…of the Pope’s annual year-end address to the Roman Curia? The one that has inspired many headlines?
(The Vatican is usually especially slow about translating this one)
Go to the Papa Ratzinger Forum, this page, and scroll down. Teresa Benedetta has done the work:
I would invite you to read the whole thing, and to look, in particular, for the genius of this particular Pope at work as he takes up subjects and popular ways of thinking, flips them on their heads and then follows through to logical conclusions before we really even realize what is going on.
Aside from that, which is so fascinating to read, I appreciated this reflection on the Word of God, the subject of the Synod of Bishops:

Finally, we must recall the Bishops Synod – pastors coming from around the world met together about the Word of God which they exalted together, around the Word of God, whose great manifestation is found in Sacred Scripture.
That which we often take for granted daily, we grasped freshly in its sublimity:
– The fact that God speaks to us, that he answers our questions.
– The fact that he, using human words, speaks to us in person and we can listen to him, and in listening, learn to know him and to understand him.
– The fact that he enters our lives to shape it, and we can step out of our life in order to enter the vastness of his mercy.
Thus we realised all over that God in his Word addresses each of us, speaks to the heart of every being. If our heart is awake and opens itself to listen, then everyone can learn to hear the Word that is addressed specifically to him.
But only when we hear God speaking to each of us in such a personal way, then we can also understand that his Word is meant to bring us each closer to one another, so that we may find the way out of what is only personal.
This Word has shaped our common history and will continue to do so. And so we realize all over that precisely because the Word is so personal, then we can understand it correctly and totally only within the ‘we’ of the community instituted by God – always conscious that we can never exhaust it completely, that it always has something new to say to each generation.
We have understood that, of course, the Biblical texts were written in specific times, and therefore constitute in this sense a book from the past. But we also saw that their message does not remain in the past nor can they be kept there. God fundamentally always speaks in the present, and we will have heard the Bible fully only if we discover the ‘present’ of God, which calls to us now.
Finally, it was important to experience that in the Church, there is a Pentecost even today – that the Church speaks in many tongues, and this, not only in the external sense that all the languages in the world are represented in her, but in an even deeper sense: in her are found the multiple ways of experiencing God and the world, the richness of different cultures, and only thus can we see the vastness of human existence, and because of this, the vastness of the Word of God.
We have also learned that Pentecost continues to be ‘under way’, it is still incomplete. There are a multitude of languages which still await the Word of God in the Bible translated for them.
And it has been moving to see the multiple testimonials of lay faithful who in every part of the world not only live the Word of God, but suffer for it.
A precious contribution was the address of a rabbi on the Sacred Scriptures of Israel, which are our Sacred Scriptures too.
And an important moment for the Synod was when Patriarch Bartholomew, in the light of Orthodox tradition, and with penetrating analysis, opened for us another way of access to the Word of God.
Let us now hope that the experiences and acquisitions of the Synod may effectively influence the life of the Church: on personal relations with Sacred Scriptures; on their interpretation in the liturgy and in catechesis as well as in scientific study – so that the Bible does not remain a Word of the past, but that its vitality and actual relevance may be read and disclosed in the vast dimensions of its meanings.

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