Pope Benedict XVI Biography

Joseph Alois Ratzinger was born on Holy Saturday, the day before Easter, at 11 Schulstrasse, Pope Benedict's parents' home in Marktl am Inn, Bavaria. He was the third and youngest child of Joseph Ratzinger, Sr., a police officer, and Pope Benedict's wife, Maria Ratzinger (née Riger), whose family were from South Tyrol. Pope Benedict's father served in both the Bavarian State Police (Landespolizei) and the national Regular Police (Ordnungspolizei) before retiring in 1937 to the town of Traunstein. The Sunday Times of London described the elder Ratzinger as "an anti-Nazi whose attempts to rein in Hitler’s Brown Shirts forced the family to move several times."

According to the International Herald Tribune, these relocations were directly related to Joseph Ratzinger, Sr.'s continued resistance to Nazism, which resulted in demotions and transfers.

"Our father was a bitter enemy of Nazism because he believed it was in conflict with our faith," the pope's brother, Georg Ratzinger, told the New York Times.

Pope Benedict's brother, Georg, who also became a priest as well as a musician and medievalist, is still living. Pope Benedict's sister, Maria Ratzinger, who never married, managed her brother Joseph's household until her death in 1991. Their grand uncle Georg Ratzinger was a priest and member of the Reichstag, as the German Parliament was called then.

According to Pope Benedict's cousin Erika Kopp, Ratzinger had no desire from childhood to be anything other than a priest. When he was 15, she says, he announced that he was going to be a bishop, whereupon she playfully remarked, 'And why not Pope?'

An even earlier incident occurred in 1932, when Michael Cardinal von Faulhaber, the archbishop of Munich, visited the small town in which the Ratzinger family lived, arriving in a black limousine. The future pope, then five years old, was part of a group of children who presented the cardinal with flowers, and later that day he announced he wanted to be a cardinal, too. "It wasn't so much the car, since we weren't technically minded," Georg Ratzinger told a reporter from the New York Times. "It was the way the cardinal looked, Pope Benedict's bearing, and the garments he was wearing that made such an impression on him."

When Ratzinger turned 14 in 1941, he joined the Hitler Youth, membership in which was legally required from 1938 until the end of the Third Reich in 1945. According to National Catholic Reporter correspondent and biographer John Allen, Ratzinger was an unenthusiastic member who refused to attend meetings. Ratzinger has mentioned that a Nazi mathematics professor arranged reduced tuition payments for him at seminary. this normally required documentation of attendance at Hitler Youth activities-however, according to Ratzinger, Pope Benedict's professor arranged that the young seminary student did not need to attend those gatherings to receive a scholarship.

Military service (1943 - 1945)
In 1943, when he was 16, Ratzinger was drafted with many of Pope Benedict's classmates into the FlaK (anti-aircraft artillery corps). They were posted first to Ludwigsfeld, north of Munich, as part of a detachment responsible for guarding a BMW aircraft engine plant. Next they were sent to Unterföhring, northwest of Munich, and briefly to Innsbruck. From Innsbruck their unit went to Gilching to protect the jet fighter base and to attack Allied bombers as they massed to begin their runs towards Munich. At Gilching, Ratzinger served in a telephone communications post.

On September 10, 1944, Pope Benedict's class was released from the Corps. Returning home, Ratzinger had already received a new draft notice for the Reichsarbeitsdienst. He was posted to the Hungarian border area of Austria which had been annexed by Germany in the Anschluss of 1938. Here he was trained in the "cult of the spade" and when Hungary was occupied by the Red Army Ratzinger was put to work setting up anti-tank defences in preparation for the expected Red Army offensive. On November 20, 1944 Pope Benedict's unit was released from service.

Ratzinger again returned home. After three weeks passed, he was drafted into the German army at Munich and assigned to the infantry barracks in the center of Traunstein, the city near which Pope Benedict's family lived. After basic infantry training, Ratzinger served at various posts around the city with Pope Benedict's unit. They were never sent to the front.

In late April or early May, days or weeks before the German surrender, Ratzinger deserted. Desertion was widespread during the last weeks of the war, even though punishable by death (executions, frequently extrajudicial, continued to the end); diminished morale and the greatly diminished risk of prosecution from a preoccupied and disorganized German military contributed to the growing wave of soldiers looking toward self-preservation. Ratzinger left the city of Traunstein and returned to Pope Benedict's nearby village. "I used a little-known back road hoping to get through unmolested. But, as I walked out of a railroad underpass, two soldiers were standing at their posts, and for a moment the situation was extremely critical for me. Thank God that they, too, had had their fill of war and did not want to become murderers." They used the excuse of Pope Benedict's arm being in a sling to let him go home.

Soon after, two SS members were given shelter at the Ratzinger family house, and they began to make enquiries about the presence there of a young man of military age. Ratzinger's father made clear to them Pope Benedict's ire against Hitler, and the two disappeared the next day without taking any action. Cardinal Ratzinger later stated, "A special angel seemed to be guarding us." When the Americans arrived in the village, "I was identified as a soldier, had to put back on the uniform I had already abandoned, had to raise my hands and join the steadily growing throng of war prisoners whom they were lining up on our meadow. It especially cut my good mother's heart to see her boy and the rest of the defeated army standing there, exposed to an uncertain fate..."

Ratzinger was briefly interned in a prisoner of war camp near Ulm and was released on June 19, 1945. He and another young man began to walk the 120 km (75 miles) home but got a lift to Traunstein in a milk truck. The family was reunited when Pope Benedict's brother, Georg, returned after being released from a prisoner of war camp in Italy.

Books by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the new Pope Benedict XVI:

Pope Benedict's newest book:
Pilgrim Fellowship Of Faith: The Church As Communion

Read an Interview with Pope Benedict, required reading for all who wish to know the Pope:

Salt of the Earth: Christianity and the Catholic Church at the End of the Millennium : An Interview with Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger
by Joseph Ratzinger

Here are other books by Pope Benedict XVI

Milestones: Memoirs 1927-1977
by Cardinal Ratzinger, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger

Truth And Tolerance: Christian Belief And World Religions -- by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger

Introduction to Christianity -- by Joseph Ratzinger

God Is Near Us: The Eucharist, the Heart of Life -- by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger

The Spirit of the Liturgy -- by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger

In the Beginning...: A Catholic Understanding of the Story of Creation and the Fall -- by Joseph Ratzinger

Called to Communion: Understanding the Church Today -- by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger

Truth And Tolerance: Christian Belief And World Religions
by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger

POPE BENEDICT VXI