Popes like citations. You don’t need to read a papal encyclical to recognize this; everything from an apostolic constitution to a motu proprio to a published homily that comes from the pontiff’s pen will inevitably include dozens and perhaps hundreds of references to the church’s intellectual patrimony. Scripture or church documents usually dominate, and for the last half-century, the documents of the Second Vatican Council have often taken pride of place in the footnotes.
Sometimes popes go rogue. Pope Francis liked to reference the English priest and novelist Robert Hugh Benson as well as Fyodor Dostoevsky. As is the case with any pope who reigns for more than a few years, the documents of the latter years of Francis’ tenure also had a lot of references to his own papal oeuvre. (If you want to get technical, even St. Luke liked that move: What’s the opening line of Acts of the Apostles? “In my first book, Theophilus…”) And Pope Benedict XVI liked to include Plato and other classical Greco-Roman authors as much as he did any church father.
