Volume 26, Number 7 · May 3, 1979
Where the New Pope Stands
By J.M. Cameron
The Year of Three Popes
by Peter Hebblethwaite
Collins, 220 pp., $8.95
Voices of Authority
by Nicholas Lash
Patmos Press, 119 pp., $3.95 (paper)
Illustrissimi: Letters from Pope John Paul I
by Albino Luciani, translated by William Weaver
Little, Brown, 258 pp., $10.00
The Dilemmas of Contemporary Religion
by David Martin
St. Martin's, 160 pp., $14.50
The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine Vol. III: The Growth of Medieval Theology (600-1300)
by Jaroslav Pelikan
University of Chicago Press, 333 pp., $17.50
Sign of Contradiction
by Karol Wojtyla
Seabury Press, 206 pp., $8.95
Easter Vigil and Other Poems
by Karol Wojtyla, translated by Jerzy Peterkiewicz
Random House, 81 pp., $5.00
Interest in the Papacy has increased since the short pontificate of John XXIII. The good nature and charm of John were irresistible. As a personality Paul VI was less expansive; the task of presiding over the consequences of the second Vatican Council was something he did with great ability, but he found it tormenting, and this was evident in the tone of his later speeches, plaintive, passionate, mournful. John Paul I was an instant success: it seemed as though Don Camillo had become Pope (just as John XXIII, in his humanity and holiness, seemed to have come out of the pages of I Promessi Sposi); but we had scarcely begun to enjoy his gentle belletrist approach to spiritual problems when death took him. (Illustrissimi, with its letters to Dickens, Scott, Saint Bernard, Goldoni, Figaro, Luke the Evangelist, and others, has a distinctively nineteenth-century charm.)
Review, 6102 words
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