Read Paul Cella's article in Touchstone. His core disagreement with Thomas Woods' latest book is that he is not convinced that the Catholic Church of antiquity, of the middle ages, and of today is the same church.
Which I thought was a bit specious since, over time, he's not the same person. And you're not the same. And I'm not the same. Every seven years nearly every cell in our body is exchanged. And yet I presume he's unwilling to disavow his identity just because he was completely different in adolescence or as an unborn child. Taken to the extreme, the Church is completely different from one moment to the next. But if we had amnesia, how would we learn our identity? With the help of others. (I'll explain at the end.)
Pope Benedict recently addressed this very point with regard to those who say the Church after Vatican II is not the Church before:
There is an interpretation that I would call "a hermeneutic of discontinuity and rupture"; it has frequently availed itself of the sympathies of the mass media, and also one trend of modern theology. On the other, there is the "hermeneutic of reform," of renewal in the continuity of the one subject-Church which the Lord has given to us. She is a subject which increases in time and develops, yet always remaining the same, the one subject of the journeying People of God...To paraphrase/update St. Augustine, who dealt with the same issue back in the 4th century, if you ask anyone before Vatican II to take you to a Catholic Church they'll take you to St. John's or St. Margaret's or Sacred Heart...etc... And then if you ask anyone after Vatican II to take you to a Catholic Church, they'll take you to...St. John's or St. Maggie's or Sacred Heart...
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