Last week I wrote on the CatholicCulture site about the unwillingness of our bishops to respond to theological dissent in any effective way. It’s a problem that has troubled many of us for decades.

This week Sandro Magister reproduces an address given by then-Cardinal Ratzinger to Chilean bishops in 1988, shortly after the (first) excommunication of Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre and the newly ordained SSPX bishops. The whole text is worth reading, but I was struck by this passage:

I myself witnessed, when I was a professor, how the same bishop who before the Council had dismissed an irreproachable professor for his somewhat brusque manner of speaking, after the Council found himself unable to dismiss another professor who openly denied some fundamental truths of the faith.

Was it something about Vatican II— or, more likely, the prevailing attitudes of the following years— that made bishops reluctant to defend the integrity of the faith?

This is no small question. The Ratzinger text continues:

All this leads many to wonder whether the Church of today is really the same as yesterday, or whether it has been exchanged for another without notice. The only way to make Vatican II credible is to present it clearly for what it is: a part of the whole and sole Tradition.

Ratzinger/Benedict did what he could to present Vatican II in that light: the hermeneutic of continuity. Either his work must be continued and completed— which entails rejecting anything that clearly violates the “whole and sole Tradition"— or else…

Or else the SSPX is right.