(A new category, in which I give the Pope some unsolicited advice. A bit tongue in cheek, but only a bit.)
Fr. Aidan Nichols, O.P.
He seems to want the job, and he knows what needs to be done.
The "politically correct" refusal to speak about the conversion of England for fear of offending ecumenical or inter-faith sensibilities as well as arousing humanist-secularist irritation takes its rise from a misreading of the documents of the Council. Those documents furnish a mandate for courtesy, respect and the seeking of common ground in dialogue with such different constituencies as separated Christians, adherents of other religions, humanists. But they do not understand dialogue as entailing the cessation of mission, or as putting into cold storage the universalist claims of the Catholic Church.The obscuring of these imperatives, on the ground that in a pluralist society to refer to them at all would be bad taste, has damaged the Church, not only by insinuating doubt as to what our message is and how committed we are. It has also, I believe, created what the scholastic theologians call an obex, an "obstacle" to the development in us of the graces of baptism and confirmation. These graces are not given exclusively for the purpose of personal sanctification. They are given for the insertion of individuals into the common mission of the Church, which continues that of the Apostles, who continued that of Christ, whose own mission was the prolongation of his eternal procession as the divine Son - all with a view of bringing back a world lost and wandering to the Father in its entirety As the present Holy Father put it in his encyclical on mission, "faith is strengthened when it is given to others". When the Church in England slapped a self-defying ordinance on converting those outside the household (for that is the widespread perception), did. it not in part bring upon itself the decline recent statistics have charted?
My favorite line in it is the bit about "misreading the Documents of the Council." If I had a dime for every time that though has crossed my mind, I'd be on my way to riches. Has there ever been a Church council more willfully misread than Vatican II?
Give Fr. Nichols a hundred mendicant Dominican preachers and a few million Challoner Douay-Rheims Bibles and get out of his way. . .
UPDATE: He lays out the full strategy here.
Firmer doctrine in our teaching and preaching.
Re-enchant the liturgy.
Recover the insights of metaphysics.
Renew Christian political thought.
Revive family life.
Resacralise art and architecture.
Put a new emphasis on monastic life.
Strengthen pro-life rhetoric.
Recover a Catholic reading of the Bible.
And guns. Lots of guns.
Just kidding . . . I know a few of you out there are fans of the Chick tracts, so I thought I'd put that in for a few paranoid laughs.
Those nine items are good not only for England, but for anywhere in the Western world. If you read this, Holy Father, you might want Fr. Nichols's nine points printed on 3X5 cards, laminated, and sent to every cardinal, bishop, priest, deacon, monk and nun in the world.
If I were to add two more, they would be Eucharist Adoration and the Rosary. But that list is a fine starting point.