“When he resigned in the spring of 2013, it seemed to him and to me—I can confess it here—that he had only a few months left, but not eight years.”
When Benedict XVI resigned in the spring of 2013, “it seemed to him and to me—I can confess it here—that he had only a few months left, but not eight years,” Archbishop Georg Gänswein, the secretary of the pope emeritus, said at an Austrian psychiatric congress, the German periodical Die Tagespost reported on April 1.
The archbishop also spoke about the crisis in the Church, especially in Germany.
As an unexpected speaker at a conference organized by the Institute for Religion in Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, an Austrian institution, Archbishop Gänswein talked about the filial relationship he has had with the pope emeritus since the death of his own father. He rejoiced in the “ever-increasing closeness” that unites him to Benedict XVI, especially when they pray the Rosary together in the Vatican Gardens.
The German pope emeritus did not expect to stay so long in the Mater Ecclesiae monastery. “When he resigned in the spring of 2013, it seemed to him and to me—I can confess it here—that he had only a few months left, but not eight years.” “Everything has taken a different turn,” acknowledged the man who assists the 93-year-old pontiff emeritus every day.
The prefect of the Pontifical Household says that Benedict XVI—who was vaccinated last January—has been little affected personally by the health constraints resulting from the current pandemic. “It’s almost as if Pope Benedict, with his resignation eight years ago, had, so to speak, decided on an experimental confinement for us,” he says.
