"By contrast, I had difficulties in penetrating the thought of Thomas Aquinas, whose crystal-clear logic seemed to me to be too closed in on itself, too impersonal and ready-made." Milestones Joseph Ratzinger, Ignatius Press, 1998, p 44

One of the professors with whom Ratzinger was very friendly (and who is still alive today) commented on this phenomenon in an interview with 30 Days Magazine in the January / February 2006 edition:

30 Days: In his seminary studies did his bugbears emerge also in the young Ratzinger ?
Fr. Alfred Läpple: The philosopher at Freising was Arnold Wilmsen, a neo-scholastic in tendency. Ratzinger has never spoken to me very much about him, perhaps because he didn't want to be discourteous. But Wilmsen's lectures slipped off like water off a raincoat. He said to me: I regret the time I'm wasting, it would be much more useful to go for a stroll with you...

30 Days: What was wrong with neo-scholasticism ?
A.L.: He also mentions it in his book (Milestones +TF). Wilmsen, who had become attached to the neo-Thomism he had studied in Roman theology faculties, seemed to him someone who no longer set himself questions, but is concerned to defend from all doubts the truths he thinks he possesses.

30 Days: And why did that create difficulties for Ratzinger ?
A.L.: It's not so much a matter of conflicting philosophical doctrines as of what man is. Man is always asking questions, and when he thinks he's answered one question, a bigger one is already presenting itself. The impulse to consider the truth as a possession to be defended has always unsettled him

30 Days N. 1/2-2006 p 60

Thus a serious question presents itself: If all is not cut and dried (and admittedly it isn't) but if one cannot form some stable conclusions, can we know at all ? The basis of thought itself is in serious jeopardy. Let us assume, though, that Ratzinger is right when he speaks of a core and a shell that changes, how can we know what the core is ? Who is to decide ? And if change (or "transformation") is the order of the day, then cannot today's conclusions be different tomorrow ? The stability of logic itself is undermined. Who's to say when or if anybody has found the truth. The logical conclusion of this school of thought is that ultimately everything is relative. How does one defend "I am the way, the truth and the life" against the spirit of religious indifferentism. Thomism answers these questions, openness to question one's beliefs ends in trouble.

Then there is yet another issue, and Bishop Williamson wrote about this in his last column:

Serious heads condemn the document for its doubletalk, and see in it no better than a decoy to lure Traditional Catholics back into the quicksands of the Conciliar church.

As to the doubletalk, now favouring Catholicism, now favoring Conciliarism, there is no doubt about it. Yet what else can one expect from what one might call a double-pope? Benedict XVI, like Paul VI and John-Paul II before him, surely cannot see that he is believing in two contradictory religions at once. 

I don't agree that there are two contradictory religions, but doubletalk is definitely a problem. Three cases in point:

1/ In Milestones the cardinal wrote:

"When I came home after the Council's first session, I had been filled with the joyful feeling, dominant everywhere, of an important new beginning. Now I became deeply troubled by the change in the ecclesial climate that was becoming ever more evident. In a presentation at the University of Münster on true and false renewal, I tried to sound a first warning signal, but few if any noticed. I then became more emphatic at the Bamberg Catholic Congress of 1966, so much so that Cardinal Döpfner expressed surprise at the "conservative streak" he thought he detected in me". op. cit. p. 134

The problem here is that in 1966 he wasn't sounding warning signals but in fact authored a book: Theological Highlights of Vatican II which I have quoted from before in this column. In this book he praises many of the elements of VII that worry Trads.

2/ In the letter that accompanied the Motu Proprio we find this curious sentence:

There is no contradiction between the two editions of the Roman Missal. In the history of the liturgy there is growth and progress, but no rupture

Now contrast that with this:

"What happened at the Council was something else entirely: in the place of the liturgy as the fruit of development came fabricated liturgy. We abandoned the organic, living, process of growth and development over centuries, and replaced it - as in a manufacturing process - with a fabrication, a banal on-the-spot product."

From the preface to the French edition of "Reforms of the Roman Liturgy Its Problems and Background" 1993

or this:

"The second great event at the beginning of my years in Regensburg was the publication of the Missal of Paul VI, which was accompanied by the almost total prohibition, after a transitional phase of only half a year, of using the missal we had had until then. (...) The prohibition of the missal that was now decreed, a missal that had known continuous growth over the centuries, starting with the sacramentaries of the ancient Church, introduced a breach of the liturgy whose consequences could only be tragic."

"Milestones – Memoirs 1927 – 1977", Joseph Ratzinger, Ignatius, San Francisco, 1998, p 146

3/ In the ongoing controversy surrounding the third secret of Fatima, the Italian journalist Antonio Socci reported that he had received a personal letter from Pope Benedict thanking the journalist for a book that ostensibly accuses the Vatican of censoring the Blessed Mother by failing to reveal the whole third secret. This is somewhat surprising since Tarcisio Bertone, the Pope's Prime Minister issued a rebuttal book that had a preface from the Pope thanking the Cardinal for defending the Vatican from Socci's book - go figure ! One would have to wonder if the old cult of the Roman god Janus has been resurrected. Moving on....

The argument about the New Mass is a hard one, I have no doubt. But, isn't the pope correct about a 'total exclusion' of the New Mass 'as a matter of principle' being contrary to its holiness and value?

We are back to the traditionalist dilemma of whether the New Mass is invalid (sede position), only valid but harmful (SSPX position), or whether, on the grounds of the Church's indefectible mission, its promulgation and use by the Roman Pontiff is a guarantee of its potency to sanctify the faithful (surely Benedict's position) as a rite of the Church.

Can one maintain BXVI's position in principle and SSPX's position in practice? This is the razor edge on which FSSP sit (much to their discomfort) and which periodically precipitates the departure of some of their members. Maybe BXVI's stance on 'total exclusion' is the beginning of a recognition that the FSSP exclusive Old Mass protocol is not sustainable in the long term (except under the terms of Ecclesia Dei). After all, we are dealing with two forms of the one Roman rite! Everything these days is read in terms of ecclesiology, liturgy above all (the Church confects the Eucharist, the Eucharist confects the Church, dixit de Lubac, I think!). In this light, those who cannot at some point share the same rite as the Roman Pontiff are teetering on an ecclesial cliff edge.

I can only speak from my pew-bound experience. Much in the wider Church is disturbing and in need a serious reform; of that we are agreed. (...) But what I saw when I did emerge was that where the preaching is orthodox, the devotions are Catholic and the priests are giving sound advice in the confessional, then the faithful respond by trying to lead Catholic lives. When Benedict is told about the harmful character of the New Mass, he might weigh up such arguments against the evidence of holiness that he sees in those constituencies which are not connected to the Old Mass and conclude: whatever the problems with the New Mass (and he is a critic after all), it is not intrinsic to the rite.

So, after 40 years of fighting, won't trads will have to ask themselves whether they have thrown out the baby with the bath water? They were right about the crazy experimentation, irreverence, etc., but wrong in tracing its causality. 

On a related but slightly different tack, have you seen the CDF document 'On the Ecclesial Vocation of the Theologian'? I believe there are some interesting answers to tradi dilemmas wrapped up in its analysis, particularly that of Part 4 which I append below. Read especially Note 27 which contains an adumbration of the rivalry between the theological and pastoral magisterium inscribed in the clash between SSPX and Rome.