At the very end, when communion has been distributed, Reinhard Marx gets personal, almost cheerful. The Archbishop of Munich has just celebrated the requiem for Joseph Ratzinger, Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, when Marx says that the Archdiocese will now exchange views on the life story they shared with Ratzinger and tell each other “countless” anecdotes. Benedikt was always interested to hear what was going on in his old homeland. According to Marx, and one can take this as a cardinal understatement, he probably only had access to Benedikt again and again because he was able to tell him something new about his homeland on a regular basis. Although the Bavarian in Rome “also had other sources”, “in this respect he was always well informed”. No one should forget how closely Ratzinger remained connected to his homeland to the end. “It must have cost him some effort to bring a Westphalian to the archbishop’s chair in Munich.” A quiet giggle goes through the rows in the Frauenkirche.
The Archdiocese of Munich and Freising bids farewell to the Bavarian Pope on Tuesday evening. Cardinal Marx does this with a surprising introduction: He wants to invite everyone to prayer, including those who criticize the deceased, and “even those who have experienced abuse and suffering in the church”. What Marx does not say explicitly, his professorship sends out a little later as a press release: that Ratzinger had come under massive criticism at the beginning of his last year because of his dealings with abusers.
In his sermon, Marx then pays tribute to the “passionate theologian” Ratzinger. “He wanted to think further,” says Marx about his predecessor, who was in office in Munich from 1977 to 1982. Now Ratzinger will continue to go with him, says Marx, recalling a sentence by the Pope Emeritus: “When someone dies, they don’t just walk away, they continue to go with us.”
Perhaps the cardinal would have ended up chatting, standing under the high altar, if he hadn’t had to finish on time because of the live TV broadcast. He, the Westphalian, had a “wonderful relationship” with Bavaria in Rome. And at their meetings he, Marx, always asked Benedict: “Bless me!” When they last met, however, he said to the pope: “And now I bless you. And he said: yes, please.”