Pope Benedict’s Patristic Perspective | Fr. David Vincent Meconi, S.J. | Catholic World Report
Student of the past, prophet of the future
In his (now famed) Christmas Address to the Roman Curia (December 22, 2005) Pope Benedict contrasted the two ways of understanding the Second Vatican Council. While some have insisted on seeing the Council as a clear break from what went before, others maintain that although some aspects of the Church were given new expression, the essence of the faith and those truths upon which human salvation hinges did not change. Pope Benedict named the first position the “hermeneutic of discontinuity and rupture” and the second the “hermeneutic of reform.” Aware that the Church must continuously develop and reform, the Holy Father’s address makes it quite clear that such growth is always organic, an unfolding of the fundamental truths Christ first taught his Apostles.
Such an insight is surely rooted in Benedict’s own love of the Church and in his study and command of Catholic doctrine, but also, more particularly, in his love of the early Church Fathers. For what is of note in this Christmas Address is how the entire message is rooted in the thought of St. Augustine, the opening line of the address coming from one of the Bishop of Hippo’s own Christmas sermons “Expergiscere, homo: quia pro te Deus factus est homo—Wake up, O man! For your sake God became man” (Sermon 185). As a student, Joseph Ratzinger wrote one of his doctoral dissertations on St. Augustine’s ecclesiology; as Pope Benedict he included St. Augustine’s famed seashell on his papal coat of arms, thereby pointing the world to both the power of the sacraments as well as the inexhaustibility of Christian doctrine. (The story goes that one day Augustine took a break from writing his treatise on the Trinity and while strolling along the shore, came across a young boy using a seashell to displace the waters of the Mediterranean into a hole he had dug. Augustine naturally told the boy that this was an impossible task, to which the Christ-child responded: “And you will never penetrate the mysteries of God.”)
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