The Pope's book and the Eastern Churches

A post from Eastern Christian Books on points made in Pope Bendedict's new book that might be of interest to Eastern Catholic/Orthodox readers.

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Light of the World: The Pope, The Church and The Signs Of The Times: on which I briefly commented earlier, has of course already generated enormous discussion on--predictably and tiresomely--sex. Some have said that the pope allowed himself to be played by the media and should have known how these comments would be received. I would say, based on the entire book, that the pope did know the likely reception his comments would receive, and proceeded anyway. His previous interviews--especially the 1985 Ratzinger Report--as well as his 1997 volume of memoirs, Milestones set off firestorms so I'm sure he was not unaware that something similar would happen again--all the more so in an Internet age. In any event, I've just finished reading the entire thing and have seen that the "condom comments" are so tiny that only the tendentious would be interested in repeating them.

Let me, instead, focus on those aspects of direct interest to Eastern Christians, of which there are about twenty or so passages in the book that are noteworthy. I would divide the comments into (i) the encouraging but not really surprising comments (not surprising, that is, to anyone who has read Ratzinger over the last 40 years); (ii) the truly surprising; and (iii) the disappointing. Of these, (i) is the largest category; (ii) the next largest; and (iii) has only one disappointment. Let me take them in order. Not all treat Orthodoxy directly, but all of them, I believe, have clear and obvious bearing on issues about which Orthodoxy is concerned...

Complete article here.