He grew up just across the border from Salzburg. Joseph Ratzinger spent his school years in Traunstein, about 30 km away, and his family had roots in Tittmoning on the Salzach. He never held the Salzburg professorship sometimes attributed to him, but he kept a lifelong tie to the city through the European Academy of Sciences and Arts before becoming the first German pope in five centuries.
The Story
Ratzinger was born in Marktl am Inn in Bavaria, on the river Inn, on Holy Saturday 1927. The family later lived in Tittmoning, directly on the Salzach, the same river that runs through Salzburg, and he spent his school years in Traunstein, about 30 kilometres from the city.
Contrary to a claim that has sometimes circulated, Ratzinger never held a chair at the University of Salzburg. He completed his habilitation in 1957 and took his first university professorship at Bonn in 1959, followed by Münster, Tübingen, and Regensburg. Shaped by Bavarian Catholicism and the experience of growing up under National Socialism, he became a man who would spend the next five decades arguing that Catholic doctrine and European reason were inseparable.
In 1991 he joined the European Academy of Sciences and Arts, which has its headquarters in Salzburg. The membership lasted through his papacy and reflected his belief that faith and secular intellectual life needed to engage each other rather than retreat into separate territories.
He was elected Pope Benedict XVI in April 2005, the first German pope since Adrian VI in 1522. In February 2013 he resigned the papacy, the first pope since Celestine V in 1294 to do so freely. He died in the Vatican on 31 December 2022.
Salzburg Cathedral holds the oldest and deepest institutional memory of Salzburg's Catholic identity, built by the archbishops whose Counter-Reformation project shaped the tradition Ratzinger studied. Through the Academy and his upbringing in the borderland just across the river, one of the 20th century's most consequential theological minds stayed tied to the region where that tradition took visible stone form.
