AsiaTimes Online
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John Paul II and Cardinal Ratzinger belonged to the "Augustinian" minority of senior clergy who tried to steer the Church back to its fundamental mission, namely repentance and salvation. Anthony Mansueto of the University of New Mexico, a left-wing critic, remonstrates bitterly against this current:
[Around Vatican II] a new Augustinian Right emerged which regarded Neo-Thomism and Social Catholicism as too focused on the social apostolate and ineffective in communicating what they saw as the essential message of Christianity: human sinfulness and God's offer of forgiveness. This group, which developed around the journal Communio, and which includes both the current pope and his chief theologian, Joseph Ratzinger, but of whom the most important theological representative was Hans Urs von Balthasar, explicitly rejects both the "cosmological" approach of historic Thomism, which rises to God through an attempt to explain the natural world, and the "anthropological" approach of the conciliar (and in a different way the liberation) theologians, in favor of an "esthetic" approach which gives priority to the passive reception of the self-sacrificial gift of Christ on the cross. The effect is a sort of clericalized Lutheranism.
Mansueto intends the term "clericalized Lutheranism" as an insult, but there is a grain of truth here. John Paul II's Augustinian leaning made him more of a unifying figure in the Christian world, in particular among US evangelicals. The scriptural rather than philosophical emphasis of the Augustinian current, moreover, deepened the late pope's instinctive sympathy for Judaism, the scriptural religion par excellence.
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