John Paul II was always two steps ahead of his critics, escaping the rigid either-or categories into which they tried to push him by finding the new both-and possibilities that come from integrating Vatican II into the long tradition of the Church. Which is precisely what Benedict XVI is up to in his writing. Jesus of Nazareth is a promise that the intellectual life is not divorced from the life of faith and the scholarly pursuit is not the enemy of piety. It's an idea, in the end — a claim that God exists, that Christ is real, and thus that the world makes a kind of unified sense. That, as young Eleanor so devoutly wishes, things really do cohere.

One sometimes wishes the Vatican itself would get the news of what this pope is doing. From the ginned-up Muslim reaction to a scholarly passage in Benedict's 2006 Regensberg lecture to the 2010 reporting on the priest scandals, the Vatican bureaucracy has lurched from one mismanaged crisis to another. Perhaps there was some benefit to the old style of pope, who understood how to rule. Neither the last pope nor this one qualify as even vaguely competent managers for the bureaucratic side of the job. 

Of course, John Paul II had an alternative: jetting back and forth around the world, his personal magnetism served as a kind of quasi-Vatican. Simply by the sheer star power of his personality, he carried Catholicism forward. Benedict has proved quite charming in his public appearances, but it is a quieter sort of charm, more a twinkle than a blaze. And when combined with his age (84 this month), his much more retiring nature, and his scholarly interest, he lacks the resources that John Paul II had for projecting his vision before the public eye.

That's what makes a book like Jesus of Nazareth so important: this is where Benedict is doing his work. The book is the equivalent of John Paul II's personal appearances, teaching the new vision of a Church in which the best of the modern joins without contradiction the best of the past — all in order to offer the world an idea. A coherent alternative.

From the perspective of Eleanor, sitting in the pews of St Vincent de Paul's parish, waiting for the noon Mass to begin, it's all the better that the result is exactly what she loves: a book. A pious thing to read. A smart thing to read.