George Weigel’s new book The Next Pope is a call to ressourcement. This means that the Church must engage in a retrieval of her teaching by looking back to the authoritative sources of the faith—Scripture and Tradition. And in order to revitalize the present so as to move faithfully forward. The specific focus is on the papacy and the next pope in light of a Church in mission.
Weigel argues that the Church is currently living through the turbulence of a transition from Counter-Reformation Catholicism to Vatican II Catholicism, the Church of the New Evangelization. The “world Church [has] embraced the Christ-centered, evangelical vision of the Catholic future” proposed by John XXIII in his opening address at Vatican II, Gaudet Mater Ecclesia. The central question has been around for more than half century: “the debate over whether Vatican II was council in continuity with revelation and tradition, or a council of rupture and discontinuity in which the Church essentially reinvented itself.”
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