On the third anniversary of Pope Benedict XVI’s death, Cardinal Koch recalls his lifelong pursuit of God and vision of death as a divine new beginning.
Newsroom (31/12/2025 Gaudium Press ) On the third anniversary of Pope Benedict XVI’s death, the quiet of the Vatican Grottoes was filled with remembrance and reverence. Cardinal Kurt Koch, Prefect of the Dicastery for Promoting Christian Unity, presided over a memorial Mass beneath St. Peter’s Basilica, honoring the late Pope as a man who, through intellect and faith, never ceased to seek the face of God.
The date—December 31—marks not only the close of a calendar year but, for the Church, a profound metaphor of renewal. In his homily, Cardinal Koch drew powerfully from this coincidence. As the Gospel of John opens with the words “In the beginning was the Word,” he reflected, so too does Christianity promise that life’s final chapter is not an end but a new beginning. “The earthly end of human life is not at all the end,” the Cardinal said. “It is the beginning of eternal life with God.”
For Cardinal Koch, the life of Joseph Ratzinger—Pope Benedict XVI—embodied that promise. His spiritual pursuit was marked by a profound longing to encounter God face-to-face, a motif that, Koch noted, ran through Benedict’s major theological works and personal reflections alike. The Pope’s three-volume Jesus of Nazareth was described as an “expression of his personal search for the face of the Lord,” the fruit of a lifetime spent contemplating the mystery of Christ as the manifestation of divine love.
That love, Cardinal Koch reminded the faithful, is what transforms the tragedy of death into the birthplace of hope. Quoting from Benedict’s Unpublished Homilies (2005–2017), he recalled the late Pontiff’s acknowledgment of death as a “tearing apart of all human relationships.” Yet, Benedict insisted, it is within that desolation that divine love acts most powerfully. “Only if God himself becomes present with His love in this place of absolute solitude,” Koch said, “a new beginning is possible.”
The Cardinal invoked Benedict’s meditation before the Shroud of Turin—“Love has penetrated into hell”—as the ultimate articulation of that mystery. Christ’s descent into death, he explained, reveals that divine love permeates even the darkest spaces, making resurrection possible not as myth but as truth alive in every believer’s end.
“Christ brings new life in the midst of death,” Koch declared. “What was fulfilled in Him is accomplished also in the death of each individual.” Death, therefore, becomes a gateway to communion—a transition from isolation into the fullness of God’s eternal presence. This, he said, is the heart of Christian hope and the theological legacy Benedict XVI leaves behind.
As the Mass concluded, Cardinal Koch invited those gathered to ask, as Benedict surely does now, for “the fulfillment of one’s life in His eternal presence.” In that quiet prayer, beneath the marble and silence of the Grottoes, Pope Benedict’s lifelong search seemed to echo still—the search for the face of the God he now sees.
- Raju Hasmukh with files from Vatican News
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