"Gradually we have stopped laughing"

     "Did we not also have, in the ten years after Gaudium et spes, experiences that, despite the differences of level, were not entirely unlike those that lay behind the metaphorphosis of Don Quixote?  We started out boldly and full of confidence in ourselves; there may have been, in thought and, perhaps, also in reality, many an auto-da-fé of scholarly books that seemed to us to be foolish novels of chivalry that led us only into the land of dreams and made us see dangerous giants in the beneficial effects of technology, in the vanes of its windmills.  Boldly and certain of victory, we barricaded the door of a time that was past and proclaimed the abrogation and annihilation of all that lay behind it.  In conciliar and postconciliar literature, there is abundant evidence of the ridicule with which, like pupils ready for graduation, we bade farewell to our outmoded schoolbooks.  In the meantime, however, our ears and our souls have been pierced by a different kind of ridicule that mocks more than we had wanted or wished.  Gradually we have stopped laughing; gradually we have become aware that behind the closed doors are concealed those things that we must not lose if we do not want to lose our souls as well.  Certainly we cannot return to the past, nor have we any desire to do so.  But we must be ready to reflect anew on that which, in the lapse of time, has remained the one constant.  To seek it without distraction and to dare to accept, with joyful heart and without diminution, the foolishness of truth—this, I think, is the task for today and for tomorrow:  the true nucleus of the Church's service to the world, her answer to 'the joy and hope, the grief and anguish of the men of our time' (Gaudium et spes, 903)."

     Joseph Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic theology:  building stones for a fundamental theology, trans. Sister Mary Frances McCarthy (San Francisco:  Ignatius Press, 1987 [1982]), 393 ="Der Weltdienst der Kirche:  Auswirkungen von 'Gaudium et spes' in letzten Jahrzehnt," Internationale katholischen Zeitschrift Communio 4 (1974):  454.