25 readings for the Year of Faith

Pope Benedict XVI last Oct. 11 inaugurated at the Vatican the worldwide Catholic Year of Faith in a ceremony witnessed by thousands of the faithful as well as by Patriarch Bartholomew I of the Orthodox Church and Archbishop Rowan Williams of the Anglican Communion.

The Year of Faith coincides with the 50th anniversary of the Second Vatican Council and will last until Nov. 24, 2013. But there is more to this special occasion. “If today the Church proposes a new Year of Faith and a new evangelization,” Pope Benedict said during the Mass to open the year, “it is not to honor an anniversary, but because there is more need of it, even more than there was 50  years ago!”

The Pope said we can picture the Year of Faith as “a pilgrimage in the deserts of today’s world, taking with us only what is necessary: neither staff, nor bag, nor bread, nor money, nor two tunics as the Lord said to those he was sending out on mission (cf. Luke 9:3), but the Gospel and the faith of the Church, of which the Council documents are a luminous expression, as is the Catechism of the Catholic Church, published twenty years ago.”

This part of the Pope’s Oct. 11 homily brings me back to his inaugural one on April 24, 2005, when he lamented that “so many people are living in the desert. And there are so many kinds of desert. There is the desert of poverty, the desert of hunger and thirst, the desert of abandonment, of loneliness, of destroyed love. There is the desert of God’s darkness, the emptiness of souls no longer aware of their dignity or the goal of human life. The external deserts in the world are growing, because the internal deserts have become so vast.

“The Church as a whole and all her Pastors, like Christ, must set out to lead people out of the desert, towards the place of life, towards friendship with the Son of God, towards the One who gives us life, and life in abundance,” the Pope said.

One of the things we can do in this Year of Faith is to read material that will rekindle in our hearts the theological virtue of faith that we first received when we were baptized. That saints were persons who lived in friendship with the Word whom they encountered in the Bible or who took inspiration from the thoughts or biographies of the faithful ones who preceded them is no mere coincidence. Those who put down in writing the faith they received challenge and guide us to live with meaning, eager to help us discover the joy of being able to say like Saint Paul did that “To me, life is Christ.”

Here is a list of books we can read prayerfully to grow in spirit in this Year of Faith. Some in this selection were not written by Catholic but with the Bible and catechisms as our frames of reference can inform our faith nonetheless:

1. The Bible (The New Jerusalem Bible is a beautiful translation, available online through www.catholic.org)

2. The Catechism of the Catholic Church (available online)

3. The Catechism for Filipino Catholics

4. The Compendium of the Catechism of the Catholic Church

5. YouCat (The Youth Catechism of the Catholic Church)

6. The Baltimore Catechism, Revised Edition (available online)

7. Documents of Vatican Council II (available online)

8. Deus Caritas Est by Pope Benedict XVI (available online)

9. Spe Salvi by Pope Benedict XVI (available online)

10. Caritas in Veritate by Pope Benedict XVI (available online)

11. Jesus of Nazareth by Pope Benedict XVI (two volumes are in print, a third is coming very soon)

12. Ecclesia en Eucharistia by Blessed John Paul the Great (available online)

13. Hail, Holy Queen by Scott Hahn

14. Spiritual Friendship by Saint Aelred of Rievaulx

15. The Four Loves by C.S. Lewis

16. The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis

17. The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien

18. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien

19. The Silmarillon by J.R.R. Tolkien

20. The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien

21. The Return of the Prodigal Son by Henri J.M. Nouwen

22. Here and Now: Living in the Spirit by Henri J.M. Nouwen

23. Can You Drink the Cup? by Henri J.M. Nouwen

24. Letters to Marc about Jesus by Henri J.M. Nouwen

25. The Seven Story Mountain by Thomas Merton, OCSO