SOURCE: “The Vicars of Christ on Earth,” in New York Times Book Review, June 24, 1979, pp. 11, 44-5.

In the following review, Schroth discusses John Paul's theological views in Fruitful and Responsible Love and Sign of Contradiction.

It is almost a plunge into nostalgia now, only nine months after the events themselves, to relive the three months of the three Popes; when the television camera peered benevolently down like the eye of God on the wooden box holding the discolored corpse of the sad, sensitive, loving but not well-loved Giovanni Montini; when Dan Rather struggled to pronounce Castel Gandolfo and announced that the funeral mass was coming to an end though it had barely begun; when all those never-before and never-since-heard-of papal “candidates” popped full-color onto the covers of Newsweek and Time; and when the Roman Catholic Church—briefly and imperfectly embodied in the 111 mostly elderly Cardinal electors of the...