_faith

Following his 14th birthday in 1941, he joined the Hitler Youth, as membership was legally required in effect beginning March 25, 1939.ref|HistoryPlace According to "National Catholic Reporter" correspondent and biographer John Allen, Ratzinger was an unenthusiastic member who refused to attend meetings. Ratzinger has mentioned that a Nazi mathematics professor arranged reduced tuition payments for him at seminary. This theoretically required documentation of attendance at Hitler Youth activities (deliberately planned at Sunday mornings at that stage, to prevent church attendance) - however, according to Ratzinger, his professor arranged that the young seminary student did not need to attend those gatherings to receive a scholarship [cite web | last = The New York Times | title = New Pope Defied Nazis As Teen During WWII | date = 2005-04-23 | url = http://bc.edu/research/cjl/meta-elements/texts/cjrelations/topics/new_pope_defied_nazis.htm | accessdate = 2007-05-14 ] . However, there are those who do not accept assertions similar to those made by Allen. As per the 17 April 2005 "The Times": "Some locals in Traunstein, like Elizabeth Lohner, 84, whose brother-in-law was sent to Dachau as a conscientious objector, dismiss such suggestions. "It was possible to resist, and those people set an example for others", she said. "The Ratzingers were young and had made a different choice." [http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2089-1572667,00.html] Other sources, including former Nazis, confirm the refusal of the Ratzinger brothers to attend Nazi youth activities. These sources stressed, however, that the Ratzingers did not actively evade military service after it was forced upon them by party officials.

Military service (1943–1945)

In 1943, when he was 16, Ratzinger was drafted with many of his classmates into the Luftwaffenhelfer programme. They were posted first to Ludwigsfeld, north of Munich, as part of a detachment responsible for guarding a BMW aircraft engine plant. Next they were sent to Unterföhring, northwest of Munich, and briefly to Innsbruck. From Innsbruck their unit went to Gilching to protect the jet fighter base and to attack Allied bombers as they massed to begin their runs towards Munich. At Gilching, Ratzinger served in a telephone communications post.Fact|date=February 2007

On September 10, 1944, his class was released from the Corps. Returning home, Ratzinger had already received a new draft notice for the Reichsarbeitsdienst. He was posted to the Hungarian border area of Austria which had been annexed by Germany in the Anschluss of 1938. When Hungary was occupied by the Red Army Ratzinger was put to work setting up anti-tank defences in preparation for the expected Red Army offensive. While there, he saw Jews being herded to death camps.ref|timesonline_hj On November 20, 1944 his unit was released from service.Fact|date=February 2007

Ratzinger again returned home. After three weeks passed, he was drafted into the German army at Munich and assigned to the infantry barracks in the center of Traunstein, the city near which his family lived. After basic infantry training, Ratzinger served at various posts around the city with his unit. They were never sent to the front.Fact|date=February 2007

In late April or early May, days or weeks before the German surrender, Ratzinger deserted. Desertion was widespread during the last weeks of the war, even though punishable by death (executions, frequently extrajudicial, continued to the end); diminished morale and the greatly diminished risk of prosecution from a preoccupied and disorganized German military contributed to the growing wave of soldiers looking toward self-preservation. Ratzinger left the city of Traunstein and headed for his nearby village. "I used a little-known back road hoping to get through unmolested. But, as I walked out of a railroad underpass, two soldiers were standing at their posts, and for a moment the situation was extremely critical for me. Thank God that they, too, had had their fill of war and did not want to become murderers." They used the excuse of his arm being in a sling to let him go home.Fact|date=February 2007

Soon after, two SS members were given shelter at the Ratzinger family house, and they began to make enquiries about the presence there of a young man of military age. They might have reported this to the local Gestapo. Ratzinger's father even made clear to these SS men his ire against Adolf Hitler, but the two disappeared the next day without taking any action against the Ratzinger family. Cardinal Ratzinger later stated, "A special angel seemed to be guarding us."Fact|date=February 2007

When the Americans arrived in the village, "I was identified as a soldier, had to put back on the uniform I had already abandoned, had to raise my hands and join the steadily growing throng of war prisoners whom they were lining up on our meadow. It especially cut my good mother's heart to see her boy and the rest of the defeated army standing there, exposed to an uncertain fate..." Ratzinger was briefly interned in a prisoner of war camp near Ulm and was released on June 19, 1945. He and another young man began to walk the 120 km (75 miles) home but got a lift to Traunstein in a milk truck. The family was reunited when his brother, Georg, returned after being released from a prisoner of war camp in Italy. He became a priest when he was 24 years old. He is now 81 years old.Fact|date=February 2007

Priestly formation (1946–1951)

Following repatriation in 1945, Ratzinger and his brother entered a Catholic seminary in Freising, and then studied at the "Herzogliches Georgianum" of the Ludwig-Maximilian University in Munich. According to an interview with Peter Seewald, he and his fellow students were particularly influenced by the works of Gertrud von le Fort, Ernst Wiechert, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Elisabeth Langgässer, Theodor Steinbüchel, Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers. The young Ratzinger saw the last three in particular as a break with the dominance of Neo-Kantianism, with the key work being Steinbüchel's "Die Wende des Denkens" (The Change in Thinking). By the end of his studies he was drawn more to the active Saint Augustine than to Thomas Aquinas, and among the scholastics he was more interested in Saint Bonaventure.

On June 29, 1951, he and his brother, along with other seminarians from Traunstein seminary, were ordained in Freising by Cardinal Faulhaber of Munich. His dissertation (1953) was on Augustine, entitled "The People and the House of God in Augustine's Doctrine of the Church", and his "Habilitationsschrift" (a dissertation which serves as qualification for a professorship) was on Bonaventure. It was completed in 1957 and he became a professor of Freising college in 1958.

References

Notes

# [http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2089-1572667,00.html www.timesonline.co.uk] April 17, 2005. "Papal hopeful is a former Hitler Youth"
# International Herald Tribune April 22, 2005. "A boy's dreams lead from a village to the Vatican" (reprinted from the New York Times)
# [http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/22/international/worldspecial2/22germany.html?pagewanted=1&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1114340564-13zVUfWUfsfMLXhqWFxrDA www.nytimes.com] April 21, 2005. "A Future Pope Is Recalled: A Lover of Cats and Mozart, Dazzled by Church as a Boy"
# [http://www.nationalcatholicreporter.org/word/word101405.htm#five www.nationalcatholic reporter.org] October 14, 2005. pooplovebutt"Anti-Nazi Prelate Beatified. The conference took place under the auspices of the Pontifical Council for Health Care. At the present date (January 2006) there is no reference to this Conference on its [http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/pontifical_councils/hlthwork/index.htm| website] .
# [http://theage.com.au/articles/2005/04/20/1113854260201.html theage.com.au] April 21, 2005. "Cousin recalls boy who dreamed of church life"
# [http://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/hitleryouth/hj-prelude.htm www.historyplace.com] "Hitler Youth -- Prelude to War. 1933-1938"