Quiet place of study with a view of St Peter's
Dieter Desczyk in Berlin has published a book on "Bridges and Saints". With its drawings it is a small rarity, there is nothing comparable. "Message": The bridge has something transcendent (crossing over) in the truest sense of the word, but also in the symbolic: over dangers from one world to another, and in this the saints are accompanying intercessors and true pontifices.
In our small series of video book presentations you can now see the Fontes Christiani series (German-Latin edition of the Church Fathers) published by Herder in cooperation with the Görres Society, namely the volumes on theRoman Liber Pontificalis (double volume!) and on the Roman Martyr Legends (double volume!).
Johannes Mahr has described the first 18 years of the history of the Missionary Benedictines (of St. Ottilien) in an 850-page basic work. The brilliant volume, adorned with hundreds of historical illustrations, is the result of an immense amount of work. It is very readable and introduces in detail the mentality of the times and the first mission years in Africa, with all the light and shade.
Even in the recent novel by the Irish writer Joseph O'Connor "In My Father's House" (2023) about the Irish priest Hugh O'Flaherty (1898-1963), the Campo Santo Teutonico hardly appears. However, in 1943/44, O'Flaherty had just set up the largest private relief operation for those persecuted before the Nazis in Rome from the German College in the Vatican.
In view of its 100th anniversary, the Pontifical Institute of Christian Archaeology has published a very attractive volume in which all the current professors describe the history of their discipline. The square volume is illustrated with many historical and current photos. The editors are Chiara Cecalupo and Stefan Heid.
On today's 9 November, the consecration day of the Lateran Basilica - caput et mater omnium ecclesiarum Urbis et Orbis - we would like to draw your attention to the book "Altar and Church. Principles of Liturgy from Early Christianity", which is currently being published in english by Catholic University of America Press and Schnell und Steiner. It deals in detail with the liturgy in the early Christian churches of St John Lateran, St Peter and St Paul Outside the Walls.
The Irish Steyler missionary Vincent Twomey received his doctorate from the University of Regensburg in 1978 with the thesis "Apostolikos Thronos", supervised by Joseph Ratzinger. The work, originally published by Aschendorff, has now been published in a revised version by the University of Steubenville.
An expanded third German edition of the book "Altar und Kirche. Prinzipien christlicher Liturgie" by Stefan Heid is now available again. This edition corresponds to the new English edition also published by Schnell & Steiner in Regensburg "Altar and Church. Principles of Liturgy from Early Christianity".
In view of the war in Israel/Palestine, it is particularly welcome that Bianca Kühnel has published a book on images of Jerusalem in Europe: "Jerusalem Icons in the European Space" (Peeters Publishers).
Prelate Helmut Moll (Cologne) has published the 8th edition of the German Martyrology of Witnesses to the Faith of the 20th Century with Schöningh-Verlag. It now includes almost 1000 people. An appealing website provides an insight into the many people and fates, including the Berlin layman Karl-Heinrich Schäfer, who was a scholarship holder of the Roman Institute of the Görres Society from 1903 to 1914 and thus the longest-serving scholarship holder of the Institute. In 1914, he went off to fight in the World War, but was sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp because of his rejection of National Socialism, where he died in January 1945.
Römisches Institut der Görres-Gesellschaft
