A new book in Italian, entitled Joseph Ratzinger e il Concilio Vaticano II and edited by Sameer Advani, a member of the International Ratzinger Foundation’s Academic Network, has just been published by Cantagalli. With chapters from Card. Koch, several members of this foundation (Professors Mauro Gagliardi, Borja Lleó, Maurice Agbaw-Ebai), and other theologians from across Italy and Europe, the book examines not only Ratzinger’s contribution to and subsequent interpretation of key conciliar texts, but also how these questions remain relevant to and pressing for the Church today.
Divided into 18 thematic chapters, and based on the papers delivered in a Theological Congress organized by the Pontifical Athenaeum Regina Apostolorum in Rome, the book argues that Ratzinger’s capacity to integrate faith and reason, tradition and novity, dogma and spirituality, represents a particularly reliable hermeneutic with which to read the Conciliar texts today and to restore the Council’s missionary goal: an openness to the world, born from an encounter with the Incarnate, Crucified, and Risen Lord, and capable of speaking to an increasingly divided and disillusioned humanity.
The book is the first in a new collection, Studi Ratzingeriani, dedicated to the theology of Pope Benedict.