So the Power of the Keys hang on the wall untouched for 50+ years since John XXIII took over, and still counting.

This is a view long put out there by the neo-conservatives like EWTN, The Wanderer, and even The Remnant, and recently by Bp. Fellay. They say "The pope is a prisoner of those around him, he has no real control".


It is hogwash.

From another CI thread BXVI Blames Media for Council Failures:

Bowler said: Talk about the Church moving slow, 50 years and the council has not been properly applied or understood by all of the bishops chosen by Paul VI, JPII, and B16.

Anyone that knows how the Vatican works, knows that no novel theology ever gets to the laity unless it is promoted by the pope. Nothing and no one gets to a position to influence anything, unless it/he is promoted by the pope. That IS the way it IS.

These popes have either lost the faith or they have lost their marbles (maybe both?)

The neo-cons don't want to lose their subscribers, so they use this "The pope is a prisoner of those around him, he has no real control".

One may ask, what does the pope have to do with revolution? In the case of the Roman Catholic Church, everything. While it would be hard to find a guerrilla movement, be it the Italian Red Brigades or the Peruvian Shining Path that was not inspired and directed by university students and professors, in the Church with its unbudgeable hierarchical structure, the intellectual top, the level at which theologians move, is not high enough. Any mutation in doctrine or practice must come from the very top, from the papacy itself. There is no other way.

While the Vatican II popes were the dominant figures in the undermining process they was not alone, they were assisted by those that they placed in power during their 50+year reign. What they accomplished was the transformation of the single largest religious body in the world, a body which had gone virtually unchanged for nearly two thousand years. Unchanged, it had weathered the great break away four hundred years before, even gaining from the blow a certain strength through forced redefinition of its own identity. The Protestant shock had been a severing. What has happened in our day has been no break but rather an inside turnover, something altogether more drastic. Measured against what had been taken to be the Catholic identity for nineteen centuries the  unprecedented undermining from within of the Church of today is something totally incomparable with anything that came before.