A book with Popes’ teachings on Faith and Culture presented at the Vatican

Vatican City, Dec 10, 2003 / 22:00 pm

The Pontifical Council for Culture presented on Thursday the book  “Faith and Culture. An Anthology of Texts of the Pontifical Magisterium from Leo XIII to John Paul II.”

Cardinal Paul Poupard, President of the dicastery, said that the 1,500-page book covers a variety of topics from papal teaching over the course of more than one hundred years: “From art to technology, ideologies to the family, from sports to politics, universities to cultural identity, from globalization to inculturation.”

According to the Cardinal, the book, edited in Italian, “is meant to serve as a source of reference for episcopal conferences, cultural commissions as well as researchers at universities and institutes in theology, the religious sciences, and professors in the faculties of philosophy, theology, social sciences, education and at seminaries.”

Fr. Bernard Ardura, Secretary of the Pontifical Council, said that “the popes, in a span of one hundred years, have been witnesses and protagonists in significant evolution in the field of culture and its relationship with the Christian faith, departing from the concept of ‘civilization’ in order to achieve a more complete understanding of the human person with the concept of ‘culture’.”

The anthology of texts is the result of ten years of work and is divided into three major sections: faith and cultures - guidelines, challenges and reference points, and concrete proposals.

The book has three indexes, one of which lists 1,266 different pontifical texts, classified under the name of the pope that wrote them.