Classic Catholic

Eastern and Catholic
Even though I know intellectually that the Eastern Church Fathers are every bit as Catholic as, say, Frank Sheed, I don't think of them as Catholic in the same way as I do people like St. Thomas Aquinas. I'm especially struck by the impact that Aquinas (and scholasticism in general) has had on the texture, so to speak, of Western Christian literature. There is a post-Aquinas way of being Catholic that has the feel of an innovation of sorts. I assume this is kind of a development, but I can understand to a certain extent how the Orthodox would be suspicious. They prefer writers that still feel like the old guys. Maybe Henri de Lubac et alia were trying to recover that feel.
I also think that the legacy of John Paul II will have the same kind of transformational impact on the feel of Western Catholicism that Aquinas did.