Pope Benedict XVI

Thoughtful Catholics will feel a loss at the resignation of Pope Benedict XVI.

Orlando's Catholic Bishop John Noonan said of him, "Everyone went to Rome to see Pope John Paul II. You went to Rome to hear Pope Benedict."

The pope’s intellectual remains are immense; he wrote books the way columnists write columns, all of which are accessible to non-theologians. His three books on the life of Jesus are worth his whole papacy.

Here is a review of one of them:

"The Pope’s manner of writing is pastoral and deceptively simple. He writes with authority not only because of his station within the Catholic Church, but also primarily because he is a suburb theologian. In the late Middle Ages, theology was considered the “queen of sciences” because it contained all the other sciences, including what we moderns would call textual exegesis."

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