Pope xvi biography

His father, a Police Commissioner, belonged to an old family of farmers from Lower Bavaria of modest economic resources. His mother was the daughter of artisans from Rimsting on the shore of Lake Chiem. Before marrying, she worked as a cook in a number of hotels. Joseph spent his childhood and adolescence in Traunstein, a small village near the Austrian border, thirty kilometres from Salzburg.

His youthful years were not easy. His faith and the education received at home prepared him for the harsh experience of those years during which the Nazi regime pursued a hostile attitude towards the Catholic Church. From to , he studied philosophy and theology in the Higher School of Philosophy and Theology of Freising and at the University of Munich.

He received his priestly ordination on 29 June A year later he began teaching at the Higher School of Freising. During this last year, he held the Chair of dogmatics and history of dogma at the University of Regensburg, where he was also Vice-President of the University.

Pope benedict xvi real name

In , together with Hans Urs von Balthasar, Henri de Lubac and other important theologians, he initiated the theological journal Communio. On 28 May of the same year, he received episcopal ordination. He was the first diocesan priest in 80 years to take on the pastoral governance of the great Bavarian Archdiocese. On the one hand I saw it as the relation between my previous task as professor and my new mission.

In spite of different approaches, what was involved, and continued to be so, was following the truth and being at its service. On 15 February , he resigned the pastoral governance of the Archdiocese of Munich and Freising.