Rome, Italy, Oct 23, 2008 / 12:49 pm
At the conclusion of this week’s Wednesday General Audience, Pope Benedict XVI greeted one of his old friends from seminary, Father Hans Waxenberger, with whom he briefly conversed about “the years of his youth,” the L’Osservatore Romano reported.
The Vatican daily reported that Father Waxenberger remembers the young Joseph Ratzinger, now Benedict XVI, as “a outstanding student, first in his class, an avid reader and always interested in the Church and in matters of faith.”
Father Waxenberger was secretary to Cardinal Michael Faulhaber, who was Archbishop of München and Freising in 1951 and ordained Joseph Ratzinger to the priesthood on June 29 of that year.
Cardinal Faulhaber, he recalled, was “a great friend of then-Archbishop Eugenio Pacelli (Pius XII), the Apostolic Nuncio to Bavaria, and it was because of his action that the Church in Germany was able to survive during the years of the Nazi regime.”