“I live like a monk and I’m fine. I pray and I read,” Emeritus Pope Benedict XVI has told a German friend who visited him recently at his new residence in the Mater Ecclesiae monastery in Vatican City.
Manfred Lutz, a German scholar who is a member of the Pontifical Council for the Laity and the Pontifical Academy for Life, said he found the retired pontiff “physically weaker and a bit more stooped” than a few months earlier, but still mentally alert and cheerful.
He also said he thoroughly agrees with the theological statements of Pope Francis.