Benedict's Book Club

Even more than usual, the folks at Church Central seem to have been bitten -- hard -- by the book-bug.

The Pope is, of course, plugging furiously away on the second volume of his Jesus chronicle (often cited as a leading cause of the "inertia" feeling the Curia keeps complaining of); to mark his 75th birthday today, the Christian Unity Czar Cardinal Walter Kasper has unleashed a memoir, and the worship-chief-in-waiting Archbishop Malcolm Ranjith penned the foreword to a Kazakh bishop's recent treatise calling into question the post-Conciliar practice of standing for the reception of communion (in the hand)... to say nothing of longtime papal MC Archbishop Piero Marini's much-noted defense of the liturgical reform, which rolled out in November.

While the convergence of four high-level personal forays into the publishing world are enough to make one's head spin, some older new releases have begun to circulate more widely thanks to new translations.

As previously noted, yesterday saw the US on-sale of Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz's recollections of forty years at the side of John Paul II. And just two weeks after the Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone sees New York and Washington at B16's elbow, an English version of the Vice-Pope's meditations on The Last Secret of Fatima will hit the shelves.

Both of the latter will be released through the Holy See's Stateside publishing arm. No, not Libreria Editrice Vaticana... but Doubleday.

PHOTO: L'Osservatore Romano

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