From the BENEDICT XVI NEWS thread, where this story followed an update on the RAI Vatican correspondent who made some unacceptable statements about Benedict XVI on a TV newscast last Sunday, who said that in Les Combes, there will probably be "just the proverbial four cats - may be a few more - who still have the courage and the patience to listen to the Pope's words".
Well, as if in answer to that unfounded and malicious sarcasm:
Who tops Italy's best-seller list this week -
surpassing a weeks-long fictional bestseller?
Adapted from
So only "four cats have the courage and patience to listen to the words" of Benedict XVI!
Then who has been buying
Caritas in veritate which, in less than a week climbed to the top of Italy's best-seller list, ahead of a novel that had been the chart-topper for weeks?
'THE POPE BEATS SAVILLANO AND CAMILLERI!
"Italians are in search of values and reference points - and they show this
by their mass acquisition of Benedict XVI's new encyclical". LEV, the Vatican publishing house, printed an initial 530,000 copies in Italian, augmented by at least another half a million distributed as supplements to
Avvenire and
Famiglia Cristiana. Not to mention the texts published by Italy's 150 diocesan newspapers
.[And with so many giveaways, people are still buying the commercial edition!]
The supplement that came with the Wednesday (July 8) issue of
L'Osservatore Romano has already become a collector's item.
[Frankly, I am happily surprised by the popular interest in Caritas in veritate - a very 'technical' text compared to the 'pure' theology and philosophy of the first two encyclicals. But then, the popular success of thw first two encyclicals was a great big surprise to everyone as well. Not to mention Sacramentum caritatis, the post-Synodal exhortation on the Eucharist.
Since when have papal documents - teaching papers! - ever been best-sellers competing up there with 'regular books'? Only with Benedict XVI!]
Benedict XVI: Recommended reading
for moderns let down by modernity
by Bruno Mastroianni
Translated from
July 14, 2009
The idea that the world can use love, not as a vague sentiment, but as something solid and concrete rooted in the truth about man and on reality - caritas in veritate - has hit the mark.
On the left as on the right, among labor unions and entrepreneurs, economists and newsmen: everybody has heard the authoritative voice of the Pope.
The fact is that the era of enthusiasm over living 'as if God does not exist' is coming to an end. The global crisis has brought that clearly to light.
All this modernity has failed, over the past two centuries, to deliver what it promised. So there is widespread disssatisfaction and a desire for fresh air.
And that is why the encylical has been so well received.
And journalistic spin has not been possible because everyone has read it - or can easily do so, if they wish.
[Well, no! There are still quite a number of people who are too lazy to read the whole thing and prefer to get their knowledge of it - as well as what they ought to think about it - from what the media tell them! And there certainly has been no lack of self-serving (or ideology-serving) media spin on CIV!]
They are rediscovering what can be reasonable, shareable and stimulating from Benedict XVI, who is reconnecting human events to the ultimate sense of existence.
In this climate, the meeting between the Pope and the American President must be instructive.
While the media were anticipating a confrontation on bioethical issues, the two used the occasion to size up each other.
[And of course, it was a confrontation on bio-ethical issues - not all of it, surely - but the part of it that the Vatican unmistakably wished to be placed up front for all to see.]
Obama promised to reduce abortions
[an empty promise, by the way, since he personally and his party promote abortion as a human right, so how does that help reduce abortions? And yet, media has reported this promise uncritically and positively, without even questioning its obvious improbability!], and the Pope handed him a copy of
Dignitas personae - the document that explains very well why the defense of the dignity of man (and of human life) is not a fixation on the part of Catholics but one that concerns everybody.
If only Obama reads it with attention
[or reads it at all!], he would discover how reasonable, shrable and stimulating the Church is when it reminds man that the future depends on the capacity to defend life from its very beginning.
How it is all question of love in truth.