In a tribute to the late Cardinal Joachim Meisner, Pope-emeritus Benedict XVI praised the German prelate for his “conviction that the Lord does not leave His Church, even if at times the ship is almost filled to the point of shipwreck.”
The message from the retired Pontiff, which was read out at Cardinal Meisner’s funeral by Archbishop Georg Ganswein, suggested that Benedict saw the Church as enduring a time of crisis.
In a candid passage of his message, Benedict wrote:
“What struck me particularly in the last conversations with the Cardinal, now gone home, was the natural cheerfulness, the inner peace and the assurance he had found. We know that it was hard for him, the passionate shepherd and pastor of souls, to leave his office, and this precisely at a time when the Church had a pressing need for shepherds who would oppose the dictatorship of the zeitgeist, fully resolved to act and think from a faith standpoint. Yet I have been all the more impressed that in this last period of his life he learned to let go, and live increasingly from the conviction that the Lord does not leave his Church, even if at times the ship is almost filled to the point of shipwreck.
