On Benedict XVI's Conservatism

As the news stories on the new pope continue to pour in, David Mills at Mere Christianity has assembled a very useful commentary filled with links to some of the best writing since Cardinal Ratzinger's election. Among them is this piece by Sandro Magister, where we find this:

Over the years, accusations of fundamentalism have been scattered against this German theologian who today is the new head of the Catholic Church.

During the 1960’s, the young Ratzinger followed the second Vatican Council as an expert consultant for the cardinal of Cologne, Joseph Frings. He launched his first darts against the Holy Office, “out of step with the times and a cause of harm and scandal,” which he would direct many years later. But very soon after the end of the council, he began to denounce its effects, which were “crudely divergent” from what was to be expected.

The path he took was parallel to that of two other first-rate theologians of the time, his friends and instructors Henri De Lubac and Hans Urs von Balthasar, both of whom also became cardinals, both of whom were also accused of having turned aside from progressivism to conservatism. Ratzinger never paid any attention to the label that was applied to him: “I have not changed; they are the ones who have changed.”

His was a strange conservatism, in any case. It was apt to disturb, rather than pacify, the Church. One of his favorite models is Saint Charles Borromeo, the archbishop of Milan who, after the Council of Trent, did nothing less than “reconstruct the Catholic Church, which was almost destroyed in the area around Milan as well, without returning to the Middle Ages to do so; on the contrary, he created a modern form of the Church.”

Today the transformations in civilization are no less epochal, in his eyes. The culture that has established itself in Europe “constitutes the most radical possible contradiction, not only of Christianity, but also of the religious traditions of humanity,” he argued on April 1 at Subiaco, at his last conference during the reign of John Paul II. And therefore the Church must react with all the courage it can muster, not conforming itself to the times, not falling to its knees before the world, but "bringing, with holy consternation, the gift of faith to all, the gift of friendship with Christ."

This touches on, at a much deeper level, the subject I addressed earlier today in my commentary on David Gelernter's L.A. Times op-ed on the reactionary left. Contra those for whom conservatism is little more than a caricature, the ends toward which a thoughtful conservatism moves are, after all, not with us at the moment, else one wouldn't need to move in order to reach them. In this light, perhaps the recalcitrance of the left, both within the Church and within a very different setting, the American political arena, reflects a fear of moving beyond where we are, toward any end not already in their possession or only recently lost. It is here, in the adoration not of God, but of the mores of a particular time and culture, that makes the current alliance between the extremes of left and right possible. Their principal differences lie merely in the particulars of the times and cultures they revere.