Monsignor Alfred Xuereb served as the pope’s personal secretary for six years, between 2007 and 2013, when Pope Joseph Ratzinger did the unthinkable. Out of the blue, he decided to resign and hand over the baton, the first pontiff in 600 years to do so.

Hardly anyone was closer to the pope than the Gozitan priest since he lived, worked, ate and slept in the same papal residence in the Vatican.

Only two priests lived with the pope, and Xuereb was one of them.

The other was Archbishop Georg Gänswein, a German prelate who was once nicknamed ‘Gorgeous George’ for his blue eyes and salt-and-pepper hair and who, in 2013, made it to the cover of Vanity Fair for being ‘St Peter’s George Clooney’.

Some would think that a job as personal secretary to the pope is even better than being pope because you live a pope’s life without having to bear a pope’s troubles.

But Xuereb, now 64, says it is a demanding job, because the secretary’s life and schedule are almost entirely tied to the pope’s.

“We had four weeks of leave each year, which I would usually take all at once in summer to go visit my mother in Gozo. But other than that, I was with the pope every day,” he said.

“Sometimes, some of my Maltese friends would come over to Rome and call me to go have dinner with them, and most of the time I would tell them I can’t because I must have dinner with the pope.”

But on occasions when Xuereb would skip dinner with the pontiff to attend an event elsewhere, Benedict would ask him about it over breakfast the following morning.

“He would ask me what we ate and if we enjoyed ourselves. It felt like a father taking genuine interest in the life of his son.”

Xuereb had been working for Pope John Paul II as an usher, one of the people responsible for ushering guests and dignitaries when they arrive at the Vatican for an audience with the pope.

When Ratzinger was elected pope in 2005, Xuereb held the job, until two years later, Ratzinger asked him to be one of his private secretaries. The job was to assist the pope and take over his office, telephone calls, documents and correspondence. Xuereb is a fluent German speaker.

The job also meant he would need to pack and move in with the pope.

The ‘cats of Malta’ calendars

Benedict was known to be a cat lover, and there was one annual ritual that Xuereb followed meticulously every year when he came to Malta on holiday – and that was buying a ‘cats of Malta’ calendar for the pope.

“I would go to a particular shop every year and buy him one of those calendars that would end up in his study. He liked it a lot and we would sometimes even find ourselves discussing which cats in the calendar were the most beautiful.”

Ratzinger shared a special bond with cats.

“I knew that as cardinal he was known to, quite literally, stop to talk to cats in the streets. Once I joked about it and asked him whether he spoke to them in German or Italian,” Xuereb recalled.

“‘Cats do understand humans,’ he told me, ‘not the language, but the tone of voice. If you know how to speak to them in the right tones of voice, they will understand you. They’re a lot like babies in this sense’.”

One thing the pope would occasionally tease Xuereb about was the heavy rain that flooded St Peter’s Square on June 3, 2007, when he was canonising George Preca as the first Maltese saint.

Xuereb said Ratzinger was also very interested in Malta’s religious traditions, particularly at Christmastime, and was fascinated by the Baby Jesus procession and the tradition that a young boy or girl deliver the sermon.

He was so gentle, sensible and such a kind soul

When Benedict played Ninni La Tibkix Iżjed

Benedict was also an avid piano player, and one evening during Christmastime, Xuereb found himself singing to his piano tunes.

“We were singing carols around the crib and the Christmas tree, when he asked me if I knew any Maltese carols. I remembered someone from Malta had sent me sheet music to Ninni La Tibkix Iżjed once, and I went to get it from my room,” he said.

“He looked at the sheet music, put it on the piano, and started playing it. And I sang along to it. You can imagine how emotional I got when I realised I was singing one of the most beloved Maltese carols as the pope played it on the piano.”

Xuereb understands why people might have seen the former pontiff as unsympathetic and withdrawn compared to his predecessor and successor but says he sometimes seemed that way only because he was a very timid person.

“It’s not that he wasn’t as nice as the other two. On the contrary, he was so gentle, sensible and such a kind soul,” he said.

“When I had undergone a hernia surgery, I was stiff for some days. One morning we were watching the news and I tried to slowly stand up from my armchair, because the surgery still hurt. When he saw me struggling, he leapt from his chair and came to lift me up.

“It was my job to assist him  but for that brief period of time he assisted me.”

The greatest lesson the Gozitan priest learnt from Benedict was gratitude.

“We would be helping him wear garments for mass, for instance. There are quite a few of those, but every single time we handed him something, he would say ‘thank you’. Every single time,” he said.

“He didn’t need to because he was the pope. But he would do it anyway. And the same with everything else we did around the apartment. He was so gentle and extraordinarily grateful.”

Part of Xuereb’s job was to inform the pope of prayer intentions. People from all around the world would send in letters to the pope, asking him to pray for them before going in for surgery, for instance. Xuereb would place them inside a drawer in the pope’s kneeler and Benedict would go through them every day during his afternoon prayers.

“One day I noticed he was keeping all the letters, going back to them every few days to continue praying for those people.

“And when those people were from Malta, he would ask me if I knew them. He would come to me a couple of days later and say, ‘how did that surgery go? Did you hear anything?’ That’s how thoughtful he was.”

A day in the life of Benedict

A regular day with the pope would start at 7am, when both secretaries would go to wait for him in a chapel within their residence. Benedict would arrive shortly afterwards, and after a moment of private prayer, they would help him get dressed for mass.

When the pope was not scheduled to celebrate mass at the Vatican or in front of crowds, he would say mass in this chapel every day. It was a 25-minute private mass for his secretaries, and sometimes, a few housekeeping and kitchen staff.

After mass they would go for breakfast, which would normally be bread, butter and jam, and coffee or tea with lemon.

“It was that simple. And it took me a while to get used to the bread because it was a German recipe that I didn’t like that much,” Xuereb recalled.

After breakfast they would do office work. Xuereb and the other secretary would go through correspondence, ask him to sign documents or hand him speeches he was scheduled to deliver later.

At 11am he would go down one floor to greet guests and meet with dignitaries and heads of state and return for lunch at 1pm.

“Benedict would sit at the head of the table, I would sit at his left and Georg at his right,” Xuereb said.

“And he would tell us about the people he had just met and all their interesting stories from all around the world.”

Following an afternoon siesta, the three would say the rosary in the garden and then head back to office work until 7.30pm. After dinner, it was generally free time.

The shocking announcement... and the crying

On February 11, 2013, Benedict XVI shocked the world when he announced he would be resigning because he no longer had the mental and physical strength to run the church, becoming the first pontiff to quit in six centuries.

He informed Xuereb of his intentions two weeks before the public announcement.

“He asked me inside his office. It was just the two of us. He said that after great thought and a lot of prayer, he decided to abdicate. My first reaction was to talk him out of it, to encourage him to think about it, but I knew that he had probably already given such a mammoth decision a lot of thought,” Xuereb recalled.

“Then I remembered that lately, I had noticed him spending a little longer in private prayer before the morning mass. I had always thought he was taking some time to pray for someone, but I now realised he was probably praying about this big decision.”

Pope Benedict XVI left the Vatican one last time on February 28, 2013, and flew to the Vatican’s summer residence in Castel Gandolfo in a helicopter at around 4.30pm.

Xuereb was in that helicopter with him, crying non-stop.

Xuereb and Gänswein continued to serve as personal secretaries to the pope until he resigned. But Gänswein continued to accompany Benedict even in his retirement, till the 95-year-old died on Saturday.

Xuereb left his role with Benedict three days after the election of the new pope, when he was asked to serve as personal secretary to Pope Francis.

“Before leaving him to go join the new pope I remember going into his office, kneeling in front of him and crying,” Xuereb recalled.

After a few years with Pope Francis, Xuereb was eventually appointed archbishop and apostolic nuncio to South Korea and Mongolia in 2018, where he still lives and works.

Xuereb last visited his old boss and mentor in September. Ratzinger was seemingly frail but the two shared experiences and reminisced about the past.

“We lost a man from whom I learnt a lot and who shared with me an uncommon, special fatherhood.”