Eulogy for Ida Friederike Görres

Abstract

Eulogy for Ida Friederike Görres Fr. Joseph Ratzinger Eulogy at the passing of Ida Friederike Görres, delivered by Professor Doctor Joseph Ratzinger at the Requiem Mass in the Cathedral of Freiburg, Germany on May 19, 1971.27 The Church engages in worship by commemorating the death of her Lord. She does this gratefully because she knows that this death has given life to suffering. With such knowledge, the Church dares to give thanks at the graves of her dead. She can do this because she believes that the death of those who believe in Jesus Christ is held in His death and thus in His resurrection. It is overcome in advance. It is not destruction but merely transition into a new and final way of being with God and with all who belong to the Lord. Nevertheless, humanly speaking, this is something shocking, and sometimes we feel this outrageousness, such as when the words from the Song of Zechariah, which had been a song at the birth of a long-awaited child, are used at the open grave: "Blessed be the Lord, the God of Israel, for he has visited and brought redemption to his people."28 In the face of tears and pain, in the face of all the hardship and abandonment that a person's departure can mean, the Church [End Page 148] praises God and sees in this fate of death His visitation, His closeness that gives salvation. And even before that, in the center of the liturgy, the words ring out: It is truly right and just, our duty and our salvation, always and everywhere to give you thanks—even at this hour. Even at this hour: can we give thanks? Can we give thanks at the death of Ida Friederike Görres, with which a voice has been taken away from us, a voice which seems irreplaceable to the Church in this situation, when we are in a desert of conformism or embarrassed silence? She spoke with an insightful certainty and a fearlessness about the pressing questions and tasks of the Church today, something which is given only to the one who truly believes. And where else are there such voices? This wasn't all easy for her. She had grown up in the liberal Catholicism of the waning Habsburg monarchy. Her education at a convent provided access to faith, rooted her in it, but everything remained strangely stale, inanimate, dry. Encountering the [Catholic] Youth Movement was what brought the great turning point, which determined her entire further path until the end. She realized what from then on remained the center of her thought and work: the living Church. She realized that the Church is not just an organization, a hierarchy, an administrative office, but an organism that grows and lives through the centuries. She realized that the Church is not just the small spatial and temporal segment to which we belong, but that the whole community of believers throughout all time and all places belongs to the Church. In her own words: the Church is "not a system, an idea, an ideology, a structure, a society, but the tremendous living establishment, which has existed since the apostles until today, fulfilling her history from century to century, growing, unfolding, struggling, ailing, recovering, living out her destiny and maturing toward the return of the Lord."29 This very community throughout the eras, the whole that lives from the Lord—this is the Church in which the Lord Himself continues to walk through time and to draw her to Himself. From this point of view, a decisive insight had become a self-evident [End Page 149] matter for her, which at the same time made it possible for her to survive the darkening of the past few years and to maintain independence and serenity in them: a church built in this way must be the Church of sinners. In her last letter to me, she supported this idea passionately: A church of the elites—what would that be? No, it is precisely this that belongs to the Church: that she reaches down to the lowest misery of man, is disfigured by it, wounded, often...