ROME (AP) – The Archbishop of Vienna, a longtime friend and former student of Pope Benedict XVI, confirmed that he was the one who wrote a letter to his former teacher urging him to accept election as pontiff in 2005 if the votes went in its direction.
Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn released a statement on Wednesday confirming a revelation in a new book by Benedict’s personal secretary, Archbishop Georg Gaenswein, which was published shortly after Benedict’s death on December 31 at the age of 95.
The book, “Nothing but the Truth: My Life Next to Pope Benedict XVI,” has already sparked controversy as it revealed confidential communications and exposed the tensions that have simmered over the decade in which Benedict has lived as pope emeritus alongside Pope Francis.
Schoenborn said the publication of the book was an “unseemly indiscretion” and distanced himself from it. The statement on the Archdiocese’s website quoted him as saying, “I do not think it is right for such confidential information to be released, especially by the personal secretary.”
But Schoenborn nevertheless confirmed one of the book’s less controversial chapters, surrounding the election of former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger as pope in 2005, following the death of Saint John Paul II. Shortly after his election, Benedict told a group of German pilgrims that as the votes began to go his way during the conclave, he felt dizzy and a “guillotine” fell on him.
But he said then he was comforted by a letter he received from an unnamed ‘fellow cardinal’ in the days before the conclave began, urging him to follow whatever God had in store for him. .
In the book, Gaenswein revealed that it was Schoenborn who wrote the letter, noting that he was one of the few people who addressed Benedict with the informal “you” – something that even the closest associates of Benedict in the Vatican have never done. Schoenborn and Ratzinger had known each other since 1972, when the young Dominican priest attended a course Ratzinger taught in Regensburg, Germany, and “stayed within the close circle of his former students,” Gaenswein wrote.
In the statement, Schoenborn confirmed “It was.” But in another indication of his disagreement that such information had been made public, and so soon after Benedict XVI’s death, he added: “I have deliberately kept silent about it until now.”
Schoenborn, who turns 78 on Sunday, is in many ways eminently “papabile,” or having the characteristics of a future pope. Born into nobility and the son of divorced parents, he shares a strong affinity with Benedict and his conservative allies, but has remained on good terms with Francis. More importantly, he defended Francis’ outreach to divorced and civilly remarried couples as a natural “development” in Church doctrine, after Francis was attacked by conservatives.
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