I am writing this column Monday evening, Feb. 11, after a day responding to questions about the Holy Father. Like everyone else, I woke up to the news that the pope had resigned the office of the papacy, effective on the last day of February. Last week I was in Rome for several meetings. The pope received a group of us who were attending the Plenary Session of the Pontifical Council for Culture. Greeting him at the end of the meeting, I responded to his questions about my health. I did not have the presence of mind to ask him about his! We promised to pray for each other. My prayers for him now take on new intensity. He made his decision to resign the papacy out of love for the church, after coming to the conclusion that he no longer had the physical strength to fulfill all the tasks of his office. Throughout his life, Joseph Ratzinger has been an obedient man, a man whose faith in God has enabled him to give himself entirely to every task to which the church has called him. He is obeying now what God is telling him through the weakness of his own body. His eight years as pope have enriched the church with a body of teaching focused always on Christ, who gave himself up for the world’s salvation out of love for his Father and for the world. In Christ, we worship the Father in truth and love. The pope’s concern for right worship has been constant in his teaching, because in worship we come face to face with God. If our relationship to God is correct, if we do not put ourselves in God’s place, then all our other relationships fall into place: with the world, with the human race, with ourselves. This is the central theme of the Second Vatican Council, whose implementation has been at the heart of his papacy as it was at the heart of his predecessor’s. The heart of our relationship to God is love, for God is love. Those who dismiss God and try to forget him, often end up loving the wrong things. Benedict XVI’s teaching has been marked by the way he relates all of doctrine and all of morals to love. Justice cannot be separated from love; nor can faith be separated from love, as he teaches in this year’s message for Lent. Morality cannot be separated from love and the sacrifices it demands. The economic question cannot be answered apart from the gratuity or generosity that is a sign of love. The pope’s writings, on Christ and on the self-sacrificing love Christ brought back to a world that was created good and delightful before the Fall, are a symphonic masterpiece that will inspire the faithful for generations to come. The pope’s pastoral heart has been evident in his meetings with the victims of sexual abuse, in his concern for the safety of Christians persecuted for their faith, in his sacrifice of his own health in order to journey around the world to encourage peacemakers and hand on the faith. Again and again, the pope has spoken about the joy that permeates the heart of a believer who, in good times and bad, lives in intimate union with Christ. Benedict XVI is as good as he is smart. There are a billion, 300 million Catholics in the world, of whom about 70 million live in the United States. The pope, like his predecessors and his successors, is universal pastor, responding to the cry of the poor around the world and to the challenges to faith in every place. Our media, and we ourselves, often think of the world as if everyone shared the concerns that are ours in this country. It will be good to keep a sense of Catholicism as a global religion firmly in mind in the weeks to come as some try to analyze the papacy and the church in terms too narrow for a universal faith. The pope’s personal patron is St. Joseph, who loved and guarded Jesus and his mother and who is therefore patron of the Universal Church. I imagine the pope is praying to St. Joseph to protect the church and the bishop who will be the next successor of St. Peter. As Pope Benedict XVI relinquishes the public life that was both a cross and a joy for him, he will be in the prayers of Catholics and other Christians throughout the world. May the Lord take good care of him, as he has taken good care of us.