Newman and the hermeneutic of continuity

Just got to browsing through the articles in this week's Catholic Herald as the links have been going up on Twitter today. There is a good piece by Fr Ian Ker, the renowned Newman scholar, on how Newman can lead us out of our post-Vatican II turmoil. Only the other day, I posted one of my favourite "purple passages" from Newman which ends with the assertion "To be deep in history is to cease to be a Protestant." Fr Ker suggests:
He would say today with Pope Benedict: "To be deep in history is to cease to be a Vatican II liberal Catholic" - that is, the kind of Catholic who thinks that Vatican II represented a complete break in the history of the Church, a new dawn analogous to the Reformation as seen by Protestants.

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