Vatican to publish never-before-seen homilies by Pope Benedict XVI

ROME — The Vatican next year will publish a collection of never-before-seen homilies delivered by the late Pope Benedict XVI during his private Sunday Masses, most of them penned during his 10-year retirement, officials said Saturday.

The consecrated women who tended to Benedict during his pontificate and retirement recorded the homilies as he delivered them, and have now transcribed them for publication by the Vatican’s publishing house.

Thirty of the homilies date from Benedict’s pontificate, while around 100 more are from his retirement, said a statement from the publisher, the Joseph Ratzinger Foundation and the Vatican’s communications office. All are in Italian, the German-born theologian’s adopted language.

The Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano, in conjunction with Germany’s Welt am Sonntag, published the first of the homilies Saturday. It is a meditation on the figure of Joseph that Benedict delivered on Dec. 22, 2013, just a few months after he became the first pope in 600 years to resign.

Benedict died on Dec. 31, 2022, at the age of 95.

His longtime spokesman — the Rev. Federico Lombardi, who heads the Ratzinger Foundation — is curating the collection. Organizers of the project said the homilies don’t contain any news or theological novelties, but rather are of “substantial spiritual nutrition.”