One speech, two views.
I am pretty confident that the pope's epoch-making speech of December 22, in which he opened a new era for the Church, was greeted with great distress by the "progressives" -- which is why it has been a non-event for them. Liberal newspapers, websites, and blogs have simply IGNORED the speech, as if it had never happened. It is certainly not in their interest to further the knowledge of those crucial papal words.
Is my optimism (see 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and this) regarding the text excessive? Maybe. However, my intention never was to give an "official" version of this speech, but to make those words read and known, to undo the "progressive" boycott of this essential text.
In the past few days, two very important traditional Catholic outlets on both sides of the Atlantic have published the views of two men on this speech. In France, the great Jean Madiran, this hero of Tradition, published three articles on the speech in the only orthodox Catholic French daily, Présent. He seems to agree with my assessment and is actually more optimistic than I ever was; his series of articles is titled "Benedict frees the Faith" and is available here (in French).
In America, Christopher Ferrara has written a very interesting and thorough article on the events (or lack of events...) of this pontificate so far in The Remnant, and he even makes a reference to this blog and its comments on the papal Christmas Address to the Roman Curia (which we have called an "epoch-making speech"). I agree with much of what he writes (I thank him for writing that we are "actually spot-on concerning many issues"), but I believe I agree much more with Madiran.
I would just like to stress that the expression "Holy Revolution", mentioned by Ferrara, was coined by the Italian newsweekly Panorama (see here) and is unrelated to the speech of December 22.
