"A giant”: that is how a high-ranking prelate in the Roman Curia describes Joachim Meisner, the German cardinal who died suddenly last week. He fell asleep while he was reading the Breviary, and never woke up.
“He was a good, strong man,” a curial cardinal who was friends with him told me. “The Lord took him at one of the most beautiful moments for a good priest.”
Meisner certainly was a benchmark for the German Catholic Church in the past century. “A wise old bear”: that’s the image offered with affection by one of his friends. Whenever problems arose, when there was a difficult point to face, it was customary to seek his advice.
