America's Largest Catholic Newspaper
Msgr. Georg Ratzinger, a musician and Retired Pope Benedict XVI’s elder brother, died July 1. He was 96.
According to Vatican News, Msgr. Ratzinger died in Regensburg, Germany, where he had been hospitalized.
Pope Benedict followed the July 8 Funeral Mass of his brother via livestreaming, reported the German Catholic news agency KNA.
Bishop Rudolf Voderholzer of Regensburg said Pope Benedict, 93, was connected to the Mass offered for his brother in the Regensburg Cathedral. During the Mass, the Regensburg bishop recalled the surprise June 18-22 visit Pope Benedict paid to the sickbed of his dying brother.
Born at Pleiskirchen, Germany, Msgr. Ratzinger already was a proficient organist and pianist by the time he entered the minor seminary in Traunstein in 1935. Forced to leave the seminary when war broke out, he was wounded while serving in Italy with Germany’s armed forces in 1944 and later was held as a prisoner of war by U.S. forces.
When the war ended, he and his brother enrolled in 1946 in the seminary of the Munich and Freising Archdiocese and were ordained priests five years later. He directed the Regensburg boys’ choir from 1964 to 1994, when he retired.
Providing musical accompaniment for the Funeral Mass were 16 former members of the “Domspatzen,” the name of the Regensburg Cathedral’s world-famous boys’ choir that Msgr. Ratzinger directed.
Bishop Voderholzer praised Msgr. Ratzinger’s musical contribution and said it made clear how Church music was not an “external ingredient” in a Christian church service. Music itself was “a medium of evangelization,” he said.
The Vatican newspaper and KNA reported that alongside Bishop Voderholzer at the altar were Pope Benedict’s private secretary, Archbishop Georg Ganswein, and the pope’s ambassador to Germany, Archbishop Nikola Eterovic. Among other participants were the former Regensburg bishop, Cardinal Gerhard Muller, and Munich Cardinal Reinhard Marx.
The retired pope had written to his deceased brother a letter, which was read at the ceremony by Archbishop Ganswein. Recalling his June visit to Regensburg, the retired pope said he said “farewell” to his brother, knowing that “it would be a farewell from this world forever. But we also knew that God, who is good, who gave us this gift of being together in this world, also reigns in the other world, and there He will let us be reunited again.” —CNS
