Posted on 01/20/2023 6:36:10 PM PST by marshmallow
CNA Newsroom, Jan 18, 2023 / 08:00 am Austrian Cardinal Christoph Schönborn on Wednesday confirmed he was the person who encouraged Joseph Ratzinger to accept the conclave’s decision — if elected — to become the successor to Pope John Paul II as supreme pontiff of the Catholic Church.
Benedict’s longtime secretary, Archbishop Georg Gänswein, revealed Schönborn’s identity in his book titled “Nothing but the Truth” (“Nient’altro che la verita”), which was published in Italy last week.
CNA Deutsch, CNA’s German-language news partner, reported that Schönborn on Jan. 18 confirmed Gänswein’s assertion that Schönborn had written Cardinal Ratzinger “a little letter just in case.”
At the same time, the archbishop of Vienna accused Gänswein of committing an act of “unseemly indiscretion” with his book by publishing “confidential things,” according to the Archdiocese of Vienna’s website.
Schönborn said he had “so far deliberately kept silent” about his note to Benedict, noting “it happened within the context of the meeting of the cardinals, and not at the conclave itself.”
Benedict’s ‘guillotine speech’
Pope Benedict XVI spoke about the letter on April 25, 2005, during an audience with pilgrims from Germany.
The address is famous among German Catholics as the “guillotine speech” — in German Fallbeilrede.
In it, Benedict compared the experience of his election to that of having the axe of a guillotine dropping down on him. The guillotine blade in German is called a fallbeil.
(Excerpt) Read more at catholicnewsagency.com ...
Interesting.
bump
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