Here:
In other words, his progressivism consisted of wanting to make Catholic orthodoxy comprehensible to the modern world -- not in wanting to overturn those orthodoxies! The book goes on to talk about his shock in the years immediately following the Council to see how people within the Church used "the spirit of Vatican II" as a pretext to dismantle Catholicism. Ratzinger, a good-hearted soul who expected the best from others, had been terribly naive.
It wasn't just Ratzinger, however.
The same phenomenon occurred in Protestantism, and in politics.
President Ronald Reagan, for example, had campaigned in the 1970s on libertarian economic orthodoxies, in particular on cutting ordinary income tax rates because he believed people were better judges of what to do with their money than was government. He won in landslides.
But as Ratzinger never anticipated how nefarious forces in the church would use their freedom to indulge sinful human nature, Reagan never anticipated how rich people and corporations would use their tax savings windfalls to invest abroad instead of in the United States, shipping millions of formerly good middle class jobs abroad to cheaper labor markets, hollowing out the country and growing thereby even more fabulously rich in the process.
Underestimating sinful human nature has been the story of our times.
