Linz, January 28th, 2023 (KAP) As in a central requiem of the bishops’ conference on January 9th in Vienna’s St. Stephen’s Cathedral and other dioceses, a memorial mass for Benedict XVI will also be held in Linz’s Mariendom on Friday evening. been celebrated. Bishop Manfred Scheuer presided over the celebration of the Eucharist in memory of the Pope Emeritus, who died on New Year’s Eve. The former Linz bishops Maximilian Aichern and Ludwig Schwarz, Vicar General Severin Lederhilger and cathedral priest Maximilian Strasser celebrated with him.
Scheuer explained at the beginning of the service: Benedict XVI. I “intervened in life, biographies, faith, set the course. Uplifting, sometimes stressful, encouraging, here and there not to understand.” And the bishop added: “We place his and our faith history in God’s hands, asking that he heal, perfect and lead to fullness.”
In his sermon, Scheuer referred to two events that – very differently – also happened on January 27: In 1756 Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born in Salzburg’s Getreidegasse, whose music Joseph Ratzinger deeply admired throughout his life. The German Pope interpreted music “as the sound of creation, as an image of God’s incarnation, man’s incarnation”.
And also on January 27, 1945, the Auschwitz Birkenau concentration camp was liberated, which allowed the celebration in Mariendom to take place on Holocaust Remembrance Day. Scheuer recalled the words that Benedikt had spoken on May 28, 2006 during a visit to Auschwitz – the scene of a “crime against God and man without parallel in history”, as he said at the time: “In this place of horror … it is almost impossible to speak – it is particularly difficult and depressing for a Christian, a pope who comes from Germany. In this place words fail, only shaken silence can stand.” The Bishop of Linz: “The eloquent speech of the scholar gives way to the stammering of the prayer when the impotence of the language almost erupts in a ‘scream’, which in the sense of a theodicy-sensitive spirituality of lamentation turns to God himself. Benedict’s questions to God: “Why were you silent? Why could you tolerate all this?”
During the service, Bishop Scheuer also pointed out that his pectoral cross and that of his predecessor Ludwig Schwarz was one that they both received from Pope Benedict XVI. received as a gift during an ad limina visit to Rome.
The memorial service was musically designed by a vocal ensemble from the cathedral music department under the direction of cathedral music director Andreas Peterl, soprano Susanne Thielemann and cathedral organist Wolfgang Kreuzhuber on the organ.
