The following exchange is from an interview with Tracey Rowland, dean of the Australian session of the John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and the Family posted today on Zenit.

Q: In what sense is there continuity or discontinuity between in the views of Pope Benedict XVI and Pope John Paul II -- a major contributor to "Gaudium et Spes" -- in regard to the Church's interaction with "the world"?

Rowland: I think that there will be continuity in the sense that Benedict would no doubt agree that a de Lubacian-type reading of "Gaudium et Spes" is desirable -- that culture is not theologically neutral, that we have a choice between a civilization of love and a culture of death, and that Christ and a Christian anthropology are needed to rescue us from a web of cultural and moral practices which destroy human integrity and foster nihilism.

However, one difference in nuance is that Benedict is less inclined to use a particular rhetorical strategy favored by John Paul II.To give an example, John Paul II once said that the Church of the Council "saw itself as the soul of modernity." He then defined modernity as "a convergence of conditions that permit a human being to express better his or her own maturity, spiritual, moral and cultural." The problem here is that this is not what most people think of when they hear the expression "modernity"; and it is certainly not the reading one finds in the many scholarly accounts of this cultural phenomenon.

From what I have read, Benedict doesn't adopt this intellectual strategy. When Benedict talks about modernity he doesn't try to redefine the common meaning. This is perhaps because he thinks that there is little rhetorical advantage in presenting the Church as modern when the postmoderns are so busy being critical of modernity. It simply aligns Catholics with a position whose popularity in on the wane.

A second way I think the papacies of the two might differ is that whereas John Paul II concentrated on ethics and anthropology -- and hence the central themes of "Gaudium et Spes" -- it is possible that Benedict will take a more ecclesiological focus, concentrating on themes in "Lumen Gentium" and the [Vatican II] decree on ecumenism as well as dealing with the whole territory of liturgy.

This seems to me an interesting comparison: that Benedict's thinking on many issues related to modern thought is different from John Paul II's squares with much of what one reads in the better media, and I've certainly had this sense from reading some of the books written by then-Cardinal Ratzinger. But I wonder if Rowland's categories here cut deeply enough. There was always a lot more premodern culture alive during the period of flourishing for intellectual modernity, an indication of the gulf between thought and practice that seems an eternal feature of human life. There is correspondingly still a lot of "modernity" in practice, even as the intellectual elite promotes "postmodernity." Moreover, in so far as postmodernity is a largely destructive enterprise, it remains unclear what practical legacy it will have. Some Christian thinkers have taken an optimistic view that the postmodern critique will open up premodern possibilities again. The jury is still out on this.