The Pedagogic Life

How does one teach a church of 1.4 billion people? That is, after all, part of the office of the Pope: the “ordinary universal magisterium,” that ponderous slab of Catholic theological Kunstsprache, is simply the Pope’s duty to teach the entire Catholic Church and the entire world. How to carry out that office in a Church divided in so many ways—by nationality, by politics, by thousands of languages—and how to do so when doctrine can seem so abstracted from people’s immediate needs are questions that makes one understand why, perhaps, the person entrusted with this job might need God’s help.