vaticannews.va — By Andrea Tornielli — Benedict XVI died emeritus but was buried as pontiff. An ocean of prayers accompanied the funeral rite presided over by Pope Francis on the parvis of St. Peter’s Basilica. Prayers of gratitude rose up from all over the world, in the certainty that Joseph Ratzinger can finally enjoy the face of the Lord he loved and followed all his life, and to whom he addressed his last words before his final hours: “Lord, I love you!”

There is a distinctive trait that unites Benedict XVI to his successor, and we can find it in the words that the Pope Emeritus spoke in his first Urbi et Orbi message, on the morning the day after his election: “In undertaking his ministry, the new Pope knows that his task is to bring the light of Christ to shine before the men and women of today: not his own light but that of Christ”. Not his own light, his own protagonism, his own ideas, his own tastes, but the light of Christ. Because, as Benedict XVI said, the Church is not our Church but His Church, the Church of God. The servant must account for how he has managed the good that has been entrusted to him. We do not bind people to us; we do not seek power, prestige or esteem for ourselves. It is interesting to note that already as a cardinal, for years, Joseph Ratzinger had warned the Church against a pathology that afflicted it and still afflicts it: that of relying on structures, on the organisation. That of wanting to ‘count’ on the world stage in order to be ‘relevant’.

In May 2010 in Fatima, Benedict XVI told the Portuguese bishops: “When, in the feeling of many, the Catholic faith is no longer the common patrimony of society and is often seen as a seed undermined and obfuscated by ‘divinities’ and lords of this world, it is very difficult for it to touch hearts through simple speeches or moral appeals, and even less through generic reminders of Christian values”. Because “the mere utterance of the message does not reach deep into the heart of the person, does not touch his freedom, does not change his life. What fascinates above all is the encounter with believing people who, through their faith, draw people towards the grace of Christ, bearing witness to Him’. It is not speeches, grand reasoning or vibrant reminders of moral values that touch the hearts of today’s women and men. Religious and proselytising marketing strategies are not needed for the mission. Nor can today’s Church think of living in nostalgia for the relevance and power it had in the past. Quite the contrary: both Benedict XVI and his successor Francis have preached and witnessed to the importance of returning to the essential, to a Church rich only in the light it freely receives from its Lord.

And it is precisely this return to the essential that is the key to the mission. Joseph Ratzinger had said this when he was still prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, during a catechesis in December 2000, which was quoted in these days by Fides director Gianni Valente. Ratzinger took his starting point from the Gospel parable of the Kingdom of God, compared by Jesus to the mustard seed, which “is the smallest of all seeds but, once it has grown, is larger than the other plants in the garden and becomes a tree”. He explained that when speaking of the “new evangelisation” in secularised societies, it was necessary to avoid “the temptation of impatience, the temptation to immediately seek great success, to seek great numbers”. Because this “is not God’s method”. The new evangelisation, he added, “cannot mean: immediately attracting with new, more refined methods the great masses that have drifted away from the Church”. The very history of the Church, Cardinal Ratzinger further observed, teaches that ‘great things always begin with the small grain and mass movements are always ephemeral’. Because God ‘does not count with large numbers; external power is not the sign of his presence. Most of Jesus’ parables point to this structure of divine action and thus respond to the concerns of the disciples, who expected quite different successes and signs from the Messiah – successes of the kind offered by Satan to the Lord’. The Christians, the future Benedict XVI further recalled, “were small communities scattered throughout the world, insignificant according to worldly criteria. In reality they were the seed that penetrated the dough from within and carried within themselves the future of the world’. Therefore, it is not a question of ‘enlarging the spaces’ of the Church in the world: ‘We do not seek an audience for ourselves, we do not want to increase the power and extension of our institutions, but we want to serve the good of people and humanity by giving space to He who is Life.

And precisely this return to the essentials is the key to the mission. Joseph Ratzinger had said this when he was still prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, during a catechesis in December 2000, which was quoted in these days by Fides director Gianni Valente. Cardinal Ratzinger took his starting point from the Gospel parable of the Kingdom of God, compared by Jesus to the mustard seed, which “is the smallest of all seeds but, once it has grown, is larger than the other plants in the garden and becomes a tree”. He explained that when speaking of the “new evangelisation” in secularised societies, it was necessary to avoid “the temptation of impatience, the temptation to immediately seek great success, to seek great numbers”. Because this “is not God’s method”. The new evangelisation, he added, “cannot mean: immediately attracting with new, more refined methods the great masses that have drifted away from the Church”. The very history of the Church, Cardinal Ratzinger further observed, teaches that ‘great things always begin with the small grain and mass movements are always ephemeral’. Because God ‘does not count with large numbers; external power is not the sign of his presence. Most of Jesus’ parables point to this structure of divine action and thus respond to the concerns of the disciples, who expected quite different successes and signs from the Messiah – successes of the kind offered by Satan to the Lord’. The Christians, the future Benedict XVI further recalled, “were small communities scattered throughout the world, insignificant according to worldly criteria. In reality they were the seed that penetrated the dough from within and carried within themselves the future of the world’. Therefore, it is not a question of “enlarging the spaces” of the Church in the world: “We do not seek an audience for ourselves, we do not want to increase the power and extension of our institutions, but we want to serve the good of people and humanity by giving space to He who is Life. This expropriation of the self by offering it to Christ for the salvation of mankind, is the fundamental condition of true commitment to the Gospel’.

It is this awareness that has accompanied the Christian, theologian, bishop and Pope Benedict XVI throughout his long existence. An awareness echoed in a quotation that his successor – to whom he always guaranteed “reverence and obedience” – wished to include in his funeral homily. It is taken from the “Pastoral Rule” of St Gregory the Great: “Amid the shipwreck of the present life, sustain me, I beseech you, by the plank of your prayer, that, since my own weight sinks me down, the hand of your merit will raise me up”. “It is the awareness of the Shepherd,” commented Pope Francis, “that he cannot carry alone what, in reality, he could never carry alone and, therefore, he knows how to abandon himself to prayer and to the care of the people entrusted to him. Because without Him, without the Lord, we can do nothing.

by npr.org — VATICAN CITY — Pope Francis honored his predecessor Benedict XVI, the German theologian who made history by retiring, presiding Thursday over a rare requiem Mass for a dead pontiff by a living one before thousands of mourners in St. Peter’s Square. Bells tolled and the faithful applauded as pallbearers carried Benedict’s cypress coffin out of the fog-shrouded basilica and rested it before the altar. Benedict’s longtime secretary, Archbishop Georg Gaenswein, bent down and kissed a book of the Gospels that was left open on the coffin. Francis, wearing the crimson vestments typical of papal funerals, then took his place and opened the Mass with a prayer.

Tens of thousands visit the Vatican to pay respects to former Pope Benedict XVI Heads of state and royalty, clergy from around the world and thousands of regular people flocked to the ceremony, despite Benedict’s requests for simplicity and official efforts to keep the first funeral for an pope emeritus in modern times low-key. Many hailed from Benedict’s native Bavaria and donned traditional dress, including boiled wool coats to guard against the morning chill. “We came to pay homage to Benedict and wanted to be here today to say goodbye,” said Raymond Mainar, who traveled from a small village east of Munich for the funeral. “He was a very good pope.” The former Joseph Ratzinger, who died Dec. 31 at age 95, is considered one of the 20th century’s greatest theologians and spent his lifetime upholding church doctrine. But he will go down in history for a singular, revolutionary act that changed the future of the papacy: He retired, the first pope in six centuries to do so. Francis has praised Benedict’s courage to step aside, saying it “opened the door” to other popes doing the same. The reigning pontiff, for his part, recently said he has already left written instructions outlining the conditions in which he too would resign. After some 200,000 people paid their respects during three days of public viewing, authorities estimated some 100,000 would attend Benedict’s funeral, though it was not clear if that many did in the end.

Only Italy and Germany were invited to send official delegations, but other leaders took the Vatican up on its offer and come in their “private capacity.” They included several heads of state, at least four prime ministers and two delegations of royal representatives. In addition, a host of patriarchs joined 125 cardinals in the seats to the side of the altar. Among them was Hong Kong Cardinal Joseph Zen, who was given special court permission to attend the funeral and arrived in Rome on Thursday. Zen was detained in May on suspicion of colluding with foreign forces under a national security law that China after he fell afoul of authorities over his participation in a now-silenced democracy movement. His passport was revoked when he was detained.

Matteo Colonna, a 20-year-old seminarian from Teramo, Italy, said he came in part because of the historic nature of the funeral — but also because it had personal resonance for him. “The first spark of my vocation started under the pontificate of Benedict, but then it became even stronger under Pope Francis,” Colonna said, while sitting in prayer in St. Peter’s Square ahead of the funeral. “I see a continuity between these two popes and the fact that today Francis is celebrating the funeral in Benedict’s memory is an historical event.” Early Thursday the Vatican released the official history of Benedict’s life, a short document in Latin that was placed in a metal cylinder in his coffin before it was sealed, along with the coins and medallions minted during his papacy and his pallium stoles. The document gave ample attention to Benedict’s historic resignation and referred to him as “pope emeritus,” citing verbatim the Latin words he uttered on Feb. 11, 2013, when he announced he would retire.

The document, known as a “rogito” or deed, also cited his theological and papal legacy, including his outreach to Anglicans and Jews and his efforts to combat clergy sexual abuse “continually calling the church to conversion, prayer, penance and purification.” How The Catholic Church Aided Both The Sick And The Sickness As HIV Spread Francis didn’t dwell on Benedict’s specific legacy in his homily and only uttered his name once, in the final line, delivering instead a meditation on Jesus’ willingness to entrust himself to God’s will. “Holding fast to the Lord’s last words and to the witness of his entire life, we too, as an ecclesial community, want to follow in his steps and to commend our brother into the hands of the Father,” Francis said at the end. During St. John Paul II’s quarter-century as pope, Ratzinger spearheaded a crackdown on dissent as prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, taking action against the left-leaning liberation theology that spread in Latin America in the 1970s and against dissenting theologians and nuns who didn’t toe the Vatican’s hard line on matters like sexual morals.

His legacy was marred by the clergy sexual abuse scandal, even though he recognized earlier than most the “filth” of priests who raped children, and actually laid the groundwork for the Holy See to punish them. As cardinal and pope, he passed sweeping church legislation that resulted in 848 priests being defrocked from 2004-2014, roughly his pontificate with a year on either end. But abuse survivors still held him responsible for the crisis, for failing to sanction any bishop who moved abusers around and identifying him as embodying the clerical system that long protected the institution over victims. An upcoming trip by Pope Francis has rumors swirling about his future at the Vatican A group representing German clergy abuse survivors called on German officials attending Benedict’s funeral to demand more action from the Vatican on sexual abuse. Eckiger Tisch asked German leaders to demand that Francis issue a “universal church law” stipulating zero tolerance in dealing with abuse by clergy. “Any celebration that marks the life of abuse enablers like Benedict must end,” said the main U.S. abuse survivor group SNAP. The funeral ritual itself is modeled on the code used for dead popes but with some modifications given Benedict was not a reigning pontiff when he died.

After the Mass, Benedict’s cypress coffin will be placed inside a zinc one, then an outer oak casket before being entombed in the crypt in the grottos underneath St. Peter’s Basilica that once held the tomb of St. John Paul II before it was moved upstairs. While the ritual is unusual, it does have some precedent: In 1802, Pope Pius VII presided over the funeral in St. Peter’s of his predecessor, Pius VI, who had died in exile in France in 1799 as a prisoner of Napoleon.

Benedict never intended his retirement to last as long as it did — at nearly 10 years it was longer than his eight-year pontificate. And the unprecedented situation of a retired pope living alongside a reigning one prompted calls for protocols to guide future popes emeritus to prevent any confusion about who is really in charge.