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The early life of Pope Benedict XVI concerns the period from his birth in 1927 through the completion of his education and ordination in 1951. ==Background and childhood (1927–1943)== Joseph Alois Ratzinger was born on 16 April (Holy Saturday) 1927 at 11 Schulstrasse, his parents' home in Marktl am Inn, Bavaria and baptised on the same day. He was the third and youngest child of Joseph Ratzinger, Sr., a police officer, and his wife, Maria (née Peintner), whose family were from South Tyrol. His father served in both the Bavarian State Police (''Landespolizei'') and the German national Regular Police (Ordnungspolizei) before retiring in 1937 to the town of Traunstein. The ''Sunday Times'' described the older Ratzinger as "an anti-Nazi whose attempts to rein in Hitler's Brown Shirts forced the family to move several times." According to the ''International Herald Tribune'', these relocations were directly related to Joseph Ratzinger, Sr.'s continued resistance to Nazism, which resulted in demotions and transfers. The pope's brother Georg said: "Our father was a bitter enemy of Nazism because he believed it was in conflict with our faith". The family encountered the Nazi regime's euthanasia program for the handicapped. John Allen, a Ratzinger biographer, reports a revelation made by Cardinal Ratzinger at a conference in the Vatican on 28 November 1996: "Ratzinger had a cousin with Down's Syndrome who in 1941 was 14 years old. This cousin was just a few months younger than Ratzinger and was taken away by the Nazi authorities for "therapy". Not long afterwards, the family received word that he was dead, presumably one of the 'undesirables' eliminated during that time." His elder brother, Georg (born 1924) also became a priest. Their sister, Maria, managed Joseph's household until her death in 1991, fulfilling a promise she made to their parents to take care of her brothers. She never married.〔Wolfgang Beinert, ("Pope's friends say fame has not changed Joseph Ratzinger" ), Regensburg, Germany, 12 September 2006.〕 Their great uncle Georg Ratzinger was a priest and member of the Reichstag, as the German Parliament was then called. According to his cousin Erika Kopper, Ratzinger had no desire from childhood to be anything other than a priest. At the age of 15, she says, he announced that he was going to be a bishop, whereupon she playfully remarked: "And why not Pope?". An even earlier incident occurred in 1932, when Michael Cardinal von Faulhaber, Archbishop of Munich, visited the small town in which the Ratzinger family lived, arriving in a black limousine. The future pope, then five years old, was part of a group of children who presented the cardinal with flowers, and later that day Ratzinger announced he wanted to be a cardinal, too. "It wasn't so much the car, since we weren't technically minded", Georg Ratzinger told a reporter from the ''New York Times''. "It was the way the cardinal looked, his bearing, and the knickerbockers he was wearing that made such an impression on him." In 1939, aged 12, he enrolled in a minor seminary in Traunstein.〔''Cardinal Ratzinger: the Vatican's enforcer of the faith''. John L. Allen, 2000. p. 14〕 This period lasted until the seminary was closed for military use in 1942, and the students were all sent home. Ratzinger returned to the Gymnasium in Traunstein.〔''Cardinal Ratzinger: the Vatican's enforcer of the faith''. John L. Allen, 2000. p. 15〕 During this period in the seminary, following his 14th birthday in 1941, Ratzinger was enrolled in the Hitler Youth, as membership was legally required in effect beginning 25 March 1939. Following the seminary closure he continued required attendance with the Hitler Youth to avoid financial penalties in the Gymnasium tuition fees. The financial penalty (which theoretically required documentation of attendance at Hitler Youth activities) was overlooked when a sympathetic mathematics professor allowed him not to attend any meetings. In Ratzinger's book ''Salt of the Earth'', Ratzinger says the following "... Thank goodness, there was a very understanding mathematics teacher. He himself was a Nazi but an honest man, who said to me, 'Just go once and get the document so that we have it' ... When he saw that I simply didn't want to, he said, 'I understand, I'll take care of it', and so I was able to stay free of it." After Joseph Ratzinger was elected pontiff in 2005, following the death of Pope John Paul II, a neighbor from Traunstein, Elizabeth Lohner, then 84 years old,was quoted in the 17 April 2005 edition of ''The Times'' ("Papal hopeful is a former Hitler Youth"), asserting that "()t was possible to resist, and those people set an example for others. The Ratzingers were young and had made a different choice." Lohner's brother-in-law was a conscientious objector who spent two years at Dachau for his beliefs.〔(Profile of Joseph Ratzinger in ''The Age'' (online) )〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Early life of Pope Benedict XVI」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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