Dear Blogger,
Pope Benedict XVI was baptized on April 16, 1927, the day of his birth.
His father was a police official before and during the Nazi era. If his father or mother had been Jewish, well...
sitetest
Thank you for the clarification. I was confusing him with Lustiger.
"In rural southern Bavaria, April 16, 1927, was one of those snowy, bitterly cold days the region sometimes gets in the spring. Bavarians are a tough lot, in part because by butting up against the Alps, they get some of the worst weather in middle Europe. It did not help that Ratzinger entered the world at 4:15 A.M., in the icy chill of the early morning. His older brother and sister were not allowed to come to his baptism for fear of getting sick.
Perhaps it was fate that Ratzinger was born on Holy Saturday, and his parents were named Joseph and Mary. Like another child of another Joseph and Mary, Ratzinger grew up to become a sign of contradiction, a scandal to some and a sort of savior to others. Ratzinger reports in his 1998 autobiography that because he was born on Holy Saturday, he was baptized with the newly blessed Easter water in the small parish church in the village of Marktl am Inn. It is difficult not to read some kind of sacred meaning into the scene, and Ratzinger has not resisted, seeing it as a symbol of the human condition in its "not quite" relation to Easter and the resurrection.
Now seventy-three, Ratzinger's childhood memories are the ones most closely tied to his understanding of who he is and what he believes. Listening to him and reading him today, it is striking that Ratzinger rarely makes reference to his mid-twenties through mid-forties, the years as a professional theologian during which he achieved wide fame. When Ratzinger wants to strike an autobiographical chord, he always looks back to his early days in one of four small Bavarian towns. Those memories are of intimate moments shared with his family; of the rock-solid Catholic ethos of Bavaria, expressed in the liturgy and the simple faith of the people; of his own intellectual awakening, fueled by classical languages and literature; and, finally, of the political and social upheavals of the day, most dramatically, the rise and fall of Hitler's Third Reich.