He found the man, who was in his mid-thirties at the time, to be an uncomplicated person. He was someone who first went home to Wurzerstraße to have breakfast with his sister after Mass. In addition to his academic duties, Ratzinger also preached selflessly at other services when there was a need, and once immediately anointed the sick of someone who had collapsed in church, the ex-chaplain told the GA in 2005. Interested in music, Ratzinger never missed a performance of the church choir in the Godesberg Bendel. Vetter had been sexton, organist and choirmaster in one and the same person and later even travelled to Rome with his singers to serenade Ratzinger, who had become a Cardinal of the Curia. He was very happy about it, said Vetter.

"Ratzinger never let the professor hang out, even in Godesberg," churchgoer Elisabeth Binnen also told the GA in 2005. Even though people around St Augustine's were already very proud of the "celebrity" at that time. "Such an educated man, who spoke in a sophisticated way, that was an honour for us," she recalled of the masses. "Funnily enough", she said, Ratzinger, who seemed so ascetic and smiled so finely, had made friends at the time with the typical Rhenish Subsidiar Matthias Wolber, who used to patter down on his congregation from the pulpit. Ratzinger had even come to Bad Godesberg from Rome in 1989 for Wolber's 40th anniversary as a priest, Binnen said. They dined in the town hall and celebrated mass in St Servatius and St Augustine.

At that time, the influential man from Rome, who was known to be conservative, was denied the changes that had taken place in the parish in the meantime, a contemporary witness, who did not want to be named, told the GA in 2005. In the Friesdorf altar server team, the girls were sorted out again without further ado for the Cardinal and older boys were reactivated instead.

Former Godesberg dean Helmut Powalla, who died in 2013, got to know the future Pope from a completely different perspective: Powalla had once studied under Ratzinger in Bonn and taken his exams with him. "Fantastic lectures" were given by the professor, who was rather shy as a person, Powalla told the GA in 2005. "His theological reflections were daily bread for us". Klaus Brüssermann, who has also died in the meantime and was a pastor at St. Marien for many years, had also been a Ratzinger student in Bonn from 1959. This professor had given excellent lectures, both in terms of language and content. At the same time, the theologian had somehow still seemed boyishly likeable. Without beating about the bush, but not without humour, Ratzinger always got to the point. And yet the seminars, like the books later on, always breathed faith, says Brüssermann. "Ratzinger always had a full house". Moreover, the professor had mastered the art of turning the exam into a "wonderful conversation". "Joseph Ratzinger was a great enrichment for my life," Brüssermann enthused in a GA interview in 2005.

Members of the senior citizens' group at St Augustine's also saw it that way, who fondly remembered the professor's Godesberg years in 2005 on the occasion of the election of the Pope. During his years in Godesberg and later in Rome, Ratzinger was not too fond of "Freesdörper" kettle cakes, the "Knüles", confirms a cookbook published in St. Servatius in 1986. "Knüles" is the "little man's St. Martin's goose": made from a bucket of grated potatoes, soaked bread rolls and a lot of sugar and sultanas. Joseph Ratzinger, in the meantime in whatever capacity, was happy to help himself.

Ratzinger also had personal ties to the Bonn pastor Alfons Adelkamp. "It hurts my heart that Pope Benedict XVI is leaving," Adelkamp told GA in 2013, when Benedict resigned from office for health reasons. "I studied with him for a year in Regensburg," the pastor of St Mary Magdalene and Christ's Resurrection parish explained nine years ago.