The spiritual testament was signed on Aug. 29, 2006, just one year and four months into Benedict XVI’s pontificate. The pope, who died on Dec. 31 at the age of 95, went on to live 16 years after writing the testament.
In the short text, Benedict XVI expressed gratitude to God, his family, and his friends who accompanied him through his life and asked for forgiveness from “all those whom I have wronged in any way.”
“If in this late hour of my life I look back at the decades I have gone through, first I see how many reasons I have to give thanks. First and foremost I thank God himself, the giver of every good gift, who gave me life and guided me through various moments of confusion; always picking me up whenever I began to slip and always giving me again the light of his face,” he wrote.
“In retrospect I see and understand that even the dark and tiring stretches of this journey were for my salvation and that it was in them that he guided me well.”
Reflecting on his decades of studying theology, particularly the Bible, Benedict XVI said that he has seen “theses that seemed unshakable collapse proving to be mere hypotheses,” noting in particular: “the liberal generation (Harnack, Jülicher etc.), the existentialist generation (Bultmann etc.), the Marxist generation.”
The late pope said that it is in “dialogue with the natural sciences that faith, too, has learned to better understand the limit of the scope of its claims, and thus its specificity.”
Credit: Source link
