Aid to the Church in Need held a Requiem Mass for Benedict XVI last Monday at the Church of the Immaculate Conception, Farm Street.
The director of ACN UK, Dr Caroline Hull, said the Mass was offered “in appreciation of a humble and holy shepherd whose vision of charity articulated the principles which guide ACN”.
Fr Dominic Robinson SJ, parish priest of Farm Street and chaplain to ACN UK, gave the homily, in which he said that the death of the Pope Emeritus marked “an end of an era both for the Catholic Church and for the history of Christian thought”.
“We cannot understand the contemporary history of the Church and our place in it without reference to Joseph Ratzinger and to Benedict XVI,” he said.
Fr Robinson reflected on the late Pope Emeritus’s particular concern for persecuted Christians, and their place in his theology.
“Benedict locates the love of Christ for us in a particular place,” he said, “and it is a place that the persecuted Church knows well.”
Dr Hull continued this theme in an address at the end of the Mass, referring to the then-Cardinal Ratzinger’s 2002 statement that he supported ACN “because I know it is really doing a service of faith”.
His statement continued: “Many think that you can only support social work in the narrow sense of the word, that you should leave it up to each person what they believe.
“But in reality, nothing is more important than bringing God to people, helping them to find Christ, because only then do the powers of faith awaken, which are the decisive form of energy for world history.”
ACN owes its status as a pontifical foundation to the decision of Benedict XVI to raise it to the status in 2011.
The Requiem Mass used the same readings as the funeral of the late Pope Emeritus in Rome on 5 January.
The hymns included Praise to the Holiest from The Dream of Gerontius by John Henry Newman, who Benedict beatified on his 2010 visit to the UK.
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