Raise the bastions or raze the bastions? Why are we in such ruin? The Hierarchy surrendered to the enemy and stopped fighting and decided to tear down the Church that used to defend men like me.

 Raise the bastions or raze the bastions?

Pope Pius VIII, Traditi Humilitate Nostrae

Although God may console Us with you, We are nonetheless sad. This is due to the numberless errors and the teachings of perverse doctrines which, no longer secretly and clandestinely but openly and vigorously, attack the Catholic faith. You know how evil men have raised the standard of revolt against religion through philosophy (of which they proclaim themselves doctors) and through empty fallacies devised according to natural reason. In the first place, the Roman See is assailed and the bonds of unity are, every day, being severed. The authority of the Church is weakened and the protectors of things sacred are snatched away and held in contempt. The holy precepts are despised, the celebration of divine offices is ridiculed, and the worship of God is cursed by the sinner. All things which concern religion are relegated to the fables of old women and the superstitions of priests. Truly lions have roared in Israel. With tears We say: “Truly they have conspired against the Lord and against His Christ.” Truly the impious have said: “Raze it, raze it down to its foundation

Pope Pius Xth

Discourse of Pope Pius X, 13 December 1908, on the Day of Joan of Arc’s Beatification in Orléans, France:

I am grateful, Venerable Brother [Monsigneur Touchet, Bishop of Orléans], to your generous heart, which would like me to work in the field of the Lord, always having full sunlight, without clouds or storms. But you and I must adore the dispositions of divine providence, which, having established the Church here below, allows her to encounter along her way obstacles of every kind and formidable resistance.

And the reason is evident, because the Church is militant and therefore in a continuous struggle: a struggle that makes the world a living battlefield and every Christian a brave soldier who fights under the banner of the Crucified One; a struggle that, inaugurated with the life of our most holy Redeemer, will only be accomplished at the end of time. And so every day, like the warriors of the tribe of Judah returning from slavery, we must with one hand repel the enemy and with the other raise the walls of the holy temple; that is to say, we must work for our sanctification.

Joseph Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology

Does this mean that the Council should be revoked? Certainly not. It means only that the real reception of the Council has not yet even begun. What devastated the Church in the decade after the Council was not the Council but the refusal to accept it. This becomes clear precisely in the history of the influence of Gaudium et spes. What was identified with the Council was, for the most part, the expression of an attitude that did not coincide with the statements to be found in the text itself, although it is recognizable as a tendency in its development and in some of its individual formulations. The task is not, therefore, to suppress the Council but to discover the real Council and to deepen its true intention in the light of the present experience. That means that there can be no return to the Syllabus, which may have marked the first stage in the confrontation with liberalism and a newly conceived Marxism but cannot be the last stage. In the long run, neither embrace nor ghetto can solve for Christians the problem of the modern world. The fact is, as Hans Urs von Balthasar pointed out as early as 1952, that the “demolition of the bastions” is a long-overdue task.

When he was younger, Ratzinger said the church of the future would be smaller and have much less power - and then he worked to make it so, beginning with his attack on The Holy Office he wrote for Cardinal Frings that was delivered on the first day of the 60s Synod.

Then as head of the CDF, he refused to defend the Church against the heretical wolves 

In a New Oxford Review editorial, Mr. Dale Vree, noted:

In Karl Keating’s E-Letter (March 8, 2005), he noted that for 26 years of the John Paul papacy, of which Ratzinger was the doctrinal watchdog for 24 years, only 24 people were disciplined.

Keating comments: “That is fewer than one per year!… The Catholic Church boasts 1.1 billion members. This means that, on average, over the last quarter century, the Vatican has disciplined only one out of a billion members per year. This is about as close to zero as you can get.

Is there any social, commercial, or governmental organization that disciplines such a small percentage of its people?…
If the Church had the kind of inquisitorial bureaucracy that its critics imagine, the Vatican would be disciplining 24 people each week…. However you look at it, 24 cases in 26 years is…laughable.” 

but Ratzinger did find time to rehabilitate a famous heretic, Rosmini...

https://waragainstbeing.com/parti/article4/

Is it weird or is it nor weird that Ratzinger chose to live much of his adult life in safe and beautiful church structures and to fly all over hell and half of Georgia on somebody else's dime rather than choose to live in an obscure, poor, unguarded monastery so he could personally experience what he thought the future of the average Pat and Pam Pewdweller would be like?

Nope. The future of a much smaller, weaker and poorer church is what he was helping to build but did not want to experience.