"an extremely demanding one, fraught with difficulties"

"The inheritance of salvific truth is an extremely demanding one, fraught with difficulties.  Inevitably the Church’s activities, and those of the Supreme Pontiff in particular, often become a 'sign of contradiction'.  This too shows that her mission is that of Christ, who continues to be a sign of contradiction."

     Karol Wojtyła, Sign of contradiction, trans. St Paul Publications (New York:  A Crossroad Book, The Seabury Press, 1979 [1977]), 124.

"God made man right" from the beginning

"Such a revisionist Christology seems to exert a considerable attraction on contemporary theology.  With the past having been occupied by evolutionary science, so to speak, all that seems to be left for theology is the future.  Yet this is a dangerous illusion.  Because without a distinct salvation-historical beginning there is no terminus a quo that would give orientation to the terminus ad quem.  Emergentism would make Christ himself the figure of some future God-man, the typos for an antitypos still to come.  Yet such a construal would flatly contradict the [web?] of salvation history between the primordial past of a definite terminus a quo and the promised future of a terminus ad quem, the theological center and middle point being the Incarnation.  This is unequivocally affirmed by Gaudium et spes 22:  Christ’s mission is to restore the likeness of God.  Yet a restoration presupposes a loss or a privation, an original state in which the divine likeness obtained."

     Reinhard Hütter, “Humanity’s original state,” annual Aquinas lecture, Dominican House of Studies, Washington, DC, 23 January 2023, 8:15.  Aquinas:  "God made man right [(fecerit Deus hominem rectum)]" (Ec 7:30 Vulgate)] from the beginning.

"Every creature prays"

Salaam Halila

"All the angels pray. Every creature prays. Cattle and wild beasts pray and bend the knee. As they emerge [(egredientes)] from their barns and caves they look up to heaven and call out, lifting up their spirit in their own fashion. At that time the birds too [(Sed et . . . tunc)] rise and lift themselves up to heaven: they unfold a cross of wings instead of hands [(alarum crucem pro manibus expandunt)], and give voice to what seems to be a prayer."

     Tertullian, On prayer 28-29, modifications on the translation offered by DivineOffice.org (I haven't checked the Liturgy of the hours) mine.  (These seem worth noting because the effect is to capture the creatures at morning prayer specifically.)  From DivineOffice.org:

All the angels pray. Every creature prays. Cattle and wild beasts pray and bend the knee. As they come from their barns and caves they look out to heaven and call out, lifting up their spirit in their own fashion. The birds too rise and lift themselves up to heaven: they open out their wings, instead of hands, in the form of a cross, and give voice to what seems to be a prayer.

Latin from Universalis (=CCL 1, 273-74).
     My thanks to Brian Lugioyo for directing my attention to this passage.

The human body as scientifically but no longer morally intelligible

"In a time when we are experiencing the agonizing of creation against man’s work and when the question of the limits and standards of creation upon our activity has become the central problem of our ethical responsibility, this fact must appear quite strange. Notwithstanding all this, it remains always a disagreeable fact that 'nature' should be viewed as a moral issue. An anxious and unreasonable reaction against technology is also closely associated with the inability to discern a spiritual message in the material world. Nature still appears as an irrational form even while evincing mathematical structures which we can study technically. That nature has a mathematical intelligibility is to state the obvious, the assertion that it also contains in itself a moral intelligibility, however, is rejected as metaphysical fantasy."

     Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, "Difficulties confronting the faith in Europe today," Communio:  international Catholic review 38, no. 4 (Winter 2011):  732 (728-737), underscoring mine, and also here.  =L'Osservatore Romano, 24 July 1989.  Cf. pp. 730-731:

Where such thinking holds sway, the relationship of man to his body necessarily changes too. . . .  The body then comes to be considered as a possession which a person can make use of in whatever way seems to him most helpful in attaining 'quality of life.'  The body is something that one has and that one uses.  No longer does man expect to receive a message from his bodiliness as to who he is and what he should do, but definitely, on the basis of his reasonable deliberations and with complete independence, he expects to do with it as he wishes.  In consequence, there is indeed no difference whether the body be of the masculine or the feminine sex, the body no longer expresses being at all, on the contrary, it has become a piece of property. . . .  Likewise divested of every metaphysical symbolism is the distinction between man and woman [etc]. . . .

Anti-theological theology

By contrast with "Phariseeism," "Sadduceeism" is "the liberalist [(liberalistische)] misunderstanding that, in its determination to approximate the faith to the world, attempts to remove from it everything unlikely to please the world.  Here is indeed the walling-in of what is Christian [(die Ummaurerung des Christlichen)] that keeps it from having an effect in the world, decisively tattered [(entschieden abgerissen) as it is], such that [(aber)] the faith no longer serves the world as leaven, but . . . is transformed into the world and [becomes] for that reason neither interesting nor effective, but [rather] completely superfluous.  One cannot rightly [(wohl)] deny that it is like that today to a great extent.  There is a form of anti-theological theology, in which the important business of hermeneutics is converted into a method of transforming the whole of the Christian message into words without content, and of proving that it means just about the opposite of what must normally be taken to be its sense.  The content of such [a] theology consists fundamentally in this alone [(nur noch)], to explain to man that nothing was really meant as it is meant; that [it] all means fundamentally nothing; that from the whole, which appears at first so exciting and faith-necessitating, can be extracted, if only one employs the right hermeneutic, wholly plausible and harmless Existenzialien about which, however, no one can really be bothered because they are so commonplace [(allgemein)]; that one would consider them [mere] banalities had they not been extracted with such a display of learning from texts that, for the unpretentious mind, signify [however] something else entirely.  It’s not just that I am convinced that with such a sorry effort [(Machwerk)] one entices no cat out from behind the stove (which is to say, leads no one to Christianity); it’s that I am of the further opinion that whoever arrives at such judgments [(Meinungen)] would do better to strike the flag; to confess that he no longer extracts from Christianity any meaning [whatsoever], and therefore renounces the pretentious long-windedness [(Umständlichkeit)] of extracting from historical texts Existenzialien that can be had [far] more easily without them."

     Joseph Ratzinger, "Was heißt Erneuerung der Kirche?," Diakonia:  internationale Zeitschrift für die Praxis der Kirche 1 (1966):  ??? (303-316) =in Das neue Volk Gottes: Entwürfe zur Ekklesiologie, 2nd ed. (Düsseldorf:  Patmos, 1970), ??? (267-281) =in Kirche:  Zeichen unter den Völkern:  Schriften zur Ekklesiologie und Ökumene 2, Gesammelte Schriften 8/2 (Freiburg i. Br.:  2010), 1200 ff. (1186-1202), as quoted at Wolfgang Klausnitzer, "'Das Wort sie sollen lassen stahn':  neue Bibelhermeneutik oder Abschied vom Schriftprinzip in der ökumenisch umstrittenen Frage der Homosexualität," Catholica 67, no. 4 (2013):  265 (253-280), translation mine.  (So far as I've been able to tell, this essay has yet to be translated into English.)

"God of angels, of powers, of all creation, of all the race of saints who live in your sight"

"Lord, almighty God, Father of your beloved and blessed Son Jesus Christ, through whom we have come to knowledge of yourself, God of angels, of powers, of all creation, of all the race of saints who live in your sight, I bless you. . . ."

Κύριε, ὁ Θεὸς ὁ παντοκράτωρ, ὁ τοῦ ἀγαπητοῦ καὶ εὐλογητοῦ παιδός σου Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ πατήρ, δἰ οὗ τὴν περὶ σοῦ ἐπίγνωσιν εἰλήφαμεν, ὁ θεὸς ἀγγέλων καὶ δυνάμεων καὶ πάσης τῆς κτίσεως παντός τε τοῦ γένους τῶν δικαίων, οἳ ζῶσιν ἐνώπιόν σου·  εὐλογῶ σε. . . .

     Martyrdom of St. Polycarp xiv.1, as trans. Universalis.  ". . . for judging me worthy of this day, this hour, so that in the company of the martyrs I may share the cup of Christ, your anointed one, and so rise again, in soul and body, immortal through the power of the Holy Spirit. . . ."

"no evidence for" "an ongoing opposition between a repressive, orthodox Christianity and a suppressed, often feminist and sex-positive 'paganism'"

"the idea of an ongoing opposition between a repressive, orthodox Christianity and a suppressed, often feminist and sex-positive 'paganism' (defined here as the umbrella term for 'the ancient pre-Christian religions of Europe') endured for much of the twentieth century.  Margaret Murray's influential witch-cult hypothesis, which held that the witch trials of early modern Europe were an attempt to stamp out a more joyful, female-led 'Old Religion', was rapidly accepted by many historians less familiar with the trials.  In 1929, she was invited to write the Encyclop[a]edia Britannica entry for witchcraft, further cementing her authority with the public.  Her ideas filtered through into the work of writers such as John Buchan and Rosemary Sutcliff, and she provided an approving foreward for Wicca founder Gerald Gardner's Witchcraft Today in 1954.
     "However, as Hutton suggests in his opening chapter, the idea that 'in some form and to some extent, the ancient pagan religion or religions of Britain had persisted actively long after the introduction of Christianity as the official faith' was largely a late Victorian creation, stoked by the waning dominance of the Church of England and the rapid urbanization of British society.  It was further propagated by James Frazer's highly influential book The Golden Bough (1890) and the newly formed Folk-Lore Society. . . .  Together with Murray's witch-cult hypothesis, these affected popular historical accounts until the 1960s and 70s, when a more systematic study of historical records revealed no evidence for such theories."

    Elizabeth Dearnley, "Blessed ladies:  the rise of the fairy queen in Christian Europe," a review of Ronald Hutton, Queens of the wild:  pagan goddesses in Christian Europe:  an investigation (New Haven:  Yale University Press, 2022) in Times literary supplement no. 6254 (February 3, 2023):  26.  The point seems to be that these figures first arose in the late medieval and early modern but especially late Victorian periods, not pagan antiquity.  Take the Green Man, for example.  "The Green Man was linked in the twentieth century with an ancient vegetation deity, largely on the strength of a single article from 1939.  Hutton (italics mine):

'it is perfectly legitimate to pick foliate or woodland figures . . . and group them together now as expressions of the human relationship with green and fertile nature[.] . . .  The trouble only starts if those who embrace such beliefs back-project them onto the past and declare that they are revealing an ancient mystery'.