Luminous Mysteries

I was called by a journalist who said she had just heard that white smoke had gone up in Rome and wanted to hear from me whether I knew anything more specific. “No,” I answered truthfully, “I know nothing.” Then I turned on the television and heard it there, like everybody else.

Then in fact the name Ratzinger was mentioned! I must quite honestly say that at that moment I was rather disheartened. It was a great challenge, an enormous task for him, I thought, and I was seriously worried. I saw neither the pomp nor the beauty of it, but only the challenge of this office, which now demanded everything of him, and the burden it meant for him. And I was sad that now he would probably have no more time for me. So that evening I went to bed rather depressed. Throughout that evening and then again well into the following afternoon the telephone rang nonstop, yet now it did not matter to me at all. I simply did not answer. “Nuts to you”, I thought to myself!

I did not call him, either. I told myself I would not reach him now anyway, so many people were around him at the moment who all wanted something from him. He called then the next morning, or rather: he tried to call me, but because the telephone in my house was ringing constantly and getting on my nerves, I did not answer it. “Keep on ringing, you can ring without me, too”, I thought, while it may have been my brother calling! At some point, Frau Heindl, my housekeeper, answered the telephone, and so he had her on the line first and not me.

She was naturally somewhat shocked that this stubborn caller was none other than the Pope. […] On the telephone, he already seemed quite calm again. At the moment of his election, however, he told me, it had struck him like a bolt of lightning. It was so unforeseeable, it came so suddenly in the voting, that the working of the Holy Spirit was obvious. He then surrendered quickly to him, because he, too, recognized God’s will in it.

Africa has great problems and difficulties, like all humanity has great problems. If I think about my youth, it was a completely different world than that of today, so much so that I sometimes think I’m living on a different planet from when I was a young man! Humanity finds itself in an ever more rapid process of transformation, and for Africa this process over the last 50-60 years, moving from independence after colonialism up to today, has been very demanding. Naturally, it’s a very difficult process with great problems that haven’t yet been entirely resolved.

Nevertheless, there’s a freshness, a ‘yes’ to life, in Africa, a youthfulness that’s full of enthusiasm and hope. There’s a sense of humor, a joy. It shows a freshness, too, in the religious sense. There’s still a metaphysical perception of reality, meaning reality in its totality with God. There’s not a rigid positivism, that restricts our life and makes it a little arid, and also turns off hope. I would say there’s a fresh humanism in the young soul of Africa, despite all the problems that exist. There’s a reserve of life and vitality for the future that we can count upon.