Ratzinger After Vatican II

Ashy, intensely Catholic, cats- and music-loving Bavarian boy who grew up in Nazi Germany becomes a first-class academic thinker and then, against his own will, successively archbishop of Munich, defender of Church doctrine at the Vatican, and finally pope -- before sensationally stepping down. Such a story cannot but inspire biographers, and the one who has most successfully gnawed at that prize bone is undoubtedly the German journalist Peter Seewald. Seewald was raised Catholic, but became a left-leaning atheist in his youth, before working for such respected newspapers as Der Spiegel, Stern, and the Suddeutsche Zeitung. Since 1996 he has published some half a dozen conversations with or books on Cardinal Ratzinger-Benedict XVI, all translated into the world's major languages. Seewald's encounters with Ratzinger have helped lead him back to the faith; they have also produced his crowning achievement, a monumental 1,200-page biography released in one volume in German and two volumes in English: the second has just appeared.