Pilgrim Fellowship of Faith, by (then) Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI)
I was going to go through a lot of other things I have on my bookshelf before I reviewed this book; I'm not even done with it yet, being only about 2/3rds of the way through. I have all my Bibles, devotional prayer books, works of church history, books by saints, and the half dozen or so books on the topic of exorcism that I still have to review. But I'm home sick from work today with a miserable head cold, and am taking the opportunity to do a rebuild of my computer operating system from the disk partitions up. As I do that, I am taking far too much Robitussin, and am reading Pilgrim Fellowship of Faith, by the incomparable Joseph Ratzinger.
Popular culture would portray the Pope as simply an old white patriarch out of touch with the world, or as the infamous Nation of Islam mouthpiece, Khallid Abdul Muhammad, so eloquently phrased it, "an old cracker in a dress."
I have an RSS feed that links to news stories and blog posts with the keywords "Pope Benedict XVI", and I can tell you, for the occasional interesting news story about him I encounter, there are two dozen stories or posts dismissing him in language that an eighth grader might feel bold about using about his school principal, and formed with a similar degree of insight. To dismiss the Pope out of hand is to claim a level of erudition and education that is above his; I can tell you from having read a few of the man's works, that he is not someone you can simply dismiss. He is better read, more knowledgeable, and fairer to his opponents than are any of his juvenile critics.
I have said it before, but I will say it again -- there is a reason he became Pope. And as I read Pilgrim Fellowship of Faith, I can tell you that part of the reason is that his work needed broader attention. His theology is broad enough and deep enough to bridge the differences between the Vatican II reformers and the traditionalists, while maintaining continuity with the Doctors and Fathers of the Church, and most of all, with Scripture. His writing is elegant in the sense that he can illustrate his arguments with the appropriate quotation; but that elegance is deceptive, because he is not merely clever -- one senses that he chooses his sources not out of convenience, but because he has considered many, many sources and avenues of attack, and has chosen the one that is most apt, direct, and deadly. There is a vast amount of learning and reading behind Joseph Ratzinger's arguments; he is a great teacher of theology, but one senses he was a truly masterful student.
In Pilgrim Fellowship, which is a collection of short works some of his students collected to be published on the occasion of his seventy-fifth birthday in 2002, he considers a number of different topics -- he discusses the nature and purpose of Theology, the Holy Spirit as Communion, the Eucharist, the ministry of the Priesthood, church movements and the Apostolic mission they contain, a press conference discussing the encyclical Dominus Iesus, a series of letters with the Orthodox metropolitan, ecumenism, relations with the Jews and Church guilt, and some meditations on the Church's third millenium. It is a breadth of topics that is daunting in its scope, and though, as always, one senses he is pressed for time, he considers each topic thoughtfully, bringing to bear the vast library of his knowledge.
Pope Benedict is truly a unique figure on the world stage. To read him is to see the Church through his eyes, and what one sees is something truly remarkable indeed. To wrestle with his arguments will leave any reader a better educated person.