As I have no time right now to translate the Italian articles, here's the first Anglophone article that fleshes out the Vatican statement, AP's story simply quoted from Fr. Lombardi's statement, so it doesn't count.
Pope's conversations with Peter Seewald
to be published by year's end
by Edward Pentin
Tuesday, August 31, 2010
Pope Benedict XVI has given an interview to the German journalist and author Peter Seewald which will soon be published in book form, according to an article in today’s
Die Tagespost and confirmed by the Vatican.
The date of publication is not yet known although according to the Italian Vaticanista Andrea Tornielli, it’s expected to hit bookstores within a year.
In a statement released by the Vatican this afternoon, papal spokesman Fr. Federico Lombardi said the interviews, which took place between 26th and 31st July at Castel Gandolfo, would be published by the end of the year in German and Italian, with other languages expected to follow.
Die Tagespost says the book has the working title
Das Licht Der Welt– The Light of the World – and reports that it will probably be published by the Vatican’s publishing house, Libreria Editrice Vaticana, which holds the copyright for all the Pope’s works.
Such a one-on-one published interview with a Pope is very rare, although John Paul II produced something similar with the Italian journalist Vittorio Messori in the 1994 book
Crossing the Threshold of Hope [John Paul II was encouraged to do that book by the success of Messori's 1984 Ratzinger Report which he read from his sickbed at the time, and which was a factor, according to George Weigel in his JP2 biography, in his decision to convene the Special Synodal Assembly in 1995 to review the reception within the Church of Vatican II 20 years after the Council ended.]
Benedict XVI has also given similar interviews to television (shortly before his visit to Poland in 2006, and to a group of German journalists before his visit to Bavaria in the same year), but like his press conferences on the papal plane, these are generally more formal and stage-managed.
This will be the fourth book written in interview form that Joseph Ratzinger has produced. When he was prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith he was also interviewed by Messori while he vacationed in the Dolomites in the summer of 1984. The conversations became known as
The Ratzinger Report published in 1985.
Seewald later published two successful books of interviews with the then Cardinal Ratzinger:
Salt of the Earth in 1996 and
God and the World published in 2002. Both books were translated into 25 languages.
A former editor and reporter for the German secular magazines
Der Spiegel and
Stern, Seewald says those meetings with Cardinal Ratzinger were instrumental in bringing him back to the Church.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 01/09/2010 17:39]