If at this late hour in my life I look back on the decades I have traveled, I first see how many reasons I have for thanks. Before anything else I thank God himself, the giver of every good gift, who gave me life and guided me through various moments of confusion; always getting up every time I started to slip and always giving me the light of his face again. In retrospect I see and understand that even the dark and tiring stretches of this path were for my salvation and that He guided me well in them.
I thank my parents, who gave me life in a difficult time and who, at the cost of great sacrifices, with their love prepared a magnificent home for me which, like a clear light, illuminates all my days until today. My father's lucid faith taught us children to believe, and as a signpost it was always firm amidst all my scientific acquisitions; My mother's deep devotion and great kindness are a legacy for which I can never thank enough. My sister assisted me for decades selflessly and with affectionate concern; my brother, with the clarity of his judgments, his vigorous determination and the serenity of his heart, has always paved the way for me; without his continuous preceding and accompanying me I would not have been able to find the right path.
I heartily thank God for the many friends, men and women, who He has always placed at my side; for the collaborators at all stages of my journey; for the teachers and students He gave me. I entrust them all grateful to his goodness. And I want to thank the Lord for my beautiful homeland in the Bavarian Prealps, in which I have always seen the splendor of the Creator himself shine through. I thank the people of my homeland because in them I have always been able to experience the beauty of faith again. I pray that our land remains a land of faith and I beg you, dear compatriots: do not let yourselves be distracted from faith. And finally I thank God for all the beauty that I have been able to experience in all the stages of my journey, especially in Rome and in Italy which has become my second homeland.
To all those I have wronged in some way, I sincerely ask for forgiveness.
What I said before to my compatriots, I now say to all those in the Church who have been entrusted to my service: remain steadfast in the faith! Don't be confused! It often seems that science — the natural sciences on the one hand and historical research (particularly the exegesis of Holy Scripture) on the other — are able to offer irrefutable results that conflict with the Catholic faith. I have experienced the transformations of the natural sciences since distant times and I have been able to see how, on the contrary, apparent certainties against faith have vanished, proving to be not science, but philosophical interpretations only apparently belonging to science; just as, moreover, it is in the dialogue with the natural sciences that faith has also learned to better understand the limit of the scope of its affirmations, and therefore its specificity. I have been accompanying the path of Theology, in particular Biblical Sciences, for sixty years now, and with the succession of different generations I have seen theses that seemed unshakable collapse, proving to be simple hypotheses: the liberal generation (Harnack, Jülicher etc.), the existentialist generation (Bultmann etc.), the Marxist generation. I have seen and see how the reasonableness of faith has emerged and continues to emerge from the tangle of hypotheses. Jesus Christ is truly the way, the truth, and the life — and the Church, with all her insufficiencies, is truly her body.
Finally, I humbly ask: pray for me, so that the Lord, despite all my sins and shortcomings, welcomes me into the eternal homes. To all those entrusted to me, my heartfelt prayer goes out day after day.
Benedictus PP XVI