A crony notes a certain parallel between the way Alito understands the Constitution and the way the Church understands changes in discipline. The question arises for Alito: is the Constitution a "living document"? (Emphasis mine.)
ALITO: The liberty component of the Fifth Amendment and the 14th Amendment, which I was talking about earlier, embody the deeply-rooted traditions of a country. And it's up to each -- those traditions and those rights apply to new factual situations that come up. As times change, new factual situations come up, and the principles have to be applied to those situations. The principles don't change. The Constitution itself doesn't change. But the factual situations change. And, as new situations come up, the principles and the rights have to be applied to them.
To see the whole context for this discussion, try here. Now compare with B16 on Vatican II, just a couplre of weeks ago:
the Church’s decisions about contingent matters – for example, about actual forms of liberalism or liberal interpretations of the Bible – were necessarily themselves contingent because related to a reality itself changeable. We had to learn how to recognise that in such decisions only principles express what is lasting, embedded in the background and determining the decision from within. The concrete forms these decisions take are not permanent but depend upon the historical situations. They can therefore change.
