O Estado de Sao Paulo - What are the more significant differences between the Ratzinger of Vatican II and the Ratzinger of today? Who changed more: you or the Church?

Cardinal Ratzinger – I do not see a real, profound difference between my work at Vatican Council II and my present day work. While preparing this course for Bishops, I went to review a course of ecclesiology that I taught for the first time in 1956. Naturally, I found elements that needed to be updated. But as for the fundamental vision, I found a profound similarity. What I proposed to the Bishops in Rio de Janeiro (in this trip) was the same fundamental vision that I set out (then).

]Messori points to Ratzinger as "one of the founders of the magazine Concilium, a meeting place for the progressivist wing of theology."

"'Was it a sin of youth, Your Emminence, this engagement with Concilium?' I asked him, joshing.

"'Absolutely not,' he answered. 'I did not change; they changed.'"

. Ratzinger has always been for an advanced position and openness.

I have known him for a long time, since he was a professor, and I can assure you that he did not change.

Everyone says the opposite, that there are two Ratzingers: one before he came to Rome, and a different one later.

To the contrary, he has always remained the same!

Allow me to recall something that happened. Joseph Ratzinger, an expert at the Council, was also the private secretary of Card. Frings, Archbishop of Cologne. Blind, the old Cardinal largely utilized his secretary to write his interventions. Now then, one of these interventions became memorable: it was a radical criticism of the methods of the Holy Office. Despite a reply by Card. Ottaviani, Frings sustained his critique.

It is not an exaggeration to say that on that day the old Holy Office, as it presented itself then, was destroyed by Ratzinger in union with his Archbishop.

Question: "How do you explain this dialogue with a personage whom many Catholics view as reactionary and an enemy of ecuмenical dialogue?"

Answer: "I do not understand it. It is an erroneous opinion. I met Ratzinger 30 years ago, at Vatican Council II. He was the best of the so-called expert theologians or periti, with a reputation for being a radical progressivist" (1).

"I want to emphasize again that I decidedly agree with Kung when he makes a clear distinction between Roman theology (taught in the schools of Rome) and the Catholic Faith. To free itself from the constraining fetters of Roman Scholastic Theology represents a duty upon which, in my humble opinion, the possibility of the survival of Catholicism seems to depend"

What concerns us is no longer how 'the others' will be saved. Certainly we know, by our faith in divine mercy, that they can be saved. How this happens, we leave to God. The point that does concern us is principally this: Why, despite the wider possibility of salvation, is the Church still necessary?

I am a bit puzzled about why suggesting that St. Bonaventure believed that revelation was based on scripture and tradition together.  Isn't that simply Catholicism?