Thirty of the homilies date from Benedict’s pontificate while around 100 more are from his retirement, said a statement from the publisher, the Joseph Ratzinger Foundation and the Vatican’s communications office. The Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano, in conjunction with Germany’s Welt am Sonntag, published the first of the homilies on Saturday. It is a meditation on the figure of Joseph that Benedict delivered on December 22, 2013, just a few months after he became the first pope in 600 years to resign. Federico Lombardi, who heads the Ratzinger Foundation, is curating the collection. Organisers of the project said the homilies do not contain any news or theological novelties, but rather are of “substantial spiritual nutrition”.

Source: The Times December 23, 2023 15:40 UTC