Nice Story

I guess with all the doom and gloom around us everyday in the news, I found this article and found it heart warming. It is about the Holy Father meeting with children and discussing his own childhood.
In reading the story I wondered how wonderful it would be to sit down with the Holy Father and just discuss things and talk about things with him. Anyways that is my musing for today and now on to the article,

Meeting children, pope shares early memories, says being pope is hard

By Sarah Delaney
Catholic News Service

VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- Pope Benedict XVI offered a rare glimpse into his private feelings, telling a group of children that as a boy he never dreamed of becoming pope and that he still sometimes worries he is not up to the job.

The pope answered questions and described growing up in a small German village during an audience May 30 at the Vatican with 7,000 children from the Holy Childhood Association, a group affiliated with the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples.

The meeting with the enthusiastic young audience gave the pope an opportunity to speak more openly than usual about himself, prompted by the children's more personal questions.

When asked whether as a boy he had ever thought he might one day be pope, he admitted that it had not been one of his youthful plans.

"To tell the truth, I never would have thought I might become pope. ... I was a pretty ingenuous boy in a small village far from the city," he said. "We were happy to be in the country and didn't think about much else."

Even today, he said, "it's difficult for me to understand how the Lord could have thought of me, to choose me for this ministry. But I accept it from his hands, even if it is very surprising and seems very much beyond my means."

"But the Lord helps me," he said.

For him and his companions, Pope Pius XI, the pontiff at the time, "was loved and venerated, but for us he was unreachable, almost of another world," the pope said.

The young Joseph Ratzinger spent his childhood and adolescent years in the Bavarian village of Traunstein, near the Austrian border.

The pope told the children about growing up there with children of different socioeconomic circumstances, but said it hadn't caused problems because "we all collaborated, everyone helped each other and we went on our paths together. We were all Catholic, and this was a great help."

As children, he said, "sometimes we argued, but then we made up and forgot about what had happened. This is important ... the art of reconciliation, forgiveness, starting over without bitterness of the spirit."

At 8 or 9 years old, he became an altar boy, the pope said. "At that time, there were no altar girls, but the girls read better than we did so they would read from the liturgy."

Reminiscing about his early religious education with his village companions, he said, "We learned altogether to know the Bible. ... We learned the catechism together, we learned to pray together and together we prepared for our first Communion -- that was a splendid day."

He said that as children and teens, "we weren't saints and we had our arguments, but there was a beautiful communion between us, and the distinction between rich and poor, intelligent and less intelligent, didn't count."

The pope said nothing about the difficult circumstances of his childhood with the rise of Adolph Hitler and the Nazi regime and World War II. Pope Benedict has written several times that he had been obligated as a young teenager to take part in the Hitler Youth program and that he was drafted into an anti-aircraft unit in the last months of the war.

Telling the children, "You all are missionaries, messengers for the missionary work of the church," he reminded them to pray often, together and with their families. "Pray before lunch, before dinner and on Sunday," he said.

He added, "A Sunday without Mass, the great common prayer of the church, isn't a real Sunday; it lacks heart and therefore the light for the rest of the week."