Praise for Pope Benedict XVI

[DameAgnes]

http://aleteia.org/2016/04/19/benedict-xvi-a-great-reformer-yes-and-a-stabilizer-too/

[DominicanHeart]

Because he was the best!!! 

[BarbTherese]

Indeed prayer and praise, thanksgiving for Pope Benedict, Gift of The Holy Spirit!  What an important article, Dame Agnes, thank you for sharing it.

     

For almost 40 years, Benedict XVI has been the ballast in the Barque of Peter"

Cardinal Ratzinger was elevated to the papacy on April 19, 2005

I can see the Hand of The Holy Spirit very clearly in (to mention three only) Pope John Paul II, Pope Benedict and now Pope Francis highlighted in the article - each one a Gift of The Holy Spirit revealing how The Spirit can move slowly and the end result not obvious at the 'beginning'.  The Hand of God is always moving in each and every life and every moment a 'beginning' where the end result is not obvious.

One point, I think that every single person without exception does matter and is very important to God's Plan, simply because God Himself created us and loves us to distraction.  That makes every single person matter and of importance no matter how far, no matter how close, no matter how lowly and forgotten.  But yes, The Good God will use every single life without exception towards His Own Good End.

http://aleteia.org/2016/04/19/benedict-xvi-a-great-reformer-yes-and-a-stabilizer-too/  "as Philip Neri said, “All of God’s purposes are to the good, although we may not always understand this we can trust in it.” Trust, Benedict does. His actions speak of a confidence that the church will not crumble over the actions of any single man, or even an assault of ideas, because Christ told us it would not. That is, in fact, a very stabilizing, very steadying lesson to the world, if the world can absorb it: trust that we none of us matter except as God will use our lives and what we make of them, toward his own good end.

John Paul, Benedict and Francis are all men who have hugely impacted the world, both secular and sacred, perhaps more than most of us can appreciate. But it seems to me that Joseph Ratzinger/Pope Benedict was unique in that he managed to bring to the church whatever needed shoring-up; in every capacity in which he served, he was the steady, hard-working fellow quietly doing what needed to be done, and asking for nothing. He has been the deeply-anchored, stable, and largely-unappreciated pole around which two dynamic and larger-than-life papacies could spin.

When a centering pole is solid and well-anchored, it tends not to be thought about, because it is simply doing what it is supposed to do, as the touchingly humble Benedict would likely be the first to say."