I was heartened to read in Pope Leo XIV’s General Audience of January 7th that he will begin a cycle of catechesis on the documents of the Second Vatican Council. And how providential it is that a book was published recently by Ignatius Press that addresses the challenges of that era. The book Bread Grows in Winter, by the Austrian writer Ida Friederike Görres, was first published in German in 1970, a year before her death, and it includes the eulogy given at her funeral by Joseph Ratzinger.
I read Bread Grows in Winter with simultaneous feelings of joy and frustration: joy at the human, spiritual, and theological insights, and frustration that the crises faced after Vatican II, both inside and outside the Church, continue to plague us. I am a convert to the Catholic Church, and in those years of journeying to the Faith, I read the conciliar documents, along with the encyclicals of the popes that followed. It seemed to me that in the confusion after the Council, many in the Church—in their quest to be “open” to the world and with a desire for “relevance”—lost sight of an essential aspect of her reality: that she is triumphant. I picked up on this underlying issue while reading Görres’s book.
There are just two references to triumphalism in Bread Grows in Winter, translated from German to English by my Ethics and Public Policy Center (EPPC) colleague Jennifer Bryson. Although the word appears only twice in this collection of essays and talks, I see it undergirding her entire view of the Church and the world.
Read the full article at Catholic World Report or on the EPPC scholar page.