Pave Benedikt er rett mann, på rett sted, til rett tid, skrev Martin Mosebach i en artikkel på tysk (her oversatt til engelsk) for ca en måned siden, i forb med pavens femårsjubileum:
Pope Benedict XVI has described the hours before the election that raised him to the throne of Peter with these words: “I saw the guillotine approaching.” Nobody knew better than he what would await the new Pope. Nobody but he had a more precise assessment of the four decades that had passed since the end of the Vatican II.
This council holds an exceptional position among the councils of Church history. In the past a council decided a theological dispute which had built up and introduced a phase of consolidation. Vatican II, however, which in its constitutions had largely confirmed the traditional teaching of the Church, initiated a period of theological controversy, of uncertainty, loss of substance and manifest rupture in Tradition.
It wanted to introduce an “opening to the world” but, after forty years, one has to admit that the Church is able to make clear less than ever before her most essential concerns. She has lost the power to advocate her own mission despite transforming herself into the secular domain with the greatest assiduity. Theological chaos had as a consequence that in many countries religious instruction worthy of the name no longer existed. In Germany, Catholic Christianity became an unknown religion also among, of all people, Catholics. Many spoke of a revolution in the Church. Her internal and external appearance had changed so radically that one could hardly speak any more of “development” and “evolution,” those favorite concepts of ecclesiology.
These negative results, however, were hardly able to discourage Benedict XVI. … …
Les gjerne hele stykket – se lenke over.