Pope Francis’s Christmas address of December 21—the traditional feast of the doubting Thomas the Apostle and of the Ember Saturday of Advent—is exactly the antithesis of the famous “hermeneutic of continuity” address delivered by Pope Benedict XVI on December 22, 2005. In that speech, Ratzinger (successfully or unsuccessfully) tried to reconnect the postconciliar experiment with the 3,000-year history of the Church as God’s Israel.

Francis is saying, in effect: “Nope, not gonna happen. In fact, we need to ramp up the modernization efforts and leave behind that stale, rigid old past. If we want to keep Christianity, we have to change everything.”