Aide recounts Benedict’s very last terms

VATICAN Town (AP) — Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI’s past words ended up “Lord, I really like you,” his longtime secretary said Sunday, quoting a nurse who helped treatment for the 95-12 months-old former pontiff in his last several hours.

Archbishop Georg Gaenswein, a German prelate who lived in the Vatican monastery wherever Benedict took up home immediately after his 2013 retirement, mentioned the nurse recounted listening to Benedict utter those people words and phrases at about 3 a.m. Saturday. The retired pope died later on that early morning.

“Benedict XVI, with a faint voice but in a incredibly unique way, claimed in Italian, ‘Lord, I appreciate you,’” Gaenswein advised the Vatican’s official media, introducing that it transpired when the aides tending to Benedict were being switching shifts.

“I wasn’t there in that minute, but the nurse a tiny afterwards recounted it,” the archbishop reported. ”They had been his very last comprehensible words, simply because later on, he wasn’t equipped to specific himself any more.”

Gaenswein did not discover the male nurse who shared the facts.

Previously, the Vatican mentioned that Pope Francis went to spend his respects immediately just after Gaenswein named to notify him of Benedict’s dying soon following 9:30 a.m. Saturday Vatican spokesman Matteo Bruni explained Francis stayed in Benedict’s monastery for quite some time ahead of returning to his home in a hotel situated across the Vatican Gardens.

For the duration of New Year’s Working day remarks on Sunday, Francis prayed for his predecessor’s passage to heaven and expressed thanks for Benedict’s lifetime of support to the church.

Francis departed briefly from looking through his homily in the course of a morning Mass at St. Peter’s Basilica to pray aloud for Benedict.

“Today we entrust to our Blessed Mom our beloved Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, so that she may well accompany him in his passage from this world to God,” he said.

The basilica is established to host Benedict’s coffin for 3 times of viewing that start out Monday.

Rome Prefect Bruno Frattasi, an Interior Ministry formal, explained to Italian condition Tv that “no much less than 25,000, 30,000” mourners were being anticipated to file previous the coffin on Monday.

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On Sunday, Benedict’s overall body lay on a burgundy-coloured bier in the chapel of the monastery in which he had lived in the course of his virtually ten years-long retirement. He was dressed in a miter, the headgear of a bishop, and a purple cloak-like vestment.

A rosary was put in his hand. Driving him, visible in images produced by the Vatican, were the chapel’s altar and a decorated Xmas tree.

Francis remembered Benedict yet again later on Sunday while addressing 1000’s of people in St. Peter’s Square. He advised the group that “in these hours, we invoke her intercession, in particular for Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, who, yesterday morning, left this planet.”

“Permit us unite all together, with one particular heart and just one soul, in giving thanks to God for the gift of this faithful servant of the Gospel and of the church,” Francis explained, talking from a window of the Apostolic Palace to pilgrims and travelers beneath.

The square will be the location for Benedict’s funeral led by Francis on Thursday early morning. The company will be a very simple one, the Vatican has said, in keeping with the needs of Benedict. Before he was elected pope in 2005, Benedict was a German cardinal who served as the Church’s guardian of doctrinal orthodoxy.

In the latest years, Francis hailed Benedict’s gorgeous choice to turn out to be the initially pope to resign in 600 yrs and has made very clear he’d consider this sort of a move as an choice for himself.

Hobbled by knee suffering, Francis, 86, on Sunday arrived in the basilica in a wheelchair and took his put in a chair for the Mass, which was getting celebrated by the Vatican’s secretary of state.

Francis, who has frequently decried the war in Ukraine and its devastation, recalled people who are victims of war, passing the calendar year-stop vacations in darkness, cold and fear.

“At the commencing of this year, we will need hope, just as the Earth demands rain,” Francis mentioned in his homily.

Whilst addressing the faithful in St. Peter’s Square, the pope cited the “intolerable” war in Ukraine, which commenced a lot more than 10 months in the past, and conflicts elsewhere other sites in the environment.

Nonetheless, Francis mentioned, “let us not get rid of hope” that peace will prevail.

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Nicole Winfield contributed from the Vatican.

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Much more on the death of Emeritus Pope Benedict XVI: https://apnews.com/hub/pope-benedict-xvi