Summary
Title: Pilgrim Fellowship Of Faith: The Church As Communion
Author: Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI)
Publisher: Ignatius Press
ISBN: 0898709636
Pro:
• Contains material difficult to find elsewhere, at least in English
• Representative sampling of Ratzinger’s views on many subjects
Con:
• Much of the material is very academic in nature, not for the casual reader
Description:
• Collection of material from Joseph Ratzinger on the occasion of this 75th birthday
• Gathered together by former students as representative of his opinions and writings
Book Review
Given the large amount of his published material, it’s not obvious where one should start if one wants to read some of his works. One candidate may be Pilgrim Fellowship Of Faith: The Church As Communion, a collection of speeches, essays, and other writings collected by his former students. These students, themselves now theologians, clerics, and scholars in their own right, collected this material on the occasion of Ratzinger’s 75th birthday in the hopes that it would best represent his thinking on various issues.
There are pieces where Ratzinger gives detailed explanations for the nature of faith and theology, analyses of Saint Augustine’s writings, explanations of communion and the Eucharist, and descriptions of the nature of ministry, priesthood, and church movements. Particularly interesting to readers may be Ratzinger’s letters with an Orthodox Metropolitan and Lutheran Bishop on ecumenical issues.
One advantage which this volume has is that it provides documents — for example, lectures, conference presentations, and letters — which are not otherwise readily available (especially to an English-speaking audience). Over the course of relatively short pieces, Raztinger’s methods of thinking and reasoning are demonstrated.
At the same time, though, most of what is in this volume was originally designed more for relatively educated audiences — people already well-versed in philosophy and theology. It is thus measurably more complex and difficult than, for example, the material which can be found in the book-length interviews done with him. Those three volumes present some of the same material in a much more conversational tone and manner.
Thus, this particular book probably isn’t well suited for complete beginners when it comes to Ratzinger’s ideas and Catholic theology. It would, however, probably be very good for anyone with some familiarity with those subjects and who wants to delve a bit more deeply into them — probably a good idea for those concerned with the future direction of the Catholic Church. Now that he is Pope Benedict XVI, his ideas matter even more than they did when he was merely Prefect for the Congregation of Doctrine and Faith.
