Because Blogspot will not publish it under "comments."
Any honest reader of CrossCurrents knows how extensive my coverage in defense of Benedict XVI has been since his election in 2005. I have lamented the bad press he has received, and I have carefully examined his encyclicals to help my readers comprehend their undoubted importance. I have also recounted the history of Joseph Ratzinger’s break with his former allies from Vatican II, and expressed my own opinion that, if men of good will may disagree, there is something valid coming from both camps.
As for “Connecting the Dots,” I did not refer explicitly to Benedict XVI because in most respects the forgetting of Vatican II was already accomplished before his election. He is undoubtedly a product of the Council, since many of the salient aspects of his papacy were unthinkable before the Council. But in this latest piece, my concern was simply for the possibility that the Council’s work would be in vain due to the entrenchment of those opposing renewal itself. This same threat, of course, arose during the Council itself, and it caused Ratzinger much the same anxiety then as I feel now. As he wrote in 1963:
“There was a certain discomforting feeling that the whole enterprise might come to nothing more than a mere rubber-stamping of decisions already made, thus impeding rather than fostering the renewal needed in the Catholic Church…. The Council would have disappointed and discouraged all those who had placed their hopes and it; it would have paralyzed all their healthy dynamism and swept aside once again the many questions people of our era had put to the Church.”
Oh, Dear Bernie - how can you know so much but understand so little? But no matter how sorry I feel for you - or even how often I find myself irritated by your shenanigans - I can't really let you hide behind the shield of ignorance; you forget after all that I was on the same side as you for many years - "entrenched", one might say - but not exactly in opposition to THE COUNCIL in those days!!
ReplyDeleteCome on, old top; where have "those opposing renewal itself" (supposing for a moment that "renewal itself" is the sine qua non of the whole thing) been "entrench[ed]" anywhere in recent memory? The Wanderer? Una Voce? TFP? More like foxholes than trenches for those poor chaps; they've found precious few entrenchments in chanceries or campuses, or down at the CCB. Certainly nowhere that they could reach any of the levers of ecclesiastical power...
Methinks you're trying to entrench the Ratzinger of 1963 in your shotgun seat, necktie and all; but that dog won't hunt! This whole thing sounds like a bunch of sour grapes, old chum. The barque has been pulled off of the rocks, patched-up, and is putting back out into the deep - but there's ol' B.S., standing on the shore scaling rocks at Her hull and cursing the bilge pumps even as Her sails fill with a fresh breeze...