The Church In Crisis: Pope Benedict’s Theological Vision
by Joseph A. Komonchak
"We are living," preached Benedict XVI on the day of his installation, "in alienation, in the salt waters of suffering and death; in a sea of darkness without light." A leading American theologian examines the roots of Benedict’s thought in stark contrasts between church and world.
The Enlightenment & All That - a book review of Memory and Identity by Bernard G. Prusak
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A more balanced view of Benedict than that Commonweal tripe is the column by John Allen Jr.
The Commonweal article again attempts to divide aggiorniamento from ressourcement, to reduce these two complementary drives to a matter of politics.
Commonweal: "He [Ratzinger] showed little interest in another stream (represented by figures such as Marie-Dominique Chenu, Bernard Lonergan, Karl Rahner, and Edward> Schillebeeckx) which, inspired by Aquinas, proposed and attempted a positive engagement with modern intellectual and cultural movements.
Balthasar: "Indeed, it was not as though we were unaware that with an opening to the world, an aggiorniamento, a broadening of the horizons, a translation of the Christian message into an intellectual language understandable by the modern world, only half is done. The other half - of at least equal importance - is a reflection on the specifically Christian element itself, a purification, a deepening, a centering of its idea, which alone renders us capable of representing it, radiating it, translating it believably in the world" (My Work in Retrospect, p51).
The "godfather" of the Ressourcement is Charles Peguy who, like Dorothy Day, discovered Christianity from within Marxism (the very provocation for ressourcement is engagement with the world).
As Prefect of the CDF, Ratzinger lacked the liberty to develop his ideas in a broad way, like Balthasar or de Lubac. And yet, in his ressourcement (including Luther and Augustine), Ratzinger has laid the groundwork for ecumenism with Protestants and aggiorniamento with the world.
The JP2 book review (also linked to) demonstrates the hazards of aggiorniamento ungrounded in ressourcement. To take seriously the aims and values of the Enlightenment, one must examine them at their strongest point: their connection with Christian tradition, as Henri de Lubac did in The Drama of Atheist Humanism. What made Nazism, Marxism and other ideologies so pernicious is their cultivation of Christian values apart from the fullness of Christian tradition in the church, apart from God made man in Christ.
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