Aggiornamento. Beginning of the End?

Two interesting speeches by two church men in the last week. Firstly the usual excellence from Raymond Cardinal Burke. Strong, uncompromising and to the point.http://rorate-caeli.blogspot.com/ 
  More interesting  was the speech given by Archbishop Charles Chaput (Denver), a brief excerpt:
" Christians in  my country and yours - and throughout the West, generally, - have a done terrible job of transmitting our faith to our own children and to the culture at large....  Instead of changing the culture around us, we Christians have allowed ourselves to be changed by the culture. We've compromised too cheaply. We've hungered after assimilating and fitting in. And in the process, we've been bleached out and absorbed by the culture we were sent to make holy."
      What is interesting is who is saying this. Archbishop Chaput is the poster boy for the neo-cons within the Church. Those who believe that Vatican II created no problems other than those created by the nasty liberals who didn't listen to the real content of the council and pursued their own agendas.
                   But is this actually a  critique of what for almost 50 years has been the underlying position of the Church? Namely aggiornamento, an opening up to the world? Don't get me wrong the Church needs to proclaim to the world the message of Our Lord, after all it was a commandent given to us at the Ascension,  but the Church  needs to do it from a position of strength and certitude.  Aggiornamento coincided with a weakening of the philosophical and theological underpinnings of Catholic thought, the byproduct of Vatican II and the creeping modernist movement within the Church in the 20th century.
   The city of God and the city of man are two diametrically opposed entities, using different languages, different world views. For the Church to attempt to "fit into" the age was always going to be a futile gesture, not only that it was downright dangerous, witness the damage done. Now when the Church attempts to use the langauge of the Faith it finds itself preaching to "catholics" and society at large who have no inner religious core. The words no longer have a fertile place in the heart in which to implant and germinate.
   Being Catholic means not fitting in, it is to stand out. After all throughout the New Testament we have Our Lord exhorting us to be a light in the darkness, salt of the earth etc.  In effect this means being counter cultural, different, conservative, "at odds" with the world around us. Could this lead to persecution? Probably. But look at what trying to be " one of them" has done.