Msgr. Gregory Smith was living in Rome in 2006 when an archbishop who was going to resign met a Pope who was going to resign.
He recalls the visit as one of “two climactic moments of my time in Rome,” and he was at St. Peter’s Square for both. The first was the funeral of Pope John Paul II and the announcement of Pope Benedict XVI as his successor's election.
“But the personal highlight was meeting Pope Benedict during Archbishop Raymond Roussin’s ad limina visit in 2006.”
The Vicar General for the Archdiocese of Vancouver said that “despite the formality of the procedures and the majesty of the Apostolic Palace, the encounter with the Pope was not at all intimidating. He greeted me warmly and posed for pictures with no signs of rushing.”
Because of a neurological illness, Archbishop Roussin resigned his post in 2009. At the time, Msgr. Smith said, “The words of the prophet Isaiah, ‘A man of suffering, and acquainted with infirmity,’ are appropriate to describe Archbishop Roussin.”
Archbishop Roussin “never allowed his own pain to stop him from caring for others,” he said.
In 2013, Pope Benedict resigned saying that due to advance age he was “no longer suited to adequately exercise the Petrine ministry.”
For Msgr. Smith, the past week has been a reflective one. “Sad though the though the passing of the Pope Emeritus is, it brings back for me happy and grateful memories.”
A former Vancouver choir director and liturgical musician says she and many other liturgical musicians will always be “profoundly grateful” for the emphasis Pope Benedict XVI put on sacred music during his time as Pontiff.
“In a nutshell, he got us off singing ‘Michael, row the boat ashore’ and back onto the sacred chants, and the importance of chant in the liturgy,” said Margaret Langfield, who was choir director at St. Mark’s from 1993 to 2006.
Langfield quoted an article by Sister Joan L. Roccasalvo, CSJ, who wrote that not since Pope St. Pius X (1903-14) “has a Pontiff befriended sacred music more passionately than Benedict XVI.”
Since Vatican II, the issue of sacred music had “mushroomed into bitter debates, a fact well-known to Benedict,” Sister Roccasalvo wrote.
“A complete theologian, Benedict is also a connoisseur and patron of the arts, and a fine pianist. As with the legacies of past pontiffs, the Church carries forward his overall teaching into a new papacy.”
Langfield said, “The other thing I was so grateful for – especially in the aftermath of Vatican II when all the rules seemed to have flown out the window – was the direction that sacred music should be Scripturally based.”
That direction “made sense” and countered the 1960s and 1970s approach of offering “fluff, or purely folk music,” she said.
“I’m hoping (and praying) that music will get more than a passing mention among all the plaudits that I’m sure are awaiting this holy man.”
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