Eamonn Fitzgerald's Rainy Day

[MUNICH] The sky is grey. Rain is falling. Temperature is unseasonally low. Not exactly conditions for dancing in the street. Not even if the new pope is a Bavarian who was once archbishop of this city. But spontaneous outbreaks of joy are not part of the Bavarian personality. Actually, one of the more prominent character traits in this neck of the woods is that of being "grantig", which means grouchy, grumpy. Could be a consequence of the weather; might be a result of living in the shadow of the Alps and having to wrestle a living from land that is hard to farm. Until the beginning of the 20th century, Bavaria was a mostly agrarian society and a poor one at that.

All those years in Rome have softened the cantankerous native aspect of Pope Benedict's persona but he retains the local quality of directness. It served him well in his previous roles within the Vatican curia and it will be interesting to see what role it will play now.

It's much too early, too, to say how the new pope will be factored into German political reality but here on the border with Austria one can expect a revival of interest in the glories of the Holy Roman Empire. Bavarian and Austrian Catholics have always felt that they were a people apart and they have a race memory of a time when Germanic monarchs ruled the "Empire in the West". Although the borders of the empire shifted greatly throughout its history, its principal area was always that of the German states. From the 8th century its rulers were elected German kings, who usually sought, but did not always receive, imperial coronation by the popes in Rome.

Anyway, what began historically on 25 December 800, when Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne emperor, ended ingloriously on 6 August 1806. After the extension of French control over western Germany following the Battle of Austerlitz and the reorganization of the German states into the Confederation of the Rhine by Napoleon, the Holy Roman Emperor Francis II consolidated his power in Austria, Hungary, Bohemia, and northern Italy and proclaimed himself emperor of Austria in 1804. Two years later he formally dissolved the old Holy Roman Empire to prevent the annexation of the imperial title by Napoleon. On 25 August 1806, The Times carried this "Report on the Dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire":

"The latest accounts from Vienna are of the 6th instant, the day on which FRANCIS II. abdicated his title as Emperor of Germany. Of that act of necessity, submission, and degradation, no traces or intimation whatever appear in the Vienna Papers. Some mention is made of the arrival of a Courier from Paris and some Councils held in consequence; but no pains seem to have been taken to prepare the public mind for this, the consummation of French outrage, insult and indignity."

It can be argued that Europe was ruined by the fall of the Holy Roman Empire, an empire St Benedict of old helped build by forming a new Christian society. Pope Benedict must now find a vision to transform a decayed Europe and the world.