Good Heavens! His Holiness thinks that the way to clarity and union is clarity and charity. What a shocking thing for a Pope to say. Next he'll say that unity means coming home to the Catholic Church.
Chris - My understanding is that the Papacy's view on ecumenism is now based on a commitment to a search for unity with the rest of Christendom, not just that of insisting on a "return home". Do I misunderstand its official commitment?
If the liberal denominations fail to heed the Benedict XVI's warning,the question of reunion will be settled, as orthodox protestants flee to Rome to escape the apostasy of their leaders and the liberal denominations become something other than Christian.
I am a little bit skeptical of those who see Benedict as a great conservative. I have to think, "compared to what?" Is he more "conservative" than Pius XII? Pius X? All those "dark age" popes who have been eclipsed by glorious sunrise Montini and Wojtyla -- is Benedict conservative as they were?
Forty years ago the Church pitched itself headlong into the modernist culture, like a lonely puppy greeting its master at the door. For forty years that irresistible force did not meet with anything approaching an immovable object.
The results are clear enough in terms of ecumenism, liturgy, and a host of other issues.
This is the context in which Benedict is thought to be a "conservative": he is trying to resist the irresistible, to the extent of putting limits upon it. He does not seek to roll back, but to consolidate.
It may be that Benedict believes that this is all that anyone can do at present. If that is in fact what he thinks, he may be right. The Church has presided over its own degradation, often with seeming relish. The rabid saturnalia which erupted after V2 was decades in the making. Fr Joe O'Leary is a poster boy for this eruption, of course, but he is also a good deal more common in his excesses than some people would prefer to think. He just goes a little bit further, and revels in his "Christian" nihilism a whole lot more lustily, than the rest.
Clearly, one does not clean up such a mess overnight.
But it may also be that Benedict, at bottom, has no quarrel with the "irresistible force", only with certain of its overreachings. This makes him a "conservative" only in the sense that he wants to apply the brakes judiciously, not throw the vehicle into reverse. In other words he is not so much a liberal or a conservative as a consolidator. This, at any rate, is the idea I get from reading the theological writings of Joseph Ratzinger.
If you want to consolidate the "gains" of the last forty years, Pope Ratzinger appears to be your man. But would this make him, for example, Pius XII's man? Or Pius X's man? What does that tell you about the state of the current Church? Is historical context truly everything?
I thought Fergus Kerr's chapter on Ratzinger in "Twentieth Century Catholic Theologians" was interesting, and rather disturbing. But then, I am not a "conservative" either.
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