Monsignor Gänswein greeted me at the Bronze Gate with that blend of southern German politeness and Vatican reserve that only someone who has walked between these two worlds for decades can master. We crossed corridors whose frescoes invited me to pause, but Gänswein continued walking, measured, as if he had long since absorbed the beauty of these passageways and now carried it with him like a silent possession.

It was October, a Roman October still resisting autumn, and a light filtered through the tall windows of the Apostolic Palace, a light so warm it was as if someone had stirred honey into the sun.

Gänswein opened a door—not a special one, not gilded, not monumental, but a wooden door of the kind one might find in a Franconian rectory—and behind it sat he.

He was shorter than I had imagined. But that's probably true of all people you first encounter as an idea before meeting them in person. Joseph Ratzinger sat at a desk almost hidden beneath books and manuscripts, and when he looked up, I saw a face that mingled with weariness and alertness, like those medieval monks who sat poring over parchments late into the night, becoming simultaneously exhausted and insightful. He wore a simple white cassock, and on his desk, next to a steaming cup, was a small photograph: a Bavarian landscape, mountains and a lake, the colors already faded.

"You come from Franconia," he said, and it wasn't a question but a statement, spoken in a tone that still carried the melodic softness of Old Bavarian. "Please sit down. The tea is still warm."

It was chamomile tea, and I remember this detail because it didn't fit at all with what I had expected. But chamomile tea, that was Bavaria, that was childhood, that was Marktl am Inn and Traunstein, and I realized that this man, who reigned over this city as the head of more than a billion believers, had never ceased to be a Bavarian boy in his most private moments.

"You're looking at the picture," he said. "That's Lake Chiemsee. My brother Georg and I often hiked there. As children." In his pause lay the full weight of a life that had carried him away from that lake, ever onward, until he reached the Chair of St. Peter, until this room where the chamomile tea steamed and solitude felt like a coat one had forgotten to take off.

"Do you miss it? Bavaria?"

"One doesn't miss a place," he said slowly. "One misses a way of being. Being Bavarian—it's not a geography, it's an attitude." A certain mixture of piety and stubbornness, of humility before creation and a certain, if you'll pardon the expression, obstinacy toward anything one hasn't personally examined.

He studied me with that friendly attention that was his academic trademark—the ability to make someone feel that their words were being weighed.

“Monsignor Gänswein told me that you follow a Buddhist-Daoist path,” he said. “Tell me about it.”

There was genuine curiosity in his voice, so I told him about Falun Dafa, the cultivation school I had been practicing for years, the Qigong exercises that framed my mornings like a silent liturgy, and the three principles that governed my life: Truthfulness, Compassion, and Forbearance—Zhen, Shan, Ren.

Ratzinger leaned forward, and I recognized in it the gesture of a scholar who has encountered something that enriches him.

“Zhen, Shan, Ren,” he repeated, as if savoring the words. “Truthfulness, Compassion, Forbearance. These three principles—they are another language for something related in essence. Truthfulness, that is what we would call the Logos.” Mercy, that's charity. And compassion—" he smiled, "that's perhaps what we Christians struggle with most. We can learn from your path in that respect."

I nodded. "The exercises are a combination of stillness and movement. It's about letting go of self-will, attachments, what the Buddhist tradition understands as the cause of suffering."

"Letting go of self-will," he repeated, and now there was a gleam in his eyes. "Meister Eckhart, our greatest German mystic, would have said the same thing. Serenity—letting go of self-will in order to become receptive to something greater. Eckhart was almost condemned as a heretic for it. And your school—" he looked at me seriously, "your school is being persecuted in China." It seems that truth has the same enemies in every era: the powerful, who fear that a person who liberates themselves inwardly can no longer be subjugated outwardly.

"Holy Father," I said, "as someone who follows a Far Eastern path—am I on the wrong path in your eyes?"

He stopped, and in his gaze was the kindness of someone who had reflected too long to judge lightly.

"The Holy Spirit blows where it wills. That is the Gospel of John. Wherever a person truly strives for good—Zhen, you said?—there is something at work that is greater than that person. Whether they call it God or Dao or Buddha-nature—that is a matter of language. Not of substance."

He went to the window overlooking St. Peter's Square.

"The tragedy of our time is not that people go down different paths. The tragedy is indifference. The person who has stopped asking questions." Their Falun Dafa is the exact opposite of this indifference. A path of cultivation, of daily practice—and that is what the world needs. People who practice. Not people who consume. Whether they do that in a church or during their Qigong exercises—that is, forgive my frankness, secondary.

“Seriousness,” I said, “is perhaps what is most lost. The writings I study say that through trials, a person can work off their karma and perfect themselves. That sounds harsh, but it contains a profound comfort: that nothing is in vain. Not punishment—opportunity.”

“That is, at its core, the felix culpa,” he said softly, “the transformation of suffering into knowledge. Augustine knew it. Your tradition knows it. Between Augustine and the Dao lie only languages, not truths.”

He reached for a jacket. “Come. I’ll show you where words have turned to stone.”

We entered St. Peter’s Basilica through a side entrance, and it was as if we were entering another state of being. Benedict walked slowly, almost meditatively, and I noticed that he wasn’t observing the basilica, but inhabiting it—moving through this space like someone walking through their own inner self.

“People marvel at the size,” he said. “But size isn’t the point. They built it this way because they wanted to create a space where people feel small—and precisely because of that, great. Small before the mystery. And great in the realization that this mystery speaks to them.”

“In our practice, there’s the concept of ‘thing,’” I said. “Silence, stillness. When I stand under this dome, something similar happens. The space says: Stop thinking you’re the center of attention.”

“That’s exactly the point,” he said. “Sacred space and meditation do the same thing. They shift the ego to its proper place—to the periphery, to where it can listen.”

We stood beneath the dome, and I gazed up at Michelangelo’s vast sky.

“Michelangelo wasn’t a pious man. But he knew that beauty is an argument. Not proof—an argument.” Beauty says: There is something that cannot be reduced to matter.

He pointed to the bronze baldachin above the papal altar. “Mozart and this cathedral have one thing in common: joy. The greatest testament to faith. Not gloom, not austerity. Mozart wrote church music that sounds as if God is laughing. And Bernini built this baldachin, which is so extravagant that it exudes joy.”

“In the Buddhist tradition,” I said, “the enlightened one smiles. Always. Not the absence of pain, but the knowledge of something beyond pain.”

“You see,” Benedict said, taking a light hand on my arm, “that’s precisely why I value our conversation. You meditate in the mornings with your Qigong exercises, I pray my breviary. You read the writings of Master Li Hongzhi, I read the Church Fathers. And yet—when we talk about serenity, about the Buddha’s smile and the laughter in Mozart’s music, we’re talking about the same thing. About the experience that reality is fundamentally good. That it’s worth trusting.”

We continued walking, past the Pietà, and Benedict stopped, saying nothing, simply gazing at the marble woman holding her dead son. I thought of Ren, of the ability to endure suffering without losing faith in goodness, and it seemed to me that this sculpture expressed exactly that.

As if he had heard my thoughts, Benedict said softly, “Forbearance. Ren. That is what this woman demonstrates. She does not accuse. She simply holds on. She holds the suffering without being broken by it.”

He led me out, through corridors and courtyards, and said, “Now I will show you the place where the Church keeps its memory.”

The Vatican Apostolic Archives. Benedict snorted softly when I mentioned the old name, “Secretum.” “Secretum in Latin does not mean secret. It means private. But the world loves the mysterious, and so an administrative term has been turned into a conspiracy theory.”

We entered rooms that smelled of paper and old leather. Shelves upon shelves, mile after mile, filled with documents, letters, papal bulls, court records, love letters from kings, and petitions from beggars.

"Eighty-five kilometers of shelves," Benedict said. "And what moves me most are not the grand documents. It's the small voices. The letter from a fourteenth-century woman imploring the Pope to reinstate her excommunicated husband. A sixteenth-century village priest asking if he may bury a Protestant because he was a good man. These voices—that is the Church."

"The deepest truths," I said, "are never proclaimed from above. They arise in silence. In the individual person who chooses to be truthful. The woman with her letter, the priest with his Protestant—these are people who have lived Shan, mercy, without knowing the word."

"Exactly," he said. “Mercy doesn’t need a denomination. It only needs a person who chooses to practice it. That’s the common ground we all stand on. You with your Falun Dafa. I with my Christ. There’s a foundation beneath all foundations, and that foundation is the decision to do good.”

He became more thoughtful. “Here, too, lies the trial of Galileo. And the trial of the Templars. Moments when the Church was wrong. One must be able to read these documents without shame and without making excuses.”

“We, too, know persecution,” I said quietly. “In China, since 1999, millions of practitioners have been persecuted, imprisoned, and tortured—simply because they want to live these three words: Truthfulness, Mercy, Forbearance. The patterns don’t change. Power fears the free spirit. Always.”

Benedict was silent for a long time. Then, very calmly: “I know about the persecution. Every person who suffers for their faith is a witness.” A martyr—from the Greek word martys, meaning witness. Their practitioners, imprisoned in Chinese jails for wanting to perform their morning exercises—they bear witness that there is something more precious than their own physical integrity. This witness connects them to every martyr of every tradition.

We stood silently between the shelves.

“I have spent my whole life trying to think about faith,” Benedict said more quietly. “And in the end, there is humility. Humility before that which defies thought. Not because it is irrational, but because it is greater than reason.”

“We call it Wu wei,” I said. “Not inaction, but action that does not stem from ego. The willingness to surrender to the Dao instead of trying to control everything.”

“Wu wei,” he repeated. “In German: equanimity. In Latin: fiat—let it be done. But your formulation makes it clear that humility is not resignation. It is an active consent. That is something entirely different.”

As he was leaving, he paused and said, half to me, half to himself: “Fifty-eight kilometers still unexplored. Imagine that.” Fifty-eight kilometers of voices no one has ever heard.

Then he continued walking, and I walked beside him, and between us there was something that felt like an old friendship, even though we had only known each other for hours. We had both practiced—he with his breviary, I with my exercises and the three principles. And practice creates a connection between people that runs deeper than any shared language.

As he stepped out into the Roman evening, he paused one last time.

"Keep practicing," he said, and it sounded like a blessing. "Zhen, Shan, Ren—that's a good compass. And the world needs people with a compass. More urgently than ever."

I watched him, this small, old man in his white cassock, and I thought: Here is someone who carries the weight of all Christendom on his narrow shoulders, and yet he manages to extend a hand to a stranger from a foreign tradition. And perhaps that—this openness of heart—is what mercy means. In every language. In every faith. Shan.

S.

Postscript

Joseph Alois Ratzinger was born on April 16, 1927, in Marktl am Inn. His brother Georg, with whom he remained close until Georg's death in 2020, also became a priest and served as choirmaster of the Regensburg Cathedral Choir. Both shared a love of Mozart.

As a young theologian, Ratzinger was considered a progressive thinker. He participated as an advisor in the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965). He frequently commented on the shift in his perception from reformer to conservative—he saw himself as the guardian of a position that had been overtaken by the prevailing political climate.

In his book Faith—Truth—Tolerance (2003), Ratzinger acknowledges the major religions of Asia as authentic paths to experiencing God. Meister Eckhart (c. 1260–1328), to whom he refers in conversation, was a mystic whose concept of equanimity exhibits striking parallels to Buddhist and Daoist teachings.

Falun Dafa (also known as Falun Gong) was founded in China in 1992 by Li Hongzhi and combines elements of Buddhism and Daoism with five meditative Qigong exercises. Its three core principles are Zhen (Truthfulness), Shan (Compassion), and Ren (Forbearance). The practice has been systematically promoted in China since 1999.

The Vatican Apostolic Archives, known as the "Secret Archives" until 2019, comprise approximately 85 kilometers of shelving containing documents dating back to the eighth century. Among other things, it houses the trial records of Galileo Galilei and the correspondence with Henry VIII. Significant portions remain unexamined.

The narrative is set in October 2012. On February 11, 2013, Benedict XVI announced his resignation—a step no pope had taken voluntarily since Celestine V in 1294. He died on December 31, 2022, at the age of ninety-five.

He retained the cheerfulness described in this story until the very end.

Your support keeps ideas alive — and stories in motion. 👉 https://www.paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=5NGG6XB67BZ4N 🙏

🇩🇪 My lyrical thoughts between two book covers: blau pause zimmerlautstärke - lyrik über die zeit - zurzeit

BoD Bookshop: https://buchshop.bod.de/blau-pause-zimmerlautstaerke-stefan-noir-9783695118779

Amazon-Shop: https://amzn.eu/d/1TvOBUO

🇺🇸 / 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 / 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 My lyrical thoughts between two book covers: blue pause room volume: poetry about time – currently

Amazon (English edition): https://amzn.eu/d/3b3GUF4