According to Vatican journalist Sandro Magister, Benedict XVI had arranged for the writings to be published after his death.
The Italian magazine L’Espresso published an excerpt of one the essays, a 17-page text on “the meaning of Communion,” which was finished in June 2018, when the Church in Germany was debating intercommunion: whether Protestant spouses of Catholics could receive the Eucharist at Mass.
In his essay, Benedict recalled other moments in Germany’s history when there were calls for intercommunion and said that today, sometimes those same calls are based more on outside forces than on the desire for unity in Christ.
“Especially during the years of the war, in the evangelical camp a division developed between the Third Reich and what were called the ‘deutsche Christen,’ Christian-Germans, on one side, and the ‘bekennende Kirche,’ the confessing Church, on the other,” he explained.
The split led to a new accord between evangelical Christians and the Catholic Church, he said. “One result was a push in favor of common eucharistic Communion between the confessions. In this situation there grew the desire for a single body of the Lord that today, however, risks losing its strong religious foundation and, in an externalized Church, is determined more by political and social forces than by the interior search for the Lord.”
The pope emeritus described another time, shortly after the reunification of Germany, when a eucharistic act, drinking from the chalice, was used “as an essentially political act in which the unity of all Germans became manifest.”
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