This time Marktl was prepared, and had been for years. There was a schedule, a folder with the inscription “In the event of the death of Pope Benedict emeritus” was at hand, and the condolence book, which has been on display in St. Oswald since New Year’s Eve, had already been purchased by the community when Hubert Gschwendtner was still mayor was. Gschwendtner knows from his own experience what good preparation can be worth. Because on April 19, 2005, he too was completely unexpected when he received the news that a son of his small congregation had been elected Pope.
The media interest literally overwhelmed the small community in the district of Altötting that day. A journalist counted more than 40 outside broadcast vans on the market square, they must have maneuvered around a lot and parked tightly there. Now that Joseph Aloisius Ratzinger, born in Marktl am Inn in 1927 and baptized on the same day in St. Oswald, became Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI. died in Rome, a number of people came to Marktl again, both believers and journalists. But even now there aren’t too many of them.
The “initial hype”, as Hubert Gschwendtner calls it today, is long gone anyway. The papal salami, the papal beer, all those merchandising products of some local businessmen and foreign businessmen no longer play a major role in Marktl, where they sometimes had to be harshly criticized for the improper “marketing” of the Holy Father, although that was the case had not emanated from them alone. The SPD mayor Gschwendtner tried to somehow keep everything within limits. “It got on my nerves!” he says. There was no tourist office or anything like that at first, although in the first two years 200,000 guests came to the 2,700-strong community.
In the meantime, of course, there is a tourist information center in the community center on the market square, a few steps from St. Oswald. Right in front of it is the “Benedict Column” in the form of a scroll more than four meters high. The artist Joseph Michael Neustifter made it out of bronze. Parts of the rule of Saint Benedict of Nursia and short excerpts from Ratzinger’s sermons can be read on it. A Lower Bavarian entrepreneur had donated the column for the acclaimed visit of the new Pope to his birthplace in 2006, the high point of the mass market traders Benedict Bliss.
The column and the baptismal font in St. Oswald, which had already been decommissioned and returned to its old place in the church in 2006, are part of what Hubert Gschwendtner calls “sustainable”. The sustainability has remained, even if the number of visitors has steadily decreased. Especially after Benedict’s resignation from the papacy in 2013 – and then in view of the allegations that Benedict, during his time as Archbishop of Munich and Freising and later as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and as Pope, did too little against the many cases of abuse and rather protect the institution of the Church want than the victims of those abuses.
Hubert Gschwendtner remembers that during the high phase of the corona pandemic, hardly anyone came to Marktl at all. Only the Oberammergau Passion Play, which was also postponed to 2022 due to Corona, recently attracted more people from the USA to Marktl again, says Gschwendtner, who gave up his office as mayor in 2020 and no longer stood for election. Nevertheless, he was the second person to write in the book of condolences in St. Oswald, right after Pastor Peter Meister. Both and also Gschwendtner’s successor Benedikt Dittmann will be present at the funeral of the Pope Emeritus in Rome this Thursday.
There is a book of condolences in the birthplace for mourners to sign.
(Photo: Johannes Simon/Getty Images)
In the meantime, the condolence books in Marktl could slowly fill up, in the church and in Benedict’s birthplace, which is also right on the market square. A foundation in which the Catholic dioceses in Bavaria and the Free State are involved took over the house and made it accessible as a museum and meeting place in 2007. Normally, the exhibition about Benedikt’s life is closed during the winter, but these days the house opens for at least two and a half hours in the afternoons, despite minor water damage. It will be accessible all day on Epiphany on Fridays and weekends.
The retired Pope is said to have hardly remembered this house, because as the son of a police officer who had been transferred many times, he moved on with his family at the age of two – first to the little Salzach town of Tittmoning, a good 20 kilometers away, where he attended kindergarten, and then to Aschau am Inn and to Hufschlag in the municipality of Surberg near Traunstein. But Marktl, whose honorary citizen he had been since 1997, was remembered by the town’s most famous son from later visits – and also from visits by the market traders to him in Rome. Now they drive one last time.