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The past few years have been very busy for Pope Benedict XVI. In addition to all of his travels, meetings with bishops, and pastoral duties as the bishop of Rome, he has had to deal with a number of challenging crises: sex-abuse scandals in Europe and elsewhere, persecution against Christians in the Middle East, and the AIDS epidemic in Africa, to name just a few. In a recent interview, the pope admitted that all of this is a consuming, exhausting job that demands long hours and intense concentration.
Still, in the midst of all this work, Benedict found the time to write a two-hundred-page apostolic exhortation entitled Verbum Domini (VD), or The Word of the Lord. This document is a detailed summary of the Synod of Bishops that took place two years earlier, and it contains many of the bishops’ recommendations for how to encourage Catholics to hear God’s word more clearly.
Considering all his other duties, we might ask why Benedict would devote so much time to writing this document. He could have produced a shorter, more general one and then moved on with more pressing work. But he didn’t. He took his time because he knew how important the topic is. Benedict didn’t want to just tell us to read our Bibles every day and try to be good Christians. He wanted to teach…
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