“Pepi on
the Telephone”: How a Charming Anecdote Became the Internet’s Favourite Proof that a Pope
Secretly Admired Jehovah’s
Witnesses—and Why the Facts Say Otherwise
In mid‑July 2005, just three months after
Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger emerged from the Sistine Chapel as Pope Benedict XVI, The Canberra Times ran a heart‑warming provincial story under the
headline:
Pope
Remembers Steffie – “But he’s still just a naughty boy to me,” says Cooma
cousin.
The
protagonist was Stefanie Brzakovic, a seventy‑eight‑year‑old Jehovah’s Witness
living in the Snowy‑Mountains town of Cooma, New South Wales. According to
journalist Markus Mannheim, Benedict—whom she called
“Ratzinger Pepi,” his supposed childhood nickname—had phoned her from the Vatican to reminisce about games they played as
children in Bavaria. More startling still, the Pope allegedly praised Witness
evangelism with words tailor‑made for a Kingdom‑Hall platform:
“You are
doing the work we should be doing. Your halls are small but full; our
cathedrals are great and empty.”
Within
hours the article appeared on this discussion board, igniting twenty‑plus
replies that ranged from delighted ( “So encouraging—spiritual goose‑bumps!”)
to exasperated (“Great, now my parents will quote this for weeks”). Two decades
on, the anecdote still circulates—often as irrefutable evidence that “even the
Pope admitted Jehovah’s Witnesses are right.”
Look past
the sentimental glow, however, and the story collapses on four independent
lines of evidence: genealogy, geography, linguistics, and documentary silence.
1 | Genealogy:
the paper trail that isn’t there
Benedict XVI’s maternal ancestry is unusually well documented. Parish registers show
a tight chain of Bavarian and South‑Tyrolean families:
- Maria Peintner Rieger (1884 – 1963) – the Pope’s mother
- Isidor Rieger (1860 – 1912) – her father, an only child
- Earlier generations: Reiss,
Tauber, Peintner and Rieger stretching back to the 1780s
Every
baptism, marriage and burial is accounted for, and no branch ever wanders into
the surnames Berger or Bartl.
Stefanie Brzakovic’s line, by contrast, begins with her mother Katharina Berger (baptised 20 August 1894 in Garmisch). Church ledgers
newly consulted in 2025 identify Katharina’s parents—Stefanie’s maternal grandparents—as Johann Berger and Barbara Bartl of nearby Farchant. That is as far as the
documentary trail goes, but it is far enough: the Berger/Bartl pairing appears
nowhere in the Ratzinger tree, and because Isidor Rieger had no siblings, there is no
collateral line through which Stefanie could be even a second cousin. The
relationship is genealogically impossible.
2 | Geography:
the miles that refuse to shrink
Stefanie
told the Canberra Times that
the Ratzingers lived “about fifty kilometres away” and “often came over to
play” in Weilheim. In reality:
- The Ratzingers’ 1930s
addresses—Tittmoning, Aschau am Inn, and Hufschlag near Traunstein—hug
the south‑eastern fringe of Bavaria.
- Weilheim, where Stefanie spent her
school years, lies west of Munich, nearly 100 kilometres from Traunstein by pre‑war
roads.
For rural
families of modest means, that was not an afternoon hop; it was a full‑day
journey involving two rail connections or a slow bus. No parish roll, market
roster or school register shows the two clans sharing a district at the same
time.
3 | Linguistics:
the nickname that rings false
Anyone
raised in Upper Bavaria will tell you that little Josephs are Sepp or,
at most, Seperrl. Pepi is an Austrian‑Viennese diminutive,
popular in Vienna but odd across the Inn River. Benedict’s authenticated cousin
Erika Kopper,
interviewed repeatedly in German media, always referred to the Pope as “Sepp.”
That Stefanie’s memory produced the sole Austrian variant tips the story toward
embellishment.
4 | Déjà‑vu
dialogue: Watchtower folklore repackaged
The pièce
de résistance—“You are doing the work we should be doing”—is not new. It
appears verbatim in long‑running Witness folklore:
- Watchtower, 15 June 1993: A Pentecostal pastor
confesses identical envy.
- Awake!, 8 February 1982 (recycled in Watchtower
1 Jan 1997): A minister says, “We have Holy Spirit, but you
people do the work.”
Veteran
Witnesses recognise the pattern: respected clergyman privately concedes the
superiority of house‑to‑house preaching. Stefanie’s account slots so neatly
into that template that coincidence is improbable.
5 | The
silence that speaks loudest
Had a
reigning Pope praised Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Catholic press would have
scrambled to clarify, the Witness press would have trumpeted it, and Vatican
archivists would still guard an entry in the Papal Protocol. None of these
things happened. The Watchtower—normally eager to publish even tepid
compliments from clergy—never printed a line. The Holy See never acknowledged a
call, invitation, or audience. The story survives only where fact‑checking
never reaches: personal email chains, convention corridor whispers, and long‑forgotten
message boards.
Why the
legend persists
For many
Witnesses the anecdote is irresistible: it flatters a minority community often
caricatured as marginal by suggesting that even the world’s most prominent
cleric secretly agrees with them. Because the organisation never endorsed the
claim in print, it can circulate indefinitely with no institutional liability.
It is the perfect “whisper story”: inspiring if believed, harmless if
disproved, and—thanks to half‑remembered forum posts—strangely immortal.
Verdict
Every
verifiable strand—ancestry, distance, dialect, publication history—contradicts
Stefanie Brzakovic’s charming recollection. What
remains is a single, uncorroborated reminiscence whose dialogue mirrors decades‑old
Watchtower tropes and whose geography folds under a road map. Far from
demonstrating papal admiration, the saga of “Ratzinger Pepi” illustrates how easily religious
communities generate legends that confirm the truths they already wish to hear—and how durable those legends become once
emotion outruns evidence.
