8 minute read
The Light of Holy Saturday
Ninety-five years ago, Pope Benedict XVI was born on a Holy Saturday in April — which turned out to be a sign of divine providence. Eighty-three years later, he was confronted with the most mysterious icon and relic of the night of Christ’s resurrection, the Turin Shroud.
Part 1 of a 2-Part series
• BY MICHAEL HESEMANN
Benedict XVI venerates the Shroud of Turin on May 2, 2010.
(CNS photo/L'Osservatore Romano)
A close-up of the image as a negative, from the face of the Shroud
It was a Holy Saturday on April 16, 95 years ago (1927), when Joseph Ratzinger, who later became Pope Benedict XVI, was born in Marktl am Inn, in Bavaria, Germany. The words with which his brother Georg Ratzinger (who passed away on July 1, 2020) described this day to me 11 years ago still ring in my ears. It was an ice-cold day with lots of snow, terrible weather. At some point little Georg, who was just three years old, woke up and realized that he was alone. He wasn’t used to sleeping alone; he usually laid in bed with his parents and his sister Maria. But when he awoke in the early hours of that gray, cold April day, no one was there.
Instead, he heard the sounds of hectic activity. Doors slammed shut, quick footsteps echoed in the hallway, people talked loudly. When he heard his father’s voice, he called after him: “Father, I want to get up!” Then Joseph Ratzinger senior, the taciturn, strict but kindhearted gendarme said: “No, you have to wait. Today we got a little boy.” And since the Pope’s brother had kept his wonderful sense of humor well into old age, he added, I may quote: “It was all a bit of a mystery to me back then.”
This little boy was born at 4:15 am and baptized at 8:30 am. They didn’t even wait until Anna Ratzinger, who was to be godmother, could be notified, but asked a nun named Adelma Rohrhirsch to step in for her, since at that time the liturgy of the Easter Vigil was celebrated in the morning of Holy Saturday. Because the consecration of baptismal water and the baptismal rite are an integral part of this liturgy, the parents didn’t hesitate for long: “Now the boy is born, now he’s going to be baptized!”
Not only Georg and Maria, but also their beloved mother, stayed at home, since it snowed so hard that their parents feared that the two siblings would catch a cold. The young mother, on the other hand, was still too badly affected from the birth to be allowed out into the snow. So the baby was the first to be baptized with the freshly consecrated water and given the name Joseph Aloisius. “At the door at Easter, but not yet entered” became the metaphor for his whole life, which from the very beginning had been immersed in the Easter mystery.
For some it may be a coincidence, but for us Christians it is a sign of Divine Providence that he also celebrated his 95th birthday on a Holy Saturday this year. After the last few weeks and months, which became a real Via Crucis for him, when, under a cheap pretext intended to distract from the failures of others, he was spat at and insulted and sent to the media’s via dolorosa with calls of “Crucifige eum!” he must have experienced this Good Friday even more intensely than in all the years before. The Lord calls us each to carry His cross, and the imitatio Christi, the offering of suffering, turns the via dolorosa into the via regis, the royal road to salvation. Now the media tempest has calmed down, comparable to the stillness of Holy Saturday — the time to pause and reflect on what has happened, anticipating the Easter turning point, so sudden and surprising.
In any case, I am deeply convinced that the experience of Easter Saturday left a deep impression on him in the first hours of his long and blessed (“benedictus”) life. Yes, Joseph Ratzinger’s birth on Holy Saturday was indeed a sign of divine providence that shaped his life, indicated his path and defined his predestination: because no day in the Church year corresponds so much to the nature of the theologian. It is the day of contemplatio, of stillness, of pausing, of contemplating, of trying to understand — like the disciples of the Lord, of whom John (20:9) writes: “They had not yet understood the Scriptures, that He had to rise from the dead.” (As a historian, I may now be treading on smooth ground if I dare to claim: this attempt to classify the events of Golgotha, to fathom the mystery of our redemption, was the actual birth of theology.)
The disciples were desperate. Judas Iscariot had betrayed their Master and handed Him over to the temple guards. Peter had denied Him three times. All but John had fled, hiding while the unimaginable took place: the Lord of life, yes, life itself, hung on the cross and suffered. The creator of the universe, who made Himself small out of sheer compassion and became man in order to redeem His fallen creature, was to be murdered by men. The Redeemer, the Messiah of Israel, who had been saluted with shouts of “Hosanna!” just five days earlier, hung on the cross under the titulus that macabrely proclaimed Him “King of the Jews.”
Around noon the sky darkened and the earth shook. Three hours later a shriek resounded through the universe and suddenly it seemed as if Nietzsche, who of course lived eighteen and a half centuries later, was right after all, as if God were really and truly dead. He was not breathing, His corpse was pale, rigid and cold, when Joseph of Arimathea’s men took Him down from the cross and laid Him in His mother’s lap before carrying Him down the hill of Golgotha into the cold rock tomb set like a gateway to the underworld in the sheer wall of a former quarry. For a single dark moment, it was as if death and the devil had triumphed, as if the powers of the underworld had suffocated the newly founded Church before it had even budged.
We can only guess what was going on in the heads of His disciples that night, no matter which cellar or upper room they might have been hiding in. Was their hope buried with their beloved master? Was that all – no, were they all lost now? Had they followed an illusion? Had He, whom they had taken for the Messiah, yes, the Son of the living God, failed because of His claim, because of the ice-cold power of the superpower Rome and the “godlike” Caesar Tiberius? Had Jesus, God forbid, perhaps Himself succumbed to a deception; was He even a false prophet? Didn’t Moses teach that he who was hung on the stake was cursed? And could the Son of God have suffered such a fate?
But despite all these dark thoughts, we must conclude from the fact that they remained in Jerusalem, in spite of all fear and despair, that they still had a quantum of hope. It was burgeoning deep within them, and gradually growing stronger. But then the light of Easter morning shone, first in the far distance, before it overwhelmed them with the glaring twilight and the women became messengers of the resurrection: Christ is risen, He is risen indeed, alleluia!
This brooding and pondering, this believing and hoping, this attempt to classify what happened and grasp its meaning, this time of uncertainty between Good Friday and Easter Sunday, is really nothing other than the first theological weekend seminar in Christianity. It’s a way which often enough leads through the darkness of doubt, of wrangling and searching, but in the best case should end in the light of knowledge that God has truly become man and has revealed the truth to us about our being, our destiny and the way to our salvation from this vale of tears. This at least is Ratzinger’s theology that transforms us all from seekers of God into cooperatores veritatis (“co-workers of the truth”) preparing us to behold and comprehend the glory of God on our own Easter morning. And that is precisely why Holy Saturday is the most symbolic birthday for a great theologian, in whom the Church of the future will recognize one of her greatest teachers.
Below, La Deposizione by Michelangelo Merisi, known as Caravaggio (1571-1610), kept in the Pinacoteca Vaticana
