Where the Wind is Blowing
I am grateful for Massimo Faggioli’s thoughtful critique of a recent paper I gave. I invite you to read it. Were I to offer a brief antiphonal response, it would be by way of three remarks. First, a bishop belongs by definition to everyone, not to an elite of whatever colour: his task is to seek the truth and to speak it in charity wherever he is called, in season and out of season. Secondly, my talk was principally about the Nicene creed, not about Vatican II. A couple of statements about the council did need development. It is great that Dr Faggioli picks them up, notably the complex, important question of hermeneutics. Thirdly, my reference to tediousness concerned not sometimes fraught, earnest processes of dialectic enquiry, but the mud-slinging of which we have seen rather too much.
Regarding the liberal-conservative dichotomy, I love the statement made by Fr Elmar Salmann in his marvellous discourse of farewell to Sant’Anselmo, where for 30 years he taught students to think, and to delight in thinking: ‘Perhaps we might say […] that my way of proceeding has been neither conservative nor liberal but rather classical and liberating [classico e liberante].’ Now that’s a statement apt to air out a stuffy room — and an aspiration I share.
