Joseph Ratzinger, Benedict's birth name, was born in 1927 in the predominantly Catholic state of Bavaria into a devoutly Catholic and politically moderate family with three children. (Benedict was his regnal name.) His father was a police officer who took a firm line with misbehaviour by Nazi thugs,arresting several of them.the environment of the home was devout. Joseph senior provided the intellectual rigour of young Joseph's life while mother contributed a strong devotional element. This combination of rigorous thought and deep Catholic devotion was to form a firm grounding to the future pope's religious life. It certainly led to both sons becoming priests. The home was deeply musical, and both priestly sons carried musicality with them throughout their lives. Joseph,the younger of the two, was by far the most intellectually talented and began to do well academically.
When Joseph was six the Nazis, whom his father had actively resisted, took power, leaving the family into a politically precarious position. This led to the family's moving a few times to different, more amenable areas before Joseph senior took a police pension and retired to a small farm away from the more politically dangerous larger places. There the Ratzinger family lived in hope of the eventual ending of Nazi tyranny. At this stage they looked for a future beyond the darkness through which they could not see.
Young Joseph's teens were lived under the shadow of the tyrant. He went to the Catholic junior seminary, a training school for boys wanting to be priests, at the age of twelve, which provided something of a shelter from pressure to join the Hitler youth, but the respite from tyranny was not to be long. Eventually all boys were compulsorily enroĺled in this movement, and the punishment for not joining was that the boy's father would be sent to a concentration camp. Joseph's solution was to attend one meeting and, I suspect, make himself so useless that no one complained that this physically weak inadequate never came to another meeting.
Eventually at the age of eighteen he was drafted, but did military service in an auxiliary anti aircraft unit. Luckily he did not need to fight, as he was involved in sending communications to gunners. This was a miserable time in his life. In 1945 he saw a column of Jews and others being marched from one camp to another,but was powerless to assist, as complaints were punished by instant death. In one incident a senior Nazi visited Joseph's unit to tell them that they were all volunteering for the SS. Joseph resolutely refused and said that he was a Catholic training for the priesthood. This was a risky testimony, but the shocked official did not press the point.
Eventually, as the war was ending Joseph deserted his unit and headed for home. He did not stay long at home, as he was taken prisoner by the Americans and spent some time in a prison camp, but he must not have been a threat, as he was soon released and free to resume his priestly studies. We see here a young man trying to survive with his conscience unsuĺlied under an appalling tyranny and succeeding.His life was on a course set for God and he was still on target.
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He had a lifelong commitment to theological truth. For him theology was not just an academic job, it was a path to God and therefore to be taken with the utmost seriousness.
His adherence to theology is laudable.
When you mention the use of the Dewey system West pond, I have to say that the Dewey system is so good that it is used over here. Library of Congress numbers are also used over here. Why change a winning system.
The library is almost entirely religion and philosophy, along with church history. Thus the full Dewy system is not necessary. I suspect that it would benefit from a team of librarians skilled collectively in various languages pertinent to religious matters.
Thank you!
In regard to Pope Benedict liking a Vatican librarianship, is the Vatican library Byzantinely or clearly organized? What classification -- on the (Atlantic) pond's west side, it tends to be Dewey Decimal and Library of Congress classifications -- would the Vatican library use to organize materials?
And would it be known what exact position Pope Benedict would have liked to have held?
Internally. The administration was not very professional. Externally organised crime took its opportunity.
Pope Francis appointed Cardinal Pell to clean up the Vatican bank.He found one billion euros of money that was unaccounted for and gave it to the Italian authorities. In doing so he crossed an organised crime syndicate and was later convicted of abuse on the basis of dubious evidence and spent over a year in jail before being acquitted on final appeal. Pope Francis always attested Pell's innocence. Draw your own conclusions on this case.
Bavaria would have meant retirement to a cottage that he owned with his late sister and writing theology books. There are no rules specifying what a pope does after abdication.
The computer crashed before I began another question from that same subheading, Papacy.
The second paragraph indicates that "The Vatican finances are Byzantine in complexity and were infiltrated by organised crime."
Is it the internal or the international or each component together that makes finances so complex?
What infiltration was effected by organized crime, how was it possible to achieve that infiltration and how was that infiltration mitigated?
The first paragraph in your last subheading, Papacy, indicates that Pope Benedict would have liked a Bavaria responsibility or a Vatican librarianship.
What would have been the Bavaria position?
And would it have been possible to take either responsibility after abdication or would that abdication automatically involve the "life of quiet prayer and scholarship for which he had long yearned"?