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For Pope’s First Encyclical, an Esteemed Co-Author Two Former Popes to Be Made Saints
(about 3 hours later)
VATICAN CITY — Pope Francis on Friday issued his first encyclical — a rich meditation on faith and love co-written with his predecessor, Benedict XVI, that clearly displays their different styles — one more conversational, the other more intellectual. VATICAN CITY — Showing more of his sprightly personality and his priorities, Pope Francis sped two of his predecessors toward sainthood on Friday: John Paul II, who guided the Roman Catholic Church during the end of the cold war, and John XXIII, who assembled the liberalizing Second Vatican Council in the 1960s.
“Lumen Fidei,” or “The Light of Faith,” which appears halfway through what the Vatican has declared the Year of Faith, calls on believers and seekers alike to explore how their lives could be enriched by God. In approving the sainthood of John XXIII even without a second miracle attributable to the pontiff, Francis took the rare step of bypassing the Vatican bureaucracy. Francis also said a Vatican committee had accepted the validity of a second miracle attributed to the intercession of John Paul. Both popes are expected to be canonized before the end of the year.
In a summary of the document, the Vatican said that Benedict had “almost completed” the text before he resigned in February, the first pope in modern history to do so, and that Francis added “further contributions” to the existing “first draft.” Also on Friday, Pope Francis issued his first encyclical — a rich meditation on faith and love co-written with his immediate predecessor, Benedict XVI, that clearly displays their different styles: Francis’s more conversational, Benedict’s more intellectual.
“It’s not signed by two popes because we have only one pope,” Archbishop Gerhard Müller, the head of the Vatican’s doctrinal office, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, told a news conference here on Friday. “This encyclical isn’t a patchwork,” he added, but a single unity that shows the continuity between the two papacies. The canonization cause for John Paul began almost immediately after his death in 2005. At his funeral, crowds in St. Peter’s Square began shouting “Santo subito,” or “Sainthood now,” for the beloved pope. He was beatified in May 2011, after a Vatican committee credited him with interceding to cure a French nun, Marie Simon-Pierre Normand, of Parkinson’s disease, the same malady from which the pontiff suffered.
The encyclical explores the more abstract connection between faith and love and faith and reason, but also urges Catholics to uphold the church’s conception of the family. “The first setting in which faith enlightened the human city is the family,” Francis writes. “I think first and foremost of the stable union of man and woman in marriage.” The second miracle attributed to John Paul is said to be the healing of a woman who prayed to the pope on the day of his beatification.
“This union is born of their love, as a sign and presence of God’s own love, and of the acknowledgment and acceptance of the goodness of sexual differentiation, whereby spouses can become one flesh and are enabled to give birth to new life, a manifestation of the Creator’s goodness, wisdom and loving plan,” he continues. The Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, said Francis was eager to canonize John XXIII. “Despite the absence of a second miracle it was the pope’s will that the sainthood of the great pope of the Second Vatican Council be recognized,” he said. But he played down the fact that Francis had bypassed a second miracle. “There are lots of theologians who in fact discuss the principle of the fact that it’s necessary to have two distinct miracles.”
The encyclical urges Catholics to see faith as a journey of exploration, as well as a relationship with God, a force that enriches other bonds. “Faith makes us appreciate the architecture of human relationships because it grasps their ultimate foundation and definitive destiny in God, in his love, and thus sheds light on the art of building; as such it becomes a service to the common good,” Francis writes. Father Lombardi said it was likely that John Paul and John XXIII would be canonized before the end of the year.
Alberto Melloni, a Vatican historian and director of the John XXIII Foundation for Religious Studies in Bologna, a liberal Catholic research institute, said the canonizations were an important nod to the more liberal wings of the Catholic Church. They “mark the end of a season that cast doubts over the Second Vatican Council, a season of some mistrust,” he said.
“Many spoke about the council, criticized it as too weak and with too many compromises, but failed to feel the spirit of the council,” he added. “Both popes were bishops at the council, not theologians.” Mr. Melloni said it was significant that Francis had bypassed the need for a second miracle attributed to John XXIII. Perhaps he decided “that the people of God have already made a judgment about the two popes,” he added.
At John Paul II’s beatification ceremony, which drew one and a half million people to Rome, Benedict lauded John Paul II as a central figure in the history of the 20th century and a hero of the church.
“He was witness to the tragic age of big ideologies, totalitarian regimes, and from their passing John Paul II embraced the harsh suffering, marked by tension and contradictions, of the transition of the modern age toward a new phase of history, showing constant concern that the human person be its protagonist,” Benedict said at the Mass.
While Benedict’s first encyclical, “God Is Love,” drew on the work of John Paul, Francis’s first encyclical, “Lumen Fidei,” or “The Light of Faith,” released on Friday, is the first that the Vatican has openly acknowledged was written by two popes together. The encyclical calls on believers and seekers alike to explore how their lives can be enriched by God.
It also urges Catholics to uphold the church’s conception of the family. “The first setting in which faith enlightened the human city is the family,” Francis writes. “I think first and foremost of the stable union of man and woman in marriage.”
The concluding chapter of the encyclical, which touches on the role of faith in reinforcing the common good, recalls the informal, immediate style of Francis, a low-key Argentine Jesuit who regularly delivers off-the-cuff sermons and has chosen to live in a Vatican dormitory instead of the Apostolic Palace.The concluding chapter of the encyclical, which touches on the role of faith in reinforcing the common good, recalls the informal, immediate style of Francis, a low-key Argentine Jesuit who regularly delivers off-the-cuff sermons and has chosen to live in a Vatican dormitory instead of the Apostolic Palace.
The opening three chapters are rich in biblical and thought-provoking literary references and bear the mark of Benedict, an intellectual and theologian who was head of the Vatican’s doctrinal office for 25 years before becoming pope in 2005. The opening three chapters are rich in biblical and literary references and bear the mark of Benedict, a theologian who was head of the Vatican’s doctrinal office for 25 years before becoming pope in 2005. In addition to the Old Testament and the Gospel, the encyclical quotes Dante, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Friedrich Nietzsche, T.S. Eliot and the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber.
In addition to citing the Old Testament and the Gospel, the text refers to Dante and the philosophers Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Friedrich Nietzsche; for Nietzsche, faith was associated with darkness, not light. It also refers to T.S. Eliot and the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber’s exploration of idolatry. It also touches on a passage in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novel “The Idiot,” in which Prince Myshkin sees the painting “The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb” by Hans Holbein the Younger and says, “Looking at this painting might cause one to lose his faith.”
The encyclical also touches on a powerful passage in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s “The Idiot,” in which Prince Myshkin sees the painting “Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb” by Hans Holbein the Younger and says, “Looking at this painting might cause one to lose his faith.”
“Yet it is precisely in contemplating Jesus’s death that faith grows stronger and receives a dazzling light,” Francis writes.“Yet it is precisely in contemplating Jesus’s death that faith grows stronger and receives a dazzling light,” Francis writes.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: July 5, 2013Correction: July 5, 2013

An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that Pope Francis’s encyclical was the first to be co-written by a pope with his predecessor. A Vatican spokesman said that while it has seldom been publicly acknowledged, it is not unprecedented for a pope to finish an encyclical started by a previous one.

An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that Pope Francis’s encyclical was the first to be co-written by a pope with his predecessor. A Vatican spokesman said that while it has seldom been publicly acknowledged, it is not unprecedented for a pope to finish an encyclical started by a previous one.