Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, passed away on December 31, 2022, at the age of 95, at the Mater Ecclesiae convent in the Vatican. He had retired there after resigning from the papacy, spending the last years of his long life in retreat and prayer. Federico Lombardi looks at the life and works of Joseph Ratzinger in Benedict XVI In Memoriam.

Claudio Zonta reviews In Viaggio, a documentary on Pope Francis’ journeys. The respected documentary film-maker, Gianfranco Rosi, explains how using material from 37 apostolic visits to 59 countries: “I selected nearly 200 hours of material from 800 originals and found myself having to edit for a whole year, until I arrived at an 80-minute summary for a film that remains deliberately open-ended”

Each stage of  In Viaggio – Pope Francis’ Long Pilgrimage constitutes a piece of a mosaic that aims to show an outgoing Church, capable of touching the wounds and drying the tears generated by poverty, wars, power, exclusion and human and environmental exploitation.

In The Disabled in the Life of the Church, Justin Glyn asks us to recognize the lives of disabled Catholics as exactly that – the lives of children of God, laboring together according to a multitude of gifts and talents in the vineyard of the Lord.

This month we published the first in a series of articles by Miguel Ángel Fiorito and Diego Fares on spiritual discernment. Notes for a Theology of the Spiritual Exercises is a concise reading of the spirituality of Saint Ignatius of Loyola and the pivotal point of his Spiritual Exercises.

Being siblings is often not an easy task with the bond of blood sometimes insufficient to indicate the quality of a relationship, according to Vincenzo Anselmo. His article Fraternity From Cain’s Perspective begins with a biblical narrative that deals with the theme of fraternity: the story of Cain and Abel, Adam and Eve’s sons.

Only recently have the Christian Churches sought harmony with each other.  Ecumenism and the Christian Desire for Unity traces the dialogue between the different branches of the Christian faith, as well as a research project of the John XXIII Foundation for Religious Sciences, published as a series of books titled “A History of the Desire for Christian Unity.”

Crisis and the Future of the Church by our director, Antonio Spadaro, considers the future of the Church, particularly how the past informs the future. “We need to realize that, to plumb the depths of the mystery of God, we need one another; we need to encounter one another and to challenge one another under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, who harmonizes diversities, overcomes conflicts and reconciles differences,” Pope Francis’s said concluding his homily for the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, 2015.

Also in the issue:

The Election of Pius XI and the Advent of Fascism in Italy, Giovanni Sale
Hard Times in Europe: An economic policy of shared sobriety, Fernando de la Iglesia Viguiristi
Revisiting the Partition of Palestine, David Neuhaus
Kenya’s Presidential Elections, Jean-Pierre Bodjoko
‘The Milk of Dreams’ – The 59th Venice Art Biennale, Friedhelm Mennekes
Kurt Vonnegut: ‘So it goes’ – One hundred years after his birth, Diego Mattei

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