Cardinal Ratzinger on the Christian Faith

The Christian faith can never be separated from the soil of sacred events, from the choice made by God, who wanted to speak to us, to become man, to die and rise again, in a particular place and at a particular time. “Always” can only come from “once for all”. The Church does not pray in some kind of mythical omnitemporality. She cannot forsake her roots. She recognizes the true utterance of God precisely in the concreteness of its history, in time and place: to these God ties us, and by these we are all tied together. The diachronic aspect, praying with the Fathers and the apostles, is part of what we mean by rite, but it also includes a local aspect, extending from Jerusalem to Antioch, Rome, Alexandria, and Constantinople. Rites are not, therefore, just the products of inculturation, how­ever much they may have incorporated elements from different cultures. They are forms of the apostolic Tradition and of its unfolding in the great places of the Tradition

Cardinal Ratzinger, The Spirit of the Liturgy, (SF, CA, Ignatius, 2000), p. 164.

Similarities between Paul VI and Benedict XVI

Pope Paul VI and Cardinal Ratzinger

"On the one hand there is an explanation, which I want to mention 'hermeneutics of rupture'. This often has the cooperation of the mass media, and also a part of modern theology has made use of here."

Benedict XVI, Christmas 2005 speech to the Roman Curia.

Pope Paul VI said on 23rd June 1972 the following: 

"... an emergency which We cannot and must not keep hidden: in the first place a false and erroneous interpretation of the Council, of those who want to break with the tradition, even as regards the doctrine, an interpretation which goes so far as the rejection of the pre-Conciliar Church and to the point of allowing the concept of a 'new' church, as if it were re-invented from the inside, as regards the establishment of the Church, the dogma, the customs and the law."  (Acta Apostolicae Sedis (AAS) Year 64 (1972), p. 498).