It is not easy to summarize the five years of pontificate that today, April 19, Josef Ratzinger occupied the See of Peter after the death of John Paul II. But we can summarize them in seven central axes, seven concepts around which the papacy of Benedict XVI has revolved.

The first is love. The first encyclical was entitled God is love and explained how eros must be purified in order to become true human and Christian love. That is, agape. Charity must also include affection and affection. "God is affection," a 20th century saint translated the famous phrase of St. John. Love is possible because God loves us first. If God loves and loves us, we can love with that love lent to us by God himself. This is the "revolution of love" proposal by Benedict XVI. And this has much to do with holiness, he concludes.

The second axis is reason. The Pope-Professor has spoken on countless occasions about this topic , which seems to him to be central and decisive. Already a year before his election as pope, he had agreed with Jürgen Habermas that reason and religion could cure each other of their respective pathologies. That is why the German philosopher called Ratzinger a "friend of reason." The "question of truth" has occupied an important place in his writings from the very beginning. Christianity is the religion of love and truth. After the encyclicals on love and hope, now comes one on truth. Caritas in veritate is the title of the last one: truth without love becomes rigid; love without truth degenerates into pure sentimentality and arbitrariness.

Third, (ad)prayer. He knows that it is the true motor of the Church and of Christian life. In the face of short-term activism, the German Pope knows how to wait, pray and think. But above all to pray. The liturgy is one of the central points of his theology and he has had a special interest in it since his childhood. Reason and liturgy - he said - brought him into the world of God. He is convinced that the crisis of the Church is due to the neglect of the liturgy and that the best way to fill the churches consists precisely in celebrating it well. As for John Paul II, the Eucharist is the center: it makes the Church.

The fourth, creation. Many have spoken of the "green roots" of Benedict XVI's latest social encyclical. There he has managed to combine the economic crisis and business ethics with life and sexual ethics, bioethics and respect for the environment. That is why it is a global encyclical. But his allusions to ecology and the environment are also continuous. For Ratzinger, creation is a forgotten dogma, to which we should return in order to undo the wrongs we have inflicted on the world today. He thus advocates a Christian ecologism, interior and exterior. "In the beginning was the Logos," he repeats: the creative reason, the reason-love that gives meaning to things. This is what we must return to in order to be right with nature and with our way of being.

The fifth axis is Jesus Christ. Despite his multiple occupations in his ministry, he has not given up his project staff of writing his Jesus of Nazareth. Perhaps because he considers it an important part of his duties: to speak above all about Jesus Christ. And to speak of him as God and man, as Christ of faith and Jesus of history. He is not just another avatar of divinity, but the Son of God made man. He alone saves. Remembering the centrality of Jesus Christ is not just another occupation, but the main mission statement of the Church. For this reason, in today's multicultural society, it is especially necessary to proclaim Christ, dead and risen.

The sixth idea of the pontificate is Church. Faced with the well-known slogan "Christ yes, Church no", Pope Ratzinger wants to recall that the Church is the body and spouse of Christ. She is also the people, the family of God, as he often repeats. Jesus Christ himself made use of his mediation and also of the apostles, bishops and other ministers who follow this line of continuity. He is convinced that the Church's mission statement consists of proclaiming Christ and growing in communion and cohesion in the Church. In this way it will be possible to carry forward this ecumenical project of growing in unity in the one Church of Christ, which is beginning to give its results. Slow but sure steps, as in the ascent of a mountain.

And finally, the seventh axis that has marked the five years of Benedict XVI is beauty. Ratzinger has always been in love with beauty, since his early love of music, especially that of Mozart. He has said that a theologian who does not have this sensibility is dangerous. He himself tells the story of the bequests of King Vladimir of Russia. He was looking for a religion for his kingdom. The Bulgarian Muslims and the Germanic Catholics left his ambassadors indifferent. When they arrived in Constantinople, in the beauty of worship in the basilica of Hagia Sophia, they thought they had found "heaven on earth". Russia was converted to Orthodoxy. The beauty of Christian art and the lives of the saints is the main agent of evangelization today.