Pope tells cardinals of the ‘fright’ he felt when elected

POPE BENEDICT XVI recalled the “fright” he felt at being elected Pope, telling cardinals during his year-end speech yesterday that he never imagined he would be chosen and only agreed to it because he had great faith in God.

Benedict reviewed what he called the "great events" that affected the Catholic Church in 2005, highlighting the suffering and death of Pope John Paul II, the 40th anniversary of the Second Vatican Council and the World Youth Day celebrations in Cologne, Germany.

He left the April 19 conclave that elected him Pope to the end of the lengthy speech, saying he felt "not a little bit of fright" when he was chosen by the College of Cardinals to succeed John Paul. "Such a job was completely beyond anything I could ever have imagined as my vocation," he told the cardinals and Roman curia gathered in the Sala Clementina of the Vatican's Apostolic Palace. "As such, it was only with a great act of faith in God that I could say in obedience my 'yes' to this choice."

He asked the prelates for their continued prayers.

Benedict has spoken infrequently about his election, although in one of his first public audiences he quipped that he felt like a "guillotine" was falling on him when he realised the votes were going his way. The former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was elected after four ballots in 24 hours in one of the fastest conclaves in a century.

Benedict, wearing a fur-trimmed red and gold-brocade cape over his white cassock, opened his Christmas greeting to the prelates by recalling the April 2 death of John Paul, and the weeks and months of suffering that preceded it.

"No Pope has left us with such a quantity of texts that he left us with; no Pope in history has been able to visit all the world and speak directly to the men of all continents as he did," he said. "The Holy Father, with his words and his works, gave us great things; but no less important is the lesson that he gave us from the cathedral of suffering and silence."

He devoted a substantial portion of the speech to the significance of the Second Vatican Council, the 1962-65 meetings on reforming the Catholic Church. The Vatican officially marked the 40th anniversary of the council's conclusion earlier this month.

The Pope attended the meetings as a young theologian and is among those who interpreted it as less of a liberalising break that brought the Church into the modern world as a recovery of the Church's traditional identity.

Benedict said yesterday that the council's outcome had been received with difficulty in many parts of the Church because it had been wrongly interpreted in part by the mass media as a rupture with the past and not a recovery. He called for a correct interpretation of the council's spirit.

Vatican II was a turning point for the Church. The council's reforms allowed Mass to be celebrated in languages other than Latin and priests to face their congregations instead of having their backs to them.