With the passing of Pope Benedict XVI into eternal life, one of the most sobering realizations was something that we all knew was coming on a theoretical level: the truth that nothing new would ever again come forth from the pen of Joseph Aloisius Ratzinger.
It is true that the privilege to hear anew from the man who became Pope Benedict XVI will have to wait until, Deo volente, we all meet again on the other side of this vale of tears. And yet, as providence would have it, contemporaneous with the emeritus pontiff’s death, two of his works have appeared in English for the first time: the pontiff’s previously unpublished 2006 Spiritual Testament, and a volume of Ratzinger’s lectures on creation and the Church that were delivered in 1985 yet sat forgotten for decades in an Austrian abbey.
In honor of Benedict’s passing and in homage to a lifetime of dialogue between faith and reason with a special eye toward creation and the natural sciences, I have just published this article in Notre Dame’s Church Life Journal where I reflect on some of Benedict’s key insights that emerge a final time in these newly available works.
