Speaking of the Pope…

…and his writings (post below), look back at the topic of his first encyclical, a very major publication for a pope. Especially huge when it’s a pope’s first one. This brilliant theologian and masterful writer chose as his topic “God is Love.” If you didn’t read it, well…do what Franz Beckenbauer did (post below). See how riveting and revealing Benedict’s discourse is, about the most basic three-word tenet of faith (Deus Caritas Est).

And then look at what Benedict chose as the topic of another major publication, his upcoming book: Jesus.

His book about Jesus was announced at the end of November, and will be on sale next spring. But a week does not go by without Benedict XVI preaching about the book’s protagonist: Jesus “true God and true man.”

Sandro notes that Benedict brought it up in his audience January 3.

“This is the drama of the rejection of Christ, which, as in the past, is unfortunately manifested and expressed today in many different ways. It may be that today’s forms of the rejection of God are even more subtle and dangerous than in the past: from explicit rejection to indifference, from scientistic atheism to the presentation of a so-called ‘modernized’ or ‘postmodernized’ Jesus. This is Jesus as a man, reduced in various ways to a mere man of his time, deprived of his divinity, or a Jesus so idealized as to seem sometimes a character in a fairy tale.”

To this false Jesus, the pope has opposed the “true Jesus of history”: that Jesus who is “true God and true man, and does not weary of offering his Gospel to all.” Before him, “one cannot remain indifferent…”

Benedict is probably getting fed up with all the pop theology in the entertainment culture that has circulated widely publicized, false theories about Jesus.

Good. He’s just the person to respond to them, with authority.

The either-or choice that Benedict XVI presents between the false and the true Jesus is, therefore, the same one that he sees being played out in the books that reduce Jesus to a mere man, and the ones that instead present him in his human-divine reality.

Among today’s books displaying the “power of darkness,” the pope has one especially in mind, a book that has sold half a million copies in Italy in just a few months, entitled: “Inchiesta su Gesù. Chi era l’uomo che ha cambiato il mondo [The Jesus Inquest: Revealing the Man Who Changed the World].”

The authors of the book are the agnostic Corrado Augias, a journalist, writer, and editorialist for the major liberal newspaper “la Repubblica,” and the Catholic Mauro Pesce, a professor of Church history at the University of Bologna who specializes in ancient Christian documents.

The thesis of this book is that “everything that the Christian faith professes about Jesus is false.”

That’s enough to trigger a new evangelization effort right there. Forget about “Da Vinci Code” and other neo-gnostic materials. Please.

So although Benedict XVI hasn’t yet explicitly cited the book by Augias and Pesce, these two authoritative reviews are sufficient to conclude that in the Vatican this is held to be the latest and most representative text of that attack against the Christian faith which for more than two centuries has taken Jesus as its target.

The upcoming book by Joseph Ratzinger / Benedict XVI – this is the byline on the book because he wrote it both before and after his election as pope – intends precisely to pose the authentic Jesus against the false “modernized or postmodernized” Jesus.

Know that feeling you sometimes get when you see or hear someone so much you don’t think about it, and then you suddenly see them, for the first time? That’s what Benedict is probably hoping for, the stunning encounter with the real Jesus. At least for those who seem to be looking at counterfeit images.