Visibly happy, Pope Benedict XVI enjoyed a concert Saturday evening, featuring music by Mozart. The mayor of Rome had invited the Pope to celebrate Benedict’s one year anniversary, and to celebrate the birthday of Rome. Pope Benedict said he "accepted the invitation gladly and with great joy" and thanked the mayor for "the celebratory and yet familiar evening" with compositions of Mozart which the Pope loves dearly. He also is known to play Mozart on the piano.
Over at the Papa Ratzinger Forum, two more translations: on of an article in 30 Days about Ratzinger as a young professor:
Bonn in those years was the almost accidental capital of Adenauer’s Germany. In the divided land, whose eastern states were behind the Iron Curtain, economic and civilian rebirth was proceeding at a dizzying pace. In the 1957 elections, the Christian Democratic Party had won an absolute majority in Parliament. After the Nazi nightmare, the German Church, with deserved pride, offered an essential contribution to Germany’s new beginning.
In an atmosphere that could have encouraged triumphalism, the young professor-priest Ratzinger had just written an article in 1958 for the magazine Hochland some reflections arising from his brief but intense pastoral experience as a chaplain in the parish of the Most Prescious Blood in Bogenhausen, an haut-bourgeois section of Munich.
In that article, he uses the term “statistical deception” for the cliché that described Europe as “a Continent that is almost totally Christian.” The Church in the postwar modern world appeared to him instead as “a Church of pagans – no longer, as in the past, a church of pagans who have become Christian, but a Church of pagans that still call themselves Christian but who have really become pagans.”
He tells of a new paganism “which is growing ceaselessly in the heart of the Church and threatens to demolish it from the inside.”
And…why he makes so much sense to so many of now, 40 years later:
The Redemptorist Viktor Hahn, who would become the first to earn a doctorate under Ratzinger, adds: “The hall was always overflowing. The students adored him. He used beautiful simple language – the language of a believer.”
[snip]
Roman Angulanza, one of his first students in Bonn, explains: “He appears to have reformulated even the way of writing lectures. He would read his drafts over the kitchen table to his sister Maria, a very intelligent woman but one who had never studied theology. If his sister was pleased, he took it as a sign that the lecture was well written.”
And, if you scroll down a couple of posts, a rather startling interview with Uta Ranke-Heinemann, a well-known theologian famous (infamous) for being excommunicated…
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