The value of the loci alieni for the elimination of "false directions within the Church"

The hermeneutic of reform "doesn’t simply have to do with failures which were absorbed from without; they can be also failures which developed from within. . . . [I]f [the Church i]s not doing well, that’s not always because it’s absorbed things from without, because it’s also failed to develop from within. . . . There certainly are sides of the Protestant Reformation and of the Enlightenment that are important for the Church, that she would not want to do without.  For example, at the [Second Vatican] Council it was the admonition from the Calvinist Lukas Fischer which warned the Catholics against a kind of Pollyannic, rose-colored-glasses look at the signs of the times.  It was because of the admonitions of the Protestant side—remember that we are very corrupt in the way we read the signs of the times and we need to examine them in the light of the Gospel—that you have that marvelous nuancing in Guadium et spes 4 to read the signs of the times [and] to scrutinize them in the light of the Gospel.  That wasn’t the initial Catholic impulse. . . . It was the Protestant reminder of the brokenness of humanity that goes into the Church and also was an admonition for scrutinizing the signs of the times in the light of the Gospel.  And that is the lesson which many, even in this alienational (so-called alienational) side—they are often less ecumenical than the integrative side."

     Fr. Richard Schenk, O.P., "Memory And Conversion - Thomistic Ressourcement And Productive Non-Contemporaneity," a lecture at the conference Thomism after Vatican II, Angelicum, Rome, 27 October 2018, from 55:02.  The loci alieni of the heading is taken from Melchior Cano via Schenk.