Address to the Roman Curia Offering Christmas Greetings
A speech of Pope Benedict XVI, forty years after the Second Vatican Council closed, in which he says that its implementation has been difficult in large parts of the church and describes two opposed ways of interpreting it.
Benedict XVI had been present at all four sessions of the council as theological adviser to Cardinal Frings of Cologne, according to the Holy See’s biography of him, and spoke here as pope. In the last part of the address he asks why the reception of the council has been so difficult, and answers that two ways of reading it met and quarrelled: one he calls a hermeneutic of discontinuity and rupture, which looks past the texts to a spirit of the council, and the other a “hermeneutic of reform”, of renewal within the continuity of the one church.
The speech is one party’s account of the dispute, and it sides with the second reading. It is cited in the Second Vatican Council as a pope’s own statement that the reception of the council is contested among Catholics.
Cited in
- 1962 to 1965, firm date