Personality and Temperament

Abstract

Behind this litany of impressive data stands a surprisingly inconspicuous and humble, even shy, human being. He is the second son of a Bavarian gendarme of modest means, with an older brother and sister as his siblings. Joseph Aloysius Ratzinger was born in the hamlet of Marktl am Inn on April 16, 1927. He was christened in a six-sided, white limestone baptismal font in St. Oswald Parish Church during the Easter Vigil Mass on the very day he was born.¹ His native country, characterized by a gently undulating landscape, is one of wooded hills, small lakes, and winding roads and trails, dotted by countless little white chapels and onion-domed church towers. Visitors will invariably notice that the chapels and churches seem to form the inseparable ingredients of a preconceived (divine) grand design. They are a constitutive part of picture-book, idyllic Catholic Bavaria. One senses that the Catholic faith belongs to life as much as plain air does. At noon the farmers would pause working to pray the Angelus. Such liberalitas Bavariae enjoyed both the prospect of heaven and the natural beauties of Bavaria. He has written: “The Catholicism of my Bavarian homeland… has been able to find a place for everything that is human: prayer, but also celebration; repentance, but also joyfulness.…In the faith of my parents I found the confirmation that Catholicism had been a bulwark of truth and justice against that regime of atheism and lies represented by National Socialism.”²