For the Google Photo album of today’s pilgrimage, click here.
For photos of my first day in Regensburg yesterday, click here.
So this one was unplanned – it really only formed in my head over the last couple of weeks, and it wasn’t really until last night that I decided I would do it. Joseph Ratzinger is buried with all the other popes in the crypt under St Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican. All the rest of his family are buried here in Regensburg.
Georg Ratzinger was three years older than his little brother, but they completed their seminary studies and were ordained together because of the complications of the war. Georg died on 1 July 2020. Just a few weeks earlier, the Pope Emeritus had visited his brother in Regensburg, sensing that the time for this last visit had come. When he left, they both knew it was the last time they would see each other. Georg was buried in the “Unterer Katholische Friedhof” just southwest of the main railway station (“ein Friedhof” is a cemetery – the word literally means a yard where people are laid to rest) in a plot endowed by the Domspatzen Foundation. The Domspatzen – or Cathedral Sparrows – is the name of the boys choir that sings in the Regensburg Cathedral, and which Georg Ratzinger directed for thirty years. Unfortunately it is currently school holidays in Bavaria, so the “sparrows” were not singing at mass this morning when I attended the 10am liturgy. The service was quite nice, to be sure, with eine Kantorin (a female cantor) leading the singing, and led by three concelebrating priests. The organ music was exceptional. As I have experienced before at mass in Germany, the custom of replacing parts of the ordo with sung versified hymns (a practice I know well from my Lutheran upbringing in Australia) is quite widespread in the Catholic church here as well. And so we had a very short hymn version of the Gloria in Excelsis, and a longer, quite nice, responsive version of the Apostles Creed. The sermon wended its way from the saying that you have one Father, God in heaven, to the fact that we are all brothers and sisters, and finally landing on the wonderful good news of synodality… at least as far as I could make out with my German comprehension skills. I would estimate an attendance roughly in the ballpark of a good day at St Philip’s Blackburn North – perhaps around 150 to 180.
I set off to find Georg’s grave straight after mass (well, I spent a little while praying in the blessed sacrament chapel, and took a couple of photographs, for which I was told off by one of the surpliced attendants – only worshippers are allowed in the cathedral during liturgies, and worshippers are defined people who pray, and people who take photos are defined as tourists, and tourists are forbidden in the church until after mass… so go figure). I had seen a picture of the grave online, so knew that I was looking for a grave along one of the walls, and that it was distinctively decorated with Gregorian music from the Te Deum, so it took me no more than five minutes to find. As I was saying prayers for Georg, it occurred to me that in fact we are in All Soulstide, and hence a visit to a cemetery and saying prayers for the deceased is an indulgenced act. I am sure that plenty of others have already offered up indulgences for Georg’s soul, and I have plenty of times offered up the indulgence for my own father, so this time I offer the indulgence for my uncle Carl who recently passed away.
The next cemetery on the list was at St Josef’s Church in Pentling – the little suburb of Regensburg on the southwest edge of the city where Joseph Ratzinger bought a house for himself, his brother and his sister Maria to live when he was a professor of theology at the University of Regensburg. All three of the remaining members of the Ratzinger family – Jospeh Senior, Maria Senior, and Maria Junior, are buried in the cemetery adjacent to St Josef’s.
It is another 4.5kms from the Unterer Katholische Friedhof to Pentling, but in fact, the University of Regensburg is itself is smack bang in between Georg’s grave and the Pentling house and graveyard, so I added that to my pilgrimage destinations. When Joseph Ratzinger took the appointment to Regensburg, he was leaving the prestigious Tübingen University position (where he was a colleague of Hans Küng) for a brand new university (he had that in common with Martin Luther, who took his position at the brand new University of Wittenberg!). Looking at the university today, it is architecturally almost indistinguishable from a university like Monash University in Melbourne. All concrete and brutalism – with some saving graces such as large grassed areas. In this sense, it is quite distinct from the very traditional medieval/Bavarian style of the old city. I wandered through the section that had “Philosophy and Theology” written over the doorway, and I certainly found it hard to imagine Ratzinger feeling at home in such a context. But it was the 1960s, and I guess it was all new then. Ratzinger had two motivations for his move to Regensburg – getting closer to his family and getting further away from Hans Küng. My alternative history guess is that if he wasn’t appointed to the post of Archbishop of Munich in 1977, he would have stayed at Regensburg until his retirement, and perhaps (if I had been a year earlier in my journey to this fair city) I’d have dropped in on him for a cup of coffee together.
Anyway, pushing on through the university, I walked through suburban Regensburg, largely housing blocks, but with a nice little liner park with little vegetable gardens in it. I then took the path towards Pentling that runs parallel to the freeway. It was under reconstruction, and there were barriers up, but no absolute signs saying “No entry”; so being a Sunday and no work going on, I just walked on through. At this point I realised that the weather was turning a little wild. The temperature had really dropped, and the wind was becoming quite gusty. Nevertheless, I was getting up a bit of a sweat with the effort of climbing the hill. I came up to a field of sunflowers (my daughter’s favourite), so took a few snaps of St Josef’s Church on the horizon across the sunflower fields. It was a relief to make it to the church, and to enter in out of the blustery weather. It was about 1pm, but there was still a bit of incense clouding the sanctuary as I entered. I must say this is a handsome little church in which I could very easily worship (see pictures). It is simple and dignified in every respect (with more sunflowers in the sanctuary). The only thing that surprised me a little – and it had no attendant explanation – was a rainbow display at the back of the church. So, okay. The rest of the art work was really very tasteful and easy on the eye. A modern church, but one that I could imagine Joseph and Mary Ratzinger attending for morning mass. Of course, it may have looked quite different in their day. The only indication of a connection with the Ratzinger family was a note on a double-board history of the church that Pope Benedict has visited in 2006.
In the graveyard next door, again it took me only a couple of minutes to locate the Ratzinger grave. It is quite simple, and rather nicely designed. The Pope Emeritus made his last visit here at the same time as his final visit to his brother in 2020. Joseph Ratzinger Senior died in 1959 just after Joseph Ratzinger Junior had begun his tenure as professor at Bonn, many miles to the north of Traunstein where his parents were living. Traunstein is closer to Salzburg than Munich, so I am not sure how Joseph Senior came to be buried at Pentling. His mother was living with her son Georg, presumably in Regensburg, when she died – Joseph had just taken a post at Münster – even further north of Bavaria than Bonn. Again, this is well before Joseph returned to Regensburg and bought the Pentling house. So I have a few questions about how both his mother and father came to be buried with his sister (who died in 1991 after living at the Pentling house all the last part of her life) in the St Josef church yard. Anyway, that is where they all are now, and that is where I went once again to pray for the repose of their souls.
I had one more place to visit – the Pentling house itself. It is just a short walk from the church, but you need to cross a bridge over the very big freeway that runs between the church and the little suburb. The house is now in the possession of the Papst Benedikt Institut. Today I could only look at it from the outside, but I hope to gain entrance sometime this week through the good graces of the Institut. We will see. In any case, this house is well marked and sign posted with pictures of family life at the house. You can see a picture of Maria Ratzinger leaning on the exact fence that is still there. And out the back you can see the little memorial to one of the pet cats. There is an inexplicable sign saying that there is a guard dog to be beware off – I saw no such animal. Perhaps it was a reference to another German Shepherd who lived there?
So now my pilgrimage was finished, but I had over 8km to get back to town. I had planned to take a country route back, and did so, except that it began to rain in a manner totally unpredicted by the so-called “AccuWeather” app. The wind got up too, and I thought that if I was to get very wet, I could well freeze out here. I’ve experienced cold weather at home, but this was really bitter. Thankfully, I had a very big warm weatherproof padded coat on, which I had packed for just such an occasion. Carrying it in my suitcase in Italy, I couldn’t even imagine having to use it, but here it was just the thing. Nevertheless, on the long walk back into the city, I had to shelter under a tree for a bit at the entrance of a bridge crossing the freeway, and then later again in a bus shelter, to avoid getting too wet. Finally, a rainbow appeared, and I made my way in through the back end of the city. This time, I wound my way past a brewery (which had an attached Wirtzhaus = pub/restaurant, but unfortunately it wasn’t doing meals in the middle of the afternoon), and a very nice park, before passing the front door of the Papst Benedikt Institut. This is where I will return in the morning and hopefully find a welcome.
So finally back to my little hostel at the Katholische Academie. Not many places are open for dinner, but there is a place across the road I might try, as I have not had any real food since breakfast…
Total distance walked for the pilgrimage today was 18.5km.
