The first thing was love. His first encyclical - the programmatic one - was entitled God is love, taking the degree scroll from the first letter of St. John (8:4). There he explained how between eros and agape there is no abyss. Human love (ascending) and divine love (descending) can be complementary. But in order to convert human eros into true Christian agape, purification is necessary. Like our poor heart and like gold in the crucible: passing through the fire of pain, the impurities are burned away and at the end we are left with a gold of many carats. Such is our love. In this first encyclical of 2005, the pope-teacher also explained to us that love, charity and holiness form a continuum, a progressive and inclined plane. Human love can become true Christian charity, as we have seen, until it reaches holiness, which is nothing other than total love.

These ideas are completed with the social encyclical Love in Truth (2009). Apart from recalling the "cry of the poor and of nature" - as Pope Francis would later say - the interesting thing was that here Pope Benedict presented all these themes together. The environment and bioethics, the ethics of finance and the social doctrine of the Church were presented here in an inseparable way. John Paul II was applauded when he spoke of social issues and criticized for his sexual ethics. Benedict XVI then presented all these themes inseparably united. So we can speak of this as a "global encyclical". But above all he explained the complementarity between love and truth. Love without truth degenerates into arbitrariness and sentimentality, as we can see today. Truth without love is harsh and merciless. St. Paul spoke of "speaking the truth in charity" (Eph 4:15). This was the motto that runs through this third encyclical, complementary to the first.

He who, as prefect, had been the "guardian of the faith", thus became during his pontificate the "pope of love and hope". According to the decoders and deconstructionists of the Benedictine magisterium, his second and most original encyclical on hope was his most original. Saved by hope (Rom 8:24) is a hymn about the great hope, Jesus Christ. Above all the small hopes that utopias and ideologies propose to us, we place our hope in God, who alone can save us. The allusions not only to Nietzsche (a classic in Benedictine encyclicals), but also to post-Marxist authors of the Frankfurt School were striking. Benedict XVI invoked Adorno and Horkheimer to recall that injustice in this world cries out for justice in the other. In addition, the explanation he offered of purgatory as meeting with Jesus Christ convinced friends and strangers alike. This made it a particularly ecumenical encyclical. Finally, remembering the ultimate realities made it fashionable to speak of the hereafter, even in Sunday homilies.

The last encyclical was "four-handed". After a year dedicated to faith, an encyclical dedicated to this foundational theological virtue was promised and then published in 2013. In the middle came none other than his Withdrawal and Pope Francis did not hesitate to make it his own and sign it at the beginning of his pontificate, thus becoming his first great text. The language and ideas are, however, distinctly Ratzingerian. After the encyclicals dedicated to love and hope, he completed the triptych with one dedicated to faith. There he explained faith as a relationship and knowledge: how through trust in Jesus Christ we obtain the confidence that reveals to us the deepest divine mysteries. Faith is a cooperative knowledge , we would say now, in which we participate in the same vision of God. This is where one of the typically Benedictine themes comes in: the relationship between faith and reason. Intelligence obliges us to deepen our faith, and faith moves us to know more and more and more. However, as the two Popes reminded us, we must not forget that faith is a gift and that it comes from listening (cf. Rom 10:17). This is why we said that faith is a knowledge at network: a knowledge in solidarity, never alone. It always comes to us in the Church and through the sacrament of baptism. Being aware of our own origins will help us to rediscover our own identity. This faith is also destined, he concludes, to become incarnate in our lives and in our world.

Benedict XVI, the theologian pope, reminded us that we must live by faith, hope and charity. A triptych that, if we are capable of deepening it and making it the life of our lives, can transform our society. A good bequest that he has left us to face the part of the third millennium that lies ahead of us. And for this we are grateful to him.

What more can be said about love that has not already been said? The Church has been proclaiming this new commandment of Jesus Christ for twenty centuries, and yet we still seem to need to be reminded of it. In this cruel and at the same time exciting world, where economic growth is ever more unequal; where six million children still die of hunger every year, and between 36 and 53 million are eliminated... In a world in which even killing is done in the name of God, neither the Church nor any person of more or less good will can remain silent. Thus, we could subtitle this first encyclical of Benedict XVI paraphrasing the degree scroll of a famous Latin American novel: Love in the Time of Cholera.

Benedict XVI wanted to lead a common front to defend love, life, the family, justice and charity in a well-meaning but sometimes forgetful world. The text (originally in German and Italian, 25 pages long, with shorter paragraphs than John Paul II used to use) consists of two parts: one dedicated to love, divine and human, and the other to charity, as rule of obligatory conduct in the Church. The private leads immediately to the public. In his first encyclical, Benedict XVI quoted without complexes Nietzsche, Descartes, Virgil, Plato, his beloved St. Augustine or Teresa of Calcutta. But above all, he turned to the inexhaustible Song of Songs, to St. John (the evangelist of love) and to the rest of the Bible. It was a reminder that the "revolution of love" proposal by Christ has not yet triumphed completely in our small world. Love is a pending revolution, also for Christians.

Benedict XVI took degree scroll from Paul's letter to the Romans, "in hope we have been saved" (8:24). The German pope asked himself: what subject hope is there in this world? In the face of those "without God", the Christian relies on the one who gives him all hope. Thus, "a distinctive element of Christians is the fact that they have a future": their life "does not end in emptiness" (n. 2). This hope has its foundation in the God revealed in Jesus Christ, and not in a human messiah (cf. n. 4). It is based on the Jesus who, in the ancient Christian sarcophagi, was represented as philosopher and shepherd, that is, as way, truth and life (cf. Jn 14:6). He thus criticized the political and earthly utopias that place all their hopes in this world. The encyclical on hope showed the disappointments experienced by humanity in recent times, such as Marxism, which "has forgotten man and has forgotten his freedom".

Having a firm foundation guarantees fidelity and patience, the little sister of hope, as Paul Claudel wrote. "The believer needs to know how to wait, patiently enduring trials in order to be able to "attain the promise" (cf. Heb 10:36)" (n. 8). This faith underlies every hope and every expectation of eternal life, Benedict XVI went on to explain. There is much life beyond. He described the Christian future with a force and poetry that stimulate the imagination and the intelligence: "It would be the moment of immersion in the ocean of infinite love, in which time - the before and the after - no longer exists. We can only try to think of this moment as life in the sense of plenary session of the Executive Council, to immerse ourselves ever anew in the immensity of being, at the same time as we are simply overflowing with joy" (n. 12).

Benedict XVI's third encyclical was intended to coincide with the 40th anniversary of Populorum Progressio, Paul VI's social encyclical published in 1967. The complexity of the essay and the continual tweaks that the initial draft underwent explain why it did not come out until two years later. Then the crisis had put the Economics and social problems at the center of international attention. "If it had been published earlier, it would have been said to be prophetic, since it speaks of a crisis that was then not in sight," commented Cardinal Martino. Indeed, the ambition of the encyclical seemed to know no limits: it sought to overcome the ideological outline of today's world. Ross Douthat commented in the New York Times at the time: "Why doesn't concern for the environment include being pro-life? Why should civil service examination to the war in Iraq imply accepting anything in the field of bioethics? Why does support for free trade require defending the death penalty?

Beyond these questions, the content of the new encyclical was more complex. The degree scroll - love in truth - was already significant: truth and love are equally necessary and complementary. "Without truth, charity is relegated to a reduced and private sphere of relationships. It is excluded from the projects and processes for building a human development of universal scope, in the dialogue between knowledge and operability" (n. 4). Love and truth complement each other. It was necessary to inject them into our suffering world. Benedict XVI's encyclical affirmed that "society needs truth and love". Therefore, "the greatest contribution that the Church can make to development is to proclaim Christ," the Truth incarnate, dead and risen for love. It was he who said: "Truth makes free" and "love one another" (cf. Jn 8:31; 13:34).