Bozanić Josip: Čovjek, crkva i domovina u otajstvu Uskrsa i Božića

Cardinal Josip Bozanić: Man, church and homeland in the mystery of Easter and Christmas

All the cardinal's Christmas and Easter messages from the time he took over the Zagreb archdiocese in 1997, including the message for Easter 2009 in one book! "Each of these epistles was awaited and accepted with great interest by the church and social public at the time, and each of them experienced a great response when it appeared. Now, thanks to the 'Voice of the Council', we have them all collected and published in one book. This allows us to better perceive their mutual connection and the continuity of the pastoral teachings of their author", points out the Archbishop of Rijeka, Ivan Devčić, in the foreword. Social ethicist and professor at the Catholic Theological Faculty of the University of Zagreb, Dr. Stjepan Baloban, points out in the foreword of the book that the feature of the messages "is that each of them is placed in the church and social context of the time in which it was created and as such offers the view of the Archbishop of Zagreb on the church and social situation in Croatia", interpreting the significance of the Archbishops of Zagreb in the entire Croatian history. Considering the basic thread connection, Dr. Baloban sees the main content of the Christmas messages in the title "Man is in the center", and in the Easter messages he finds the message of hope that comes from faith, and he put the subtitle to his text: "Christianity offers hope". "By publishing the Christmas and Easter messages of the Archbishop of Zagreb and Cardinal Josip Bozanić, we get the opportunity to read and study individual messages anew and, from a certain distance of time, make our own judgment about them, and that in terms of the determinants of ecclesiasticism, socio-political reality and especially in human-society, Church-society relations," concludes Dr. Baloban in his afterword. The cardinal's twelve Christmas and twelve Easter messages were published in their entirety on the pages of the Catholic weekly "Glas Koncila" and other Catholic media, and now with the introduction "The Christian faith is more than humanism" from the cardinal's pastoral letter for Lent in 2001 and the foreword by Archbishop Devčić of Rijeka and the afterword by Dr. Baloban, the book offers an excellent compass to every member of Croatian society who wants to recognize the power of festive and benevolent speech Catholic Church in view of numerous messages aimed at the common good of the Croatian people and the Croatian state. As Archbishop Devčić concludes in his foreword, the cardinal's latest book is a contribution to the Church's commitment to the good of man, because "faith affects the whole person, in its physical and spiritual, individual and social, cultural and national, private and public dimensions, and that is why it is not possible to limit it to just one area, for example to be, as some outside the Church want, only a "private matter" of the individual, without "interference" in public life". The book has 320 pages, an extensive glossary, and is enriched with illustrations by the academic painter from Split, Josip Botteri Dini.