Just before Christmas in 2005, still in the first year of his pontificate, Pope Benedict XVI gave an address to the Roman Curia in which he reflected on a variety of topics, including the 40th anniversary of the conclusion of the Second Vatican Council. He was not afraid to point out that the implementation of the Council had experienced many challenges, and he asked: “Why has the implementation of the Council, in large parts of the Church, thus far been so difficult?” (Pope Benedict XVI, Address to the Roman Curia Offering them his Christmas Greetings, 22 December 2005) To this question he responded:
Well, it all depends on the correct interpretation of the Council or – as we would say today – on its proper hermeneutics, the correct key to its interpretation and application. The problems in its implementation arose from the fact that two contrary hermeneutics came face to face and quarrelled with each other. One caused confusion, the other, silently but more and more visibly, bore and is bearing fruit. (ibid.)
The hermeneutic that was causing confusion he called “a hermeneutic of discontinuity and rupture” which would suggest that what had come before the Council was to be left in the past, and that the Council marked a break from the past, a new springtime in the Church in which all of the old ideas and practices were thrown out and new ideas and practices replaced them. On the other hand, the hermeneutic that was bearing fruit, helping to advance the true implementation of the Council he described in this way:
On the other, there is the “hermeneutic of reform”, of renewal in the continuity of the one subject-Church which the Lord has given to us. She is a subject which increases in time and develops, yet always remaining the same, the one subject of the journeying People of God. (ibid.)
I think this point is very helpful in understanding a point the Holy Father makes in Spe salvi when he writes the following:
What this means is that every generation has the task of engaging anew in the arduous search for the right way to order human affairs; this task is never simply completed. Yet every generation must also make its own contribution to establishing convincing structures of freedom and of good, which can help the following generation as a guideline for the proper use of human freedom; hence, always within human limits, they provide a certain guarantee also for the future. (SS 25)
The progress of human freedom and development builds upon what has gone before us, not dismissing it as no longer relevant. But this foundation is not so rigid that it is not open to continued growth, reform and renewal, while always maintaining that continuous connection with Jesus Christ who “is the same yesterday and today and forever.” (Heb 13:8) On the topic of Christian hope, the pope notes that there is much room for legitimate development, as he writes:
[W]e must also acknowledge that modern Christianity, faced with the successes of science in progressively structuring the world, has to a large extent restricted its attention to the individual and his salvation. In so doing it has limited the horizon of its hope and has failed to recognize sufficiently the greatness of its task—even if it has continued to achieve great things in the formation of man and in care for the weak and the suffering. (ibid.)
I believe that, with the pontificate of Pope Francis, and now continuing with Pope Leo XIV, we have seen the Church acknowledging the greatness of this task, and has helped the Church to expand her horizons to spread this message of hope to the many challenges being faced in our modern world.