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‘Heart speaks to heart’: Benedict XVI sends message for his brother’s funeral Mass

July 8, 2020 CNA Daily News 2

Rome Newsroom, Jul 8, 2020 / 08:30 am (CNA).- Benedict XVI watched his brother’s funeral via livestream on Wednesday as his secretary Archbishop Georg Gänswein read the pope emeritus’ message of remembrance at the Mass in Germany.

“When I said goodbye to him in the morning on Monday, June 22, we knew it would be his farewell to this world forever. But we also knew that the benevolent God, who gave us this togetherness in this world, will also rule in the other world and will give us a new togetherness there,” Benedict XVI wrote in the message read aloud at the funeral on July 8.

“May God reward you richly, Georg, for everything you have achieved, for what you have suffered, and for what you have given to me,” the pope emeritus wrote.

Msgr. Georg Ratzinger died in Bavaria at the age of 96 on July 1. While the pope emeritus was unable to attend Ratzinger’s funeral in Regensburg, Benedict XVI  expressed gratitude for the time he spent with his older brother during his trip to Bavaria less than two weeks before his death.

“I would like to thank you for being with him again in the last days of his life. He didn’t ask for a visit from me. But I felt that it was the hour to go to him again. I am deeply grateful for this inner sign that the Lord has given me,” Benedict XVI wrote in the letter addressed to Bishop Rudolf Voderholzer, who officiated his brother’s funeral Mass. 

Benedict XVI remembered his brother as a man of musical talent, humor, and piety. 

“Above all he was a man of God. Even though he did not put his piety on display, it was the actual centre of his life, even more so than his sobriety and honesty,” he said.

Msgr. Ratzinger was born in Bavaria on January 15, 1924, the first son of Joseph and Maria Ratzinger. He showed an early talent for music, learning to play the violin and the church organ as a child. 

He was ordained to the priesthood alongside his younger brother, the future pope, in 1951. The eldest Ratzinger son went on to serve as the choir master of the Regensburger Domspatzen, the cathedral choir of Regensburg, from 1964 to 1994.

“My brother received and understood the priesthood call as a musical call,” Benedict XVI said.

“When he finally was appointed to the position of Cathedral Choirmaster in Regensburg, it was both a moment of joy and of pain for him, as our mother had passed away almost at the same time as Cathedral Choirmaster Schrems had. Had our mother still been alive, he would not have accepted the call to be the position of choirmaster in Regensburg. This role — though bought at the price of a great deal of suffering — more and more became a joyful role for him,” he wrote.

In his homily at the funeral, Bishop Rudolf Voderholzer recalled moments from Georg Ratzinger’s life from his experience in the war to his vocation as a priest and work as a church musician. The bishop emphasized his legacy with a view to the important role of church music in evangelization.

Apostolic Nuncio Archbishop Nikola Eterović and Cardinal Gerhard Müller were present at the funeral Mass at Regensburg Cathedral.

Benedict XVI said that he received letters and emails from many countries upon the death of his brother. They “wrote to me in a way that touched my heart,” he said. “Each one should have a personal answer. Unfortunately I lack the time and strength to do so.”

“I can only thank everyone for taking part in these hours and days — Cardinal Newman’s sentence has come true for me right now: ‘Cor ad cor loquitur’ … heart speaks to heart. “

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‘It meant a great deal to her’: the Catholic faith of the woman voted ‘greatest Black Briton’

July 8, 2020 CNA Daily News 1

CNA Staff, Jul 8, 2020 / 05:00 am (CNA).- She was voted the “greatest Black Briton.” A statue of her stands opposite the Houses of Parliament. Her heroic life is taught to students in England as part of the National Curriculum. Yet few people know that Mary Seacole was a Catholic convert.

There may be a good reason for that: although the 19th-century businesswoman who cared for wounded British soldiers during the Crimean War is a celebrated figure today, little is known about her journey to Catholicism. 

Jane Robinson, author of a 2004 biography of Seacole, told CNA: “I was unable to find out much about Mary’s Catholic faith myself, but given that she was a convert, I can only assume that it meant a great deal to her.” 

“It’s frustrating that in this, as in many areas of her personal life, information is scant. She obviously considered it to be a private affair.”

Seacole was born in 1805 in Kingston, Jamaica. Her father was a Scottish lieutenant in the British Army and her mother was a Jamaican “doctress” who taught her how to treat illnesses using herbal remedies. 

She traveled to Britain in the 1820s, and worked as a nurse in the Caribbean and in Central America. She treated patients suffering in the cholera epidemic of the time.

When the Crimean War broke out in 1853, Seacole tried to join a contingent of nurses but was refused. She decided to travel independently to set up an establishment called the “British Hotel,” offering “a mess-table and comfortable quarters for sick and convalescent officers.”

Catholic author and broadcaster Joanna Bogle told CNA: “Mary Seacole never sought to be a nurse — she was a well-to-do business lady who ran a shop selling snacks and sweets to the officers.”

“She was certainly kind and helped sick soldiers, offering them comfort and doing what she could for them, and sometimes offered some of her family remedies, learned from her mother and grandmother in Jamaica.” 

“Above all, she offered the strength of her faith, and the warmth of her heart: there are touching accounts of her holding dying soldiers, and saying ‘Mother is here…’ She became known affectionately as ‘Mother Seacole’ and years later, living in London, would recall with tears the poor dying soldiers whose last hours she had shared.”

When the war ended in 1856, Seacole returned to England with little money and in poor health. Prominent supporters, including the Duke of Wellington and William Howard Russell, war correspondent of the London Times, raised funds on her behalf. 

Fr. Stewart Foster, the archivist of the Diocese of Brentwood in southeast England, told CNA that Seacole was received into the Church in 1860, at the age of 55. It appears that she became a Catholic in England, but because her reception occurred after the publication of her autobiography she left no record of her reasons for embracing the Catholic faith, which was remerging in Britain after centuries of suppression.

When Seacole died in 1881, she was buried in St Mary’s Catholic Cemetery in Kensal Green, northwest London. Her gravestone, which was restored by the Jamaican Nurses Association in 1973, describes her as “A notable nurse who cared for the sick and wounded in the West Indies, Panama and on the battlefields of the Crimea.”

The restoration of her grave was part of a wider rediscovery of her life, which had been all but forgotten in the decades after her death. 

In 2004, Seacole came top of a list of 100 great Black Britons. The poll took place after a BBC series asked viewers to vote for the “100 Greatest Britons,” but no Black people were included in the top 100.

Following the poll, Seacole was the subject of a television documentary, several biographies, and an exhibition at the Florence Nightingale Museum. A portrait was discovered and placed in the National Portrait Gallery in London.

A statue of Seacole was erected in the grounds of St Thomas’ Hospital, London, in 2016. The statue, which faces the Palace of Westminster, was believed to be the first of a Black woman identified by name in Britain. 

Reflecting on Seacole’s selfless service during the Crimean War, Bogle said: “I remember reading that when men are dying they often call for their mothers. It is apparently something noted by many nurses over the years.” 

“I am rather moved by the thought of kindly Mother Seacole responding to the cry of a dying soldier, so that at least he felt loved and caressed… and perhaps somewhere in all of that is the thought that surely Our Lady heard their cries.”

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