This is unexepected: NCR staff writer, Michael Sean Winters, has written in praise of a recent article in The Tablet (“Ratzinger the Romantic“) by our one and only Professor Tracey Rowland.
Does anyone read Winters’ stuff regularly? What’s his general take on things?
Interestingly, there a commentator on his post writes that while they “would be thrilled with the pope portrayed there, brilliant without sacrificing compassion”, that is not (apparently) the pope they know from their own experience. This raises an interesting question: are we currently in some kind of virtual “papal schism”, where one group of Catholics admires and loves one pope while another group hates and deplores another quite different – yet indeed the very same – pope?
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Sentire Cum Ecclesia 
He is a dissenter, on the Left, although he writes intelligently enough if his immediate purpose and the Catholic Faith happen to coincide.
(The ‘virtual schism’ is real, indeed, and the only thing lacking to make it ‘really real’ is the fortitude of the Bishops who have thus far failed, in any meaningful way, to call the dissenters what they really are. Obviously they– either the Bishops or the dissenters, or both– see things differently, ha.)
I don’t know Winters, but I’ve read some of Tracey Rowland’s work and I like that very much 🙂