BACKWARDS AND FORWARDS

Hope is a personal thing. A quote that makes one person hopeful will annoy another half to death. It's a matter of perspective, and context of course. In the moment context is everything. Yet some quotes live beyond their context, taking on a significance of their own.
Here, I believe, is a potential hope quote for the future. It will be hopeful for those of us who tend to abandon hope and throw up our hands in despair when we think that something has gone one step forward and two steps back--a pretty common occurrence as we wind our way through the linked corridors and dead-ends of change. here’s a hope quote aptly stated by David Gibson in the Ideas section of today’s edition of the Edmonton Journal. “a reformed reform doesn't equal a return to the past”. Gibson’s ideas are thoroughly fleshed out, showing the remarkable way in which an effort to return to the past is creating a previously unimagined future. Here are a few pieces of the article.

Pope's traditionalist acts may have liberal results

When Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was elected pope in April 2005, all the world rejoiced--or recoiled--with the certain knowledge that the cardinals had settled
on the one man who would be more conservative than John Paul II.

For those who weren't so enthused about the Holy Spirit's selection, there was grim consolation in the fact that Ratzinger, now Benedict XVI, was 78 and
himself predicting a brief papacy that would serve as a transition to whatever came next.

Thus far, Benedict's papacy has been one of constant movement and change, the sort of dynamic that liberal Catholics-- or Protestants--are usually criticized
for pursuing. In Benedict's case, this liberalism serves a conservative agenda. But his activism should not be surprising: As a sharp critic of the reforms
of Vatican II, Ratzinger has long pushed for what he calls a "reform of the reform" to correct what he considers the excesses or abuses of the time.

Of course a "reformed reform" doesn't equal a return to the past, even if that were the goal. Indeed, Benedict's reforms are rapidly creating something
entirely new in Catholicism.