Benedict XVI Quotes

“And the older you become, the more you find that your strength is just not enough to do what you should. You are too weak, too helpless or unable to deal with situations.’ At such moments he turned to his God and besought him: ‘Now you must help. I can’t do any more.”
― Peter Seewald, Benedict XVI: A Life Volume Two: Professor and Prefect to Pope and Pope Emeritus 1966–The Present

“Once Ratzinger said in passing that education should not seek to take anything away from the other; it should have the humility simply to accompany the student’s own thinking and help them to mature.”
― Peter Seewald, Benedict XVI: A Life Volume Two: Professor and Prefect to Pope and Pope Emeritus 1966–The Present

“he then coined the term ‘desecularization’ (Entweltlichung). Indeed, a church becoming more like Christ necessarily had ‘to differ sharply from the world around it’, he quoted from Pope Paul VI. It had to ‘distance itself’, we could say ‘desecularize itself’. Jesus became human ‘not just to confirm the world in its worldliness and be its companion’ and then leave it as it was. No, a church that ‘settles in this world, is self-satisfied and conforms to the world’s standards’ contravened its founder’s mission, ‘to be an instrument of salvation, imbued with God’s word’ and thus ‘be not of the world’. The pope expressly made clear that necessary ‘desecularization’ also included the church’s charitable works and its ‘organization and institution’. For ‘a church freed from material and political burdens and privileges can devote itself to the whole world better and in a truly Christian way. […] It opens itself to the world, not in order to win people for an institution with its own claims to power, but to bring them to themselves.”
― Peter Seewald, Benedict XVI: A Life Volume Two: Professor and Prefect to Pope and Pope Emeritus 1966–The Present

“Pope Benedict was “framed” in a media set-up that no longer permitted serious reporting.’ The result: ‘Pope Benedict’s papacy, which had begun so brilliantly in 2005, increasingly developed into a “serial breakdown papacy”.’ Every appearance by the pope promised the media new negative headlines.’ The reporting on the pope and the church also showed a trend towards ‘tabloidization’, a way of presenting news ‘with a striking style in both design and content that does not just seek to inform, but also specifically aims at forming’ opinion. There was the ‘expectation of failure’, a mechanism that survived by satisfying those expectations. Journalists themselves did not now ‘expect to consider what the pope had said of interest about the relation between faith and reason or on the global economy, but to look out for mistakes’. That lack of ethics had had ‘a decisive influence on the media images of Pope Benedict’. Now it was often just a matter of ‘exposing the pope’:”
― Peter Seewald, Benedict XVI: A Life Volume Two: Professor and Prefect to Pope and Pope Emeritus 1966–The Present

“On board the plane to Edinburgh, Benedict made his standpoint clear. When a journalist asked him whether the church should urgently do something to become more attractive, he answered with a plain ‘No’. The church did not sell anything, least of all itself. It was not entrusted with goods but with a message, which it had to pass on in full.”
― Peter Seewald, Benedict XVI: A Life Volume Two: Professor and Prefect to Pope and Pope Emeritus 1966–The Present

“Every suffering, said Ratzinger, ‘every silent endurance of wrong, every inner overcoming, every impulse of love, every care and every committal to God’ would have an effect. For ‘nothing good is in vain’.”
― Peter Seewald, Benedict XVI: A Life Volume Two: Professor and Prefect to Pope and Pope Emeritus 1966–The Present