On the Way to Jesus Christ

Jesus Christ is as popular as ever. Films, books, and news articles ask,"Who was Jesus Christ?" Even outside of Christianity he continues to appeal to people. And yet for so many, the popular Jesus is not the Jesus of Christianity. The popular Jesus makes no demands and never challenges people. He accepts everyone and everything under all circumstances.

On the Way to Jesus Christ is a series of meditations that Pope Benedict XVI wrote while he was Prefect for the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith. The true Jesus, he writes, is the Jesus of the Gospels, who "is quite different, demanding, bold. The Jesus who makes everything OK for everyone is a phantom, a dream, not a real figure. The Jesus of the Gospels is certainly not convenient for us. But it is precisely in this way that he answers the deepest question of our existence, which--whether we want to or not--keeps us on the lookout for God, for a gratification that is limitless, for the infinite. We must again set out on the way to this real Jesus."

This book also examines whether Jesus Christ is the only savior, and the Church's responsibility to evangelize. It concludes with reflections on Jesus' Presence in the Holy Eucharist, and the Catechism of the Catholic Church's presentation of the Christian mystery as seen through the Catechism's dynamic view of Sacred Scripture.

On the Way to Jesus Christ is for anyone--believer or unbeliever-who wants better to understand the true Jesus, the Jesus of the Gospels, the Christ of Christianity.

"Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, has written a brief but compelling invitation to know Jesus Christ as He really is: bold, demanding, merciful, strong, and the answer to our deepest longings. This is a must-read book for anyone serious about deepening his or her faith."

—Charles J. Chaput, O.F.M. Cap., Archbishop of Denver

The writings in this book precede Ratzinger's reign as Pope Benedict XVI and reflect his long teaching career, which included 24 years as prefect of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith under John Paul II. The papers in On the Way to Jesus Christ deal with following Christ on a variety of fronts. The initial three pieces concern discerning Christ in the text of the Bible, in liturgical imagery and iconography, and in the processes of evangelization. The next four address the figure of Christ in history and the church, as reflected by his responses to Satan's temptations, and present in the Eucharist and the community of its partakers; as perspicacious as they are learned, they are about as limpidly expressed as such careful exegesis could be. Of the closing two pieces, "Universality and Catholicity" instructively and even provocatively contrasts those terms in the context of the church, and the other answers criticisms of the Vatican II-inspired 1992 Catechism of the Catholic Church for being insufficiently modern. If none of this is easy reading, neither is it obscure or clotted with citational apparatus. Serious Christians stand to learn and relearn much from it. Ray Olson
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