A post from the Vox Nova blog that I found both enlightening and amusing:
Weigel effectively theorizes towards a post-structural approach to Church literature; where we do not take authorship at face value but look into the power/knowledge relations that constitute the thing in question and assume that the (competing) motives involved are steeped in structurations of conflict that create the Foucauldian notion of “governmentality.”
It may seem too ironic, but Weigel is right precisely because he takes into account the possibility of the impossible. And he does so based on a largely accurate understanding of Church (and papal) authority: Namely, that, a hermeneutic of suspicion is not heterodox to Catholic devotion, on the contrary, a simplistic or superstitious reliance on the intervention of the Holy Spirit as the norm in Vatican affairs is not necessarily orthodox at all, in fact, it can be downright dangerous.
For me, such talk goes both ways. If Weigel can read encyclicals from the point of view of machinations of the Curia, I can read Vatican II from the point of view of the machinations of questionable theologians who usurped a mantle that was not theirs to take up. (Read the book, The Rhine Flows into the Tiber). To quote Dei Verbum as if it were “inspired by God” is sort of like quoting the script from Leave It to Beaver, except the latter is older and a lot clearer. The Vatican is not the bullhorn of the Holy Ghost.
