After receiving thousands of birthday greetings in 24 languages on a website devoted to Benedict XVI, the organisers decided to make www.BenedictusXVI.com accessible in English, expand its scope, and go global.
The Tagespost Foundation said that the new worldwide edition, which went live on August 28, wants to serve as a “beacon amid the turbulent waters” of widespread secularisation.
The website now provides a newsletter with motivational sayings and extracts from significant works by the eminent theologian, as well as biographical details, background data, and a comment on the Munich study into clerical sexual abuse.
In “cooperation with experts in Germany and abroad,” the BenedictusXVI.com project’s organisers said in a written statement to CNA, “the goal of the BenedictusXVI.com project is to build an attractive digital knowledge portal that will become the authorised international collection point on the life, thought, and work of Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI.
“This idea has the approval of the pope emeritus himself.”
The Tagespost Foundation for Catholic Journalism and the Institute Pope Benedict XVI are working together to establish the site.
On April 16, Holy Saturday, Pope Benedict XVI celebrated his 95th birthday. Joseph Alois Ratzinger was born on a Holy Saturday in 1927 in Marktl am Inn, a tiny Bavarian village close to Austria.
In his autobiography, which was released prior to his election as pope, he wrote about his birth: “Due to the fact that I was baptised the morning of my birthday using water that had just been blessed during the Easter Vigil, which was observed at that time in the morning, the fact that my birthday fell on the final day of Holy Week and the eve of Easter was always noted in the family history. Being the first person to be baptised with the new water was seen as a major fortunate occurrence.”
The fact that my life was so deeply entwined with the Paschal Mystery from the start has always made me grateful since this can only be a sign of goodness, he concluded.
“Admittedly, it had just been Holy Saturday, not Easter Sunday. But the more I consider it, the more our human life—which is still anticipating Easter and isn’t quite in full light but is still confidently going toward it—seems to fit with its essence.”