Teresa, 82 years old now, remembers how young Joseph Ratzinger would dash out of his family’s house and press his nose against the window of the shop across the road.
“He was looking at a teddy bear. He wanted it so much that he would stand there gazing at it,” Teresa said. “He was only two years old. I was a little older, but I wanted that teddy too. “Then I remember that one day Joseph was in floods of tears. The teddy bear had gone from the window. I cried too!
“But what we didn’t know was that his mother had bought him it for Christmas. I had to settle for a doll.”
Teresa was three years older than Joseph, who was born in the small Bavarian town of Marktl-am-Inn on April 16, 1927, an Easter Saturday. His father, Joseph senior, was the local policeman and his mother, Maria, a cook.
The little boy who got the teddy bear he so dearly wanted grew up to become archbishop of Munich and then held one of the most senior posts in the Vatican before, three days after his 78th birthday, he was …Więcej