"God could indeed raise up among us great saints, men and women [indeed from Germany and from it's universities], who would set an example to their age of supernatural life actually lived, and, at the same time, by their personal sacrifice, mystically effect, as it were, a vicarious redemption from the tremendous load of universal guilt, whose weight prevents our contemporaries from ascending to a higher level of spiritual existence."
--Peter Wust, "Crisis in the West" in Essays in Order, editor Christopher Dawson. Macmillan Company: New York, 1931, p. 143.
Consider in this regard
Blessed Mother Teresa! (God raises up saints from the most humble origins and chooses to do the materially most impossible actions, completely bereft of worldly [even Ecclesial] power, to show first of all that the work is His action, through his saints, in history!)
Pope Saint John Paul II! (Expert in German philosophy! and himself a staunch promoter of the sciences and of God).
Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI! (The perfect fulfillment of this prophesy, who certainly must have read and been motivated by these lines during his first years in major seminary, Peter Wust being one of the philosophers he most read and devoured in those years of intellectual hunger).
--Cf. Milestones, p. 43
"...[F]or humanity there is not only a degrading solidarity of fate and guilt, but a solidarity of goodness also, and that whenever a human being in silent self-dedication devotes his life wholly to God, the general level of personal conduct around him immediately begins to rise, whether or no we are conscious of it." --Essays in Order, p. 144.
That sounds so reminiscent of the parting words or our Emeritus Pope: that he is not fleeing, but rather embracing, the cross, according to the will of Christ.
Ten years ago he was elected to that titanic papacy which the world did not deserve!
"Make yourself a Christian: completely Christian. Then look around you, and perform the work that has been given you, according to your capacity. But wait in patience. For it is only the sowing that is your business. Leave, with childlike trust, the gathering of the harvest to the generations that God has called to that magnificent work." Ibid., p. 152.