A Pope Turns Ninety

Author: Kresta in the Afternoon Published on: April 13, 2017 Published in: Church

In the long march of the Church’s history, stretching all the way back to a certain failed fisherman called Peter—whom Christ himself caught with the bait of eternal life—few occupants of the papal chair have evinced as lofty a level of erudition, existing in happy combination with ardent and uncomplicated piety, as the Bavarian Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI. Who, God willing, turns ninety on April 16, this Easter Sunday.

Although he was not born on the feast of Easter, but the day before, the Vigil of the Lord’s Resurrection, which sacred tradition speaks of as the Mystery of Holy Saturday, it remains central to his life. And when he was at once baptized with water freshly blessed for the great feast, it left an impression. In fact, it is a point he makes much of in Milestones, which is a moving account of his life from 1927, when he came into this world, until 1977, when he became Archbishop of Munich. Chosen on the strength of a single book, Introduction To Christianity, which grew out of lectures delivered at Tubingen in 1967, it evidently so captivated the then Pope Paul VI that he had him elevated straightaway into the episcopacy. After that, the scramble to the top was swift and sure. Only he was never one to scramble.

But getting back to the timing of his birth, he believed it to have been the result of divine Providence that, coming into the world when he did, he should then have been the first to be baptized. The experience filled him, he said, “with thanksgiving for having had my life immersed in this way in the Easter mystery.” Putting it a little differently, we might say that given the pilgrim shape of the soul, of an existence lived always on the way, forever in transit, this sudden and dramatic juxtaposition of already and not yet struck him as wonderfully “fitting,” since it left him in a state of “still awaiting Easter … not yet standing in the full light but walking toward it full of trust.” What can that mean for the rest of us but that we need constantly to be in a state of readiness before the door of Easter, waiting expectantly for it to swing open, yet not quite able to cross the threshold. The pivotal moment, then, becomes the event of baptism, which he would years later describe, in an arresting formulation, as nothing less than “the final mutation in the evolution of the human species.”