Catholicity: Only the Whole will Suffice

"A progressivism which maintains that nothing preconciliar is any longer of interest today is exactly what Frings wanted to preclude by his criticisms. No, the whole is always of interest. Faith always creates from the whole. Thus, just as after the First Vatican Council and after Pius XII, the Greek Fathers, Augustine, and Thomas Aquinas remained as important as before, so also after the Second Vatican Council, the First Vatican Council remains important and Pius XII remains important. In this sense the progressivism of the Caridinal from Cologne is of the highest relevance: today we also cannot bear that mentality which forgets everything but the last twenty years--or still much more if possible. Today, too, the proclamation of the faith must be catholic--that is, it must live from the whole, draw again and again directly from the Bible, drink again and again from the great, pure sources of all times. Only then does faith remain great and wide; only then does it reach into those depths and grow to that height through which it binds heaven and earth. The dialectician's tricks with which one would free us from the burden of the mystery and seem to bring us right to the pinnacle of our time--such tricks do not survive the moment, on which alone they base themselves. Only the whole will suffice."

Joseph Ratzinger, Joseph Ratzinger in Communio, Volume 1: The Unity of the Church, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010, 90.