Joseph Aloisius Ratzinger was born on the cusp of Easter, on Holy Saturday, on April 16, 1927, making him literally the child of the Easter Triduum, when the wounds of Christ were still visible on his body before the beauty of the glory of the Resurrection of Easter Sunday.

Writing in his memoir Milestones, Ratzinger says that he was always filled with thanksgiving for having had his life “immersed in this way in the Easter mystery, since this could only be a sign of blessing. To be sure, it was not Easter Sunday but Holy Saturday, but, the more I reflect on it, the more this seems to be fitting for the nature of our human life: We are still awaiting Easter; we are still not standing in the full light but walking toward it in full trust”.

Throughout his life, Ratzinger sought to walk on this way to full light even in the darkest valleys of the night. We can see it in his life, in his books, in his homilies, in his hidden life after the resignation. Much can be written about the life and work of this future Doctor of the Church but, to my mind, his entire life and teaching can be distilled in what he called the way of beauty, via pulchritudinis.

Benedict’s emphasis on beauty as a means to encounter truth and grow in faith is one of the greatest seeds planted during his pontificate and, may I say, long before as theologian, liturgist, homilist and thinker.

Like his great teacher, Augustine in the City of God, his alumnus Ratzinger went about the earthly city looking for “the spark of reason” in words, in music and in figurative arts and, thus, facilitated our understanding and enjoyment of God. Indeed, in his blueprint address on beauty in 2002 on The Feeling of Things, the Contemplation of Beauty, Ratzinger recalls the Bach concert that Leonard Bernstein conducted in Munich after the sudden death of Karl Richter.

He recalls that he was sitting next to the Lutheran bishop Hanselmann. When the last note of one of the great Thomas-Kantor-Cantatas triumphantly faded away, “we looked at each other spontaneously and right then we said: ‘Anyone who has heard this, knows that the faith is true’”.

Ratzinger eloquently makes the case of the authentic beauty that wounds, that gives us pain because “authentic beauty unlocks the yearning of the human heart, the profound desire to know, to love, to go towards the Other, to reach for the Beyond” against the “cult of the ugly which says that everything beautiful is a deception and the only representation of what is crude, low and vulgar is the truth, the true illumination of knowledge”.

Benedict called the pain we feel when we encounter authentic beauty as the “beautiful wounds” caused by an arrow that strikes the heart and opens our eyes. Whoever has perceived this beauty, he continued, knows that truth, and not falsehood, is the real aspiration of the world.

But Benedict’s life was one long Holy Saturday. He lived through the regime of Nazi Germany. After having been forcibly conscripted in the Hitler Youth and then in the army, which he deserted, he lived in fear of retribution. As a son of Germany, he keenly felt the guilt of the Final Solution. Who can forget his heart-wrenching cry in Auschwitz “Why, Lord, did you remain silent?” when he visited in May 2006?

For a lover of beauty, Benedict has seen real ugliness in his lifetime – the wounds of clerical abuse inflicted on the Church, the falling away of former friends who tried to forge other paths that diverted from orthodoxy and the relentless, often times unfair, attacks, especially from inside the Vatican itself.

Who can forget Benedict’s heart-wrenching cry in Auschwitz ‘Why, Lord, did you remain silent?’- Alessandra Dee Crespo

All through it all, Benedict still spoke of beauty because he would not let ugliness, under its myriad forms, to have the last word even when it is attractive because “falsehood has another stratagem. A beauty that is deceptive and false, a dazzling beauty that does not bring human beings out of themselves to open them to the ecstasy of rising to the heights but indeed locks them entirely into themselves”.

Even when he was still viciously attacked long after he retired, the luminosity of his words from the monastery shone through. Benedict strove for beauty “that reawakens a longing for the Ineffable, readiness for sacrifice, the abandonment of self as opposed to the kind that stirs up the will for power, possession and pleasure”.

Benedict knew that humanity itself has been undergoing its own long Holy Saturday with wars, disease, injustice but offered it hope. At the funeral of his great friend and mentor, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Ratzinger preached that “our entire task in this life consists in healing the eyes of the heart so they may be able to see the beauty of God… the reason and goal of the world and of our lives: God, the living God”.

“[If] everything makes sense, is so convincing, whom should we trust,” asked Ratzinger in 2002. The answer for him was always simple. The way of beauty that is Jesus Christ. In his last book-interview with his biographer, Peter Seewald, Benedict admitted that, despite the confidence that a loving God cannot forsake him, “the closer you come to his face, the more intensely you feel how much you have done wrong. In this respect, the burden of guilt always weighs on me but the basic trust is, of course, always there”. Benedict died speaking to the One who dazzled him with his beauty for 95 years.

As a child of Holy Saturday, Benedict always strove to stand fully in the light of Easter. The quintessential man of the liturgy who was born on the threshold of Easter entered into eternal life at Christmas on the last Saturday of the year.

The man who had dedicated his life to bringing the light of Christ to humanity has finally fully stepped into the light and is now looking on Beauty ever ancient, ever new.

Alessandra Dee Crespo is chancellor, Regional Tribunal of Second Instance.