The deaths of Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI and Cardinal George Pell have been great losses to those who remain faithful to traditional Catholic beliefs. The closest I ever got to meeting Pope Benedict was in January 1988, when he visited Cambridge as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger to deliver the Fisher Lecture at the Catholic Chaplaincy. Monsignor Alfred Gilbey helped to arrange the invitation.
Fisher House was packed. Ratzinger’s talk was called “Consumer materialism and Christian hope”. He quoted CS Lewis, talked about the AIDS epidemic and warned the student gathering about the dangers of drugs: “The result of despairing of a world which is experienced as a prison built of facts in which man cannot long endure.” He ended his speech with the line: “Morality is not man’s prison; it is rather the divine in him.”
