You can expect a rush of articles over the next month noting the year that’s passed since John Paul II’s death and the election of Benedict XVI. John Thavis gets us rolling with this CNS piece today:

He has urged Catholics to rediscover Christ as the focus of their personal lives and to resist the tendency to make the individual ego "the only criterion" for their choices. The pope has been careful to phrase this as a sympathetic invitation and not a warning.

"We continually close our doors; we continually want to feel secure and do not want to be disturbed by others and by God" — and yet still Christ will come for his people, the pope said in a sermon last May.

As a teacher, he has turned to Scripture far more than doctrine, making connections between the early Christians of apostolic times and modern men and women struggling to live their faith.

Pope Benedict has tackled contemporary social and political issues by emphasizing a few main principles: that human rights rest on human dignity, that people come before profits, that the right to life is an ancient measure of humanity and not just a Catholic teaching, and that efforts to exclude God from civil affairs are corroding modern society.

He returns often to a central theme — the relationship between God and man — in language that can be clear-cut and gripping.

"Human life is a relationship … and the basic relationship is with the Creator, otherwise all relationships are fragile. To choose God, that is the essential thing. A world emptied of God, a world that has forgotten God, loses life and falls into a culture of death," the pope said in a talk in March.