Let me propose something to think about.
The Holy Father has made his pontificate in part a reflection on continuity.
This commitment to restore a proper interpretive principle is the fruit of decades of observation and reflection from a unique, privileged vantage point.
Will you stipulate now that "rupture", lack of "continuity" is a bad thing?
The obvious type of rupture and discontinuity is in the form of a break with the past. Progressivists see the Council, for example, as a break with the past, a new theological, ecclesiological starting point. They do great harm by working from this view. If you take insufficient positive consideration of the past, you work great harm.
Another type of rupture, less obvious, comes from those who defend the past while not taking sufficient account of present progress or the possibility of authentic development without substantive change in doctrine. Those who freeze the Church and deny the possibility of broadening our theological reflection do great harm. The world does in fact present new exigencies even if human nature doesn’t "mature" out of its perennial needs – as many progressivists falsely assume.
Rupture from the past. Rupture from the future.
Rupture from the future is easier to correct. Rupture from the past is the more dangerous.
After all, it is part of the warp and weft of the Church’s nature to tend toward the unchanging, to resist the effects of that which shifts and is never fixed, and to guide the wider world toward her Lord, who is the same yesterday, today and tomorrow.
