After teaching in Catholic Schools for over 30 years, if I were to sum up her approach
to the world prior to the Pontificate of Pope St. John Paul the Great, I would
argue that she appears to have been trying to restore her lost public role by
finding common ground with "the world" and tailoring her message
to modern ways of thought. As Bl. Pope Paul VI recognized, at the end of
the Second Vatican Council liberal modernity has its own religion. The outcome
of the effort has therefore been a tendency to make Catholicism sound very much
like worship of the god of this world, and lead many Catholics to forget that
there is a difference between that worship and our own. This is a prime
thesis of my book, written as a first-hand account of the Church in the United
States following the Second Vatican Council.
MONDAY last I posted that Pope Francis might not be all that the secular media consider him to be, recommending a First Things piece on the matter. Today we read of Archbishop Chaput's interview with John Allen of the National Catholic (?) Reporter , in Rio for WYD. What caught my attention was the Archbishops's comment that alienated, non-serious Catholics perhaps interpret the Pope's openness as being less concerned than his predecessors with doctrine, and that it is already true that "the right wing of the Church" has not been happy with his election. As I argued in The Smoke of Satan , and as George Weigel has eloquently posited in Evangelical Catholicism , the political terms left and right are woefully inadequate as measurements of one's standing in the Body of Christ. There are only the orthodox, and the heterodox.
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