In El Sucesor (“The Successor”), a book-interview with Spanish Vaticanist Javier Martínez-Brocal revealed in Spanish on April 3, Pope Francis explains that he met Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, then Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, on a number of events when he himself was known as to Rome as a bishop after which as a cardinal, notably through the 1994 Synod on Consecrated Life and the 2001 Synod on Episcopal Collegiality, for which he was Assistant General Relator.
He recounts an endearing anecdote about Cardinal Ratzinger, whom he typically met in St. Peter’s Square. “I remember him in this neighborhood, walking towards his house wearing a beret and surrounded by cats. I think he knew the language of cats, it was impressive. He spoke to them, and they understood him and guided him,” recollects Francis.
Photo by Andreas SOLARO / AFP
The fond reminiscence of Bishop Xuereb
Benedict XVI’s love of cats is well-known. Archbishop Alfred Xuereb, who was assistant personal secretary to the German pontiff secretariat from 2007 to 2013, recounted a number of attention-grabbing anecdotes concerning the German pope’s ardour for felines in his memoir My days with Benedict XVI, revealed in 2023.
In it, he recollects the publication in 2007 of Joseph and Chico: The Life of Pope Benedict XVI as Told By a Cat, a kids’s e-book written by journalist Jeanne Perego, retracing the lifetime of the German pope by means of the eyes of his devoted ginger cat.
Archbishop Xuereb writes:
While we have been at desk, the pope spoke to us concerning the nice conferences he has had with the writer of this e-book for kids, and he revealed to us that, when he was cardinal, he considered writing a e-book on cats as soon as he retired. It was a dream that clearly has remained within the drawer. He commented, ‘The irony of fate: Instead of me speaking about cats, it is the neighbor’s cat that speaks about me!’ We had an ideal giggle.
In his memoir, Archbishop Xuereb additionally recounts with amusement and tenderness Benedict XVI’s angle in the direction of a stuffed cat placed close to the window of a hall resulting in his room, and which typically acquired a couple of caresses and type phrases from the Pope.
The love that the pope has towards cats is such that even the stuffed cat, resting on a windowsill within the hall that results in his room, steadily receives a pat from the Holy Father and at occasions even a mild passing remark!
The Holy Father loves all animals — the extra clever they’re, the extra he loves them —and he’s particularly enamored by their gestures. I finally found that when he watches tv, he’s even delighted with ads that depict dogs and cats.
“Treat other living beings with care.”
Pope Francis, for his half, made information when he warned towards utilizing animals as an emotional substitute for human relationships. “Yes, it is funny, I understand, but it is the reality. And this denial of fatherhood or motherhood diminishes us, it takes away our humanity,” he mentioned on the general audience on January 5, 2022, prompting a wide range of reactions. The function performed by cats in sure child-deprived societies, notably Japan, corroborates his evaluation.
Antoine Mekary | ALETEIA | I.Media
In his encyclical Laudato si’, Francis provides a wide-ranging reflection on the care of animals as a part of God’s creation, inviting us specifically, in paragraph 211, to point out “care for other living beings.”
“God has written a precious book, ‘whose letters are the multitude of created things present in the universe,’” he writes poetically in paragraph 85, quoting Pope St. John Paul II.
And, simply as his predecessor had finished with a lion cub throughout a normal viewers in January 2009, Pope Francis woke up his childlike soul by stroking a young tiger through the Jubilee of Circus Performers on June 16, 2016, on the Vatican.
