Benedict Channels the Fathers

Our publisher, Father Owen Kearns, and I once had a conversation about the difficulty of writing headlines to Benedict stories. Something about the way Benedict writes and speaks is extraordinary. But it's a subtle thing. He speaks of Christian mysteries in  a straightforward way that seems very ordinary. But his insights are penetrating and deep.

He will say something like: "Christianity is friendship with Jesus," then give that phrase a depth and breadth that you never noticed was there, and you'll read it and grasp something new for the first time. But then you slap a headline on it like "Christianity is friendship with Jesus," and it looks like a We Gather workbook chapter head.

In an interview with the Catholic organization “Early Christians,” Giovanni Maria Vian, editor of L’Osservatore Romano, got at this problem a little bit in discussing Benedict's audiences about the Christian Fathers:

Benedict is “so imbued with Christian tradition that he does not need to include many quotes; rather, he himself is so immersed that he speaks as a Father of the Church, what he says is understood, even though they are profound discourses. It is a way of drawing close to the Christian experience in a very lofty but understandable way.”

That's a nice way of putting it.

-- Tom Hoopes