As we saw again in this recent election, it is most difficult to maintain our Catholic faith in a world in which virtually every social manifestation is set against us—exactly why the prince of the world is who he is—but that burden is greatly lightened by the teaching of our Church, and most potently by the teaching of Peter; upon whose shoulders the Church was built and eternally sustained by Christ against the very gates of hell.
All of the works of our popes are valuable tools in our faith-strengthening; and occasionally, works by others about our popes are as well.
One wonderful example is the book by Tracey Rowland, Ratzinger’s Faith: The Theology of Pope Benedict XVI.
An excerpt on the various ways others have described the essence of Benedict’s theology.
“Komonchak describes it as a ‘Bonventurian theological vision’ according to which the gospel will save us, not philosophy, not science, and not scientific theology. In a period of disillusion with modernity the Church can make her appeal to the world by ‘presenting the Christian vision in its synthetic totality as a comprehensive structure of meaning that at nearly every point breaks with the taken-for-granted attitudes, strategies, and habits of contemporary culture.’” (p. 14, highlighting added)