Joseph Ratzinger/Benedetto XVI, L’insegnamento del Concilio Vaticano II (a cura di e traduzione di Pierluca Azzaro), vol. 7/tomo 2

[Autom. eng. transl.] Volume 7 of the Opera omnia of Joseph Ratzinger collects the texts he dedicated to the Second Vatican Council, dividing them into two parts. The first, corresponding to the first volume of the volume, collects what was written by Joseph Ratzinger between the announcement of the Council, January 25, 1959, and the first years after its closure, December 7, 1963, going through everything he produced during the Council: both as conciliar expert and member of various commissions, and as counselor to Cardinal Joseph Frings whom he, as Pope, will define as "a father". Precisely on the basis of the profound friendship and custom developed between the young theologian and the elderly archbishop of Cologne, the last part of the first volume of Volume 7 contains all the writings of Joseph Ratzinger in honor of Cardinal Frings. The second volume is dedicated to the reception and hermeneutics of the Council until the eve of the election of Ratzinger to the Soglio di Pietro. It is already then, a language immediately accessible, full of images and episodes, compelling and profound at the same time with which Ratzinger not only describes protagonists and themes of the event of great historical significance of which he is a witness but of which, together, he concretely does also the story. Thus emerges a fundamental characteristic of the volume and, at the same time, of the person and the theologian who he will never lose in the course of his whole intellectual and human journey: from the first beginning, the language of Joseph Ratzinger is not a school language, why not it is school disputes that interest him and it is not for scholars that he first addresses. His language is, from the beginning, a "living" language, so to speak, for everyone, and this is precisely because "he is the man of today in the reality of his world, as it is" his constant point of reference, because it is to positively propose the faith that in the end is always at the center of his thoughts: to meditate and express the Gospel of Christ in a way understandable to the man of today, to make him understand Christ again in his actuality: this is, for he, the update. Ratzinger is thus revealed as a "son of the Council" already starting from his language.