Jeffro : There’s no evidence that the lady’s story is actually true. There is no verified record of the phone call, no transcript of the conversation, no established relationship between the two people, it’s just a story a lady told.
Another interview was reported by Andrea Tornielli in Il Giornale of July 17, 2008. There he wrote (in translation) :
"The Pope, in the only phone call he made to me, a few weeks after his election, said: 'for you I will always be Ratzinger-Pepi...' ".
Steffie Brzakovic is a smiling eighty-one-year-old lady of German origins, who left Germany more than half a century ago and moved to Australia, where she lives. Steffie is a second cousin of Benedict XVI, her childhood playmate, and for over thirty years she has left the Catholic religion, that faith of which her illustrious cousin was first a rigorous guardian in the former Holy Office, and then became the world leader.
Mrs. Brzakovic, since the beginning of the seventies, has in fact embraced the beliefs of Jehovah's Witnesses, becoming an assiduous follower. She lives at number 5 Crisp Street, in Cooma, a town not far from Canberra, developed in the mid-nineteenth century thanks to the nearby gold deposits, which today has about eight thousand inhabitants. It is not easy to convince her to talk about her famous cousin, who in these days is so close to her home and not, as usual, on the other side of the globe. Steffie gave the only interview in August 2005, shortly after Ratzinger's election, to the local newspaper Canberra Times, but she almost seems to have regretted it.
"Yes," she confirms, a little hesitant and surprised to have been contacted by Il Giornale, "I am the Pope's cousin... “. We ask her if a face-to-face meeting with Benedict XVI is planned in these days. "So far no, no one has called me, no one has invited me. I was supposed to come to Sydney, to meet him, but I can't move from Cooma, I'm not able to drive, I'm old."
Mrs. Brzakovic explains her family ties with the pontiff: "My mother Katherine was a cousin of Joseph's mother, Maria Peintner. My family lived in Weilheim in Oberbayern, about fifty kilometers from the town where the Ratzingers lived. We used to hang out... “.
May I ask you what Benedict XVI was like as a child? "He was always where he shouldn't be... If I think about it today, it is a miracle that we are still alive," she adds, alluding to the liveliness of little Joseph, who one day, in Aschau am Inn, the town where the Ratzingers had moved in 1932 after leaving Tittmoning, one day fell into the pond where large carp were swimming.
An episode that the pontiff himself recalls in his autobiography, published in 1997: "Once, while I was playing, I was there to drown."
Steffie left Germany back in 1956, when Fr. Joseph was still a young priest professor. And she moved to Australia. For fifty years their relationship was interrupted, he knew he had a cousin at the antipodes, she knew she had a cousin and former playmate who became a priest and then archbishop and cardinal. Then, in April 2005, when both were 78 years old, Ratzinger's life took an abrupt turn and the elderly Bavarian cardinal was elected successor to John Paul II. A few days passed, and the phone from Brzakovic's house in Cooma rang for an international call, which came from Vatican City. On the other end of the phone is him, Benedict XVI. "At first I thought it was a joke. He told me he was 'Ratzinger-Pepi', using the nickname they called him as a child."
Finally Steffie realizes that it is not a joke and that she is talking on the phone with him. "I said to him: 'Are you the Pope?' And he replied: 'Yes, but for you I am still Ratzinger-Pepi'".
It is not easy to get a few more details about that phone call. "What we talked about - is a private matter, it concerns me and him, it concerns two cousins who had not spoken for fifty years... “. And yet, with Benedict XVI, Mrs. Brzakovic also spoke of the faith embraced a few decades earlier, that of the Jehovah's Witnesses. A choice that caused many problems and frustrations to the woman, who had to face a lot of opposition from her family.
The Pope, however, did not reproach her, as the woman had already revealed to the Canberra Times three years ago: "He told me: 'You are doing the work we should do'", referring to the missionary activity of Jehovah's Witnesses, who go from house to house to meet people. "He also told me: 'You have halls that are not so big, but they are full, we have cathedrals, churches and chapels, but they are often empty.'"
The conversation ends, but in the gaze and voice of the Pope's cousin one can grasp an expectation. She has not yet lost hope that Pope Benedict will make a phone call from Sydney and perhaps arrange to pick her up to meet her.