The End of Catholicism?: Responses
Carr, Anne & Fiorenza, Francis Schussler & Crosson, Frederick J. & Sklba, Richard J. & Batten, Loring W. III & Miles, Jack & Hughes, John Jay & Chirico, Peter & Imbelli, Robert & Sloyan, Gerard S. & McKenzie, John L. & Moore, Sebastian & CAMERON, J.M.
The end of Catholicism? The discussion continues- responses from readers and Thomas Sheehan I N ITS August I0 issue, Commonweal carded responses by David Tracy and Andrew M. Greeley to an...
...The Bible is too powerful a mythos on its own terms, however, to be reduced to any one theology of it at the level of the whole church...
...This was hard for him to say and for me to hear, and I cannot forget it...
...We must continue to trust them...
...2. His essay invokes, with apparent innocence, a number of concepts which are, to say the least, philosophically marked "handle-with-care...
...His sketch of the consensus misconstrues the direction of the last decades of historical research...
...I look forward to a Christian maturing in us, whereby we shall take responsibility for our Christian faith, and look on this dishonesty with unsurprised compassion...
...His book, Karl Rahner: The Philosophical Foundations, is forthcoming from Ohio University Press...
...The speaker wanted to believe...
...Such statements seem to me wonderful and grotesque examples of philosophical confusion...
...What is different about this renaissance is the changed context in which it occurs, a context which Rah.ner named as the central significance of Vatican II: the emergence, for the first time in history, of a world church...
...The "liberal consensus" may contribute to this renewal, but can hardly be its basis...
...Sec- ondly, we should avoid trivializing Jesus...
...When he read the funeral service for his wife, I believe that he had no doubts...
...W HEN Cardinal d'Ailly spoke those words at the Council of Constance in 1420, the church to which he was referring was reeling from the Avignon papacy and the Western Schism and was hurtling downhill towards the Protes- tant Reformation...
...Are these scientific conclusions...
...But if some such decline is possible in a few cases, it is worth worrying about as one selects which gamble to make...
...Sheehan may be right that the shift of concern among theologians and bishops toward social and political issues is only the counterpart of a withdrawal from the crumbling of "traditional theology...
...Would not extended and forthright discussions of the nature of reli- gious mythos, revelatory for the believer, be more in order...
...Dr.F...
...A variety of trustworthy teachers who know the Catholic tradition and profess it will always be able to trace it from its biblical roots...
...Professor Sheehan does all thoughtful Catholics a service by surfacing a question which Greeley deals with on other terms: must the "religious story which claims that love stronger than death is what the universe is about" forever be presented from episcopal and papal chairs as if the Enlightenment had not occurred...
...This is not to say that there is nothing distinctive about the Catholic tradition within Christianity...
...It would be easy to point out the places where Sheehan dogmatically leaps beyond his data, even where he cites the latter...
...is the weakest of his books...
...I am not --repeat NOT -- commenting on Dr...
...Of course, we did not have to heed the theologians, we could have marched on strong in our faith...
...but he could still say the Creed with belief...
...My own sense of "most practicing Catholics" is that They are far more religiously and theologically knowledgeable than Sheehan judges...
...He has written with insight and profundity on almost every important theological topic...
...know by naming" or that "we understand by imposing meaning on the conflicting phenomena of our eYtistence...
...I asked him if God had existed before Dr...
...With Tracy I unhesitatingly affirm the "fundamental trust in tradi- tion" which he identifies ~is an essential element of Catho- licism...
...Where this is present, we are on Catholic ground...
...But underlying all was deep respect for the tradition...
...Yet they are at some distance from the lan- guage of many in this "liberal consensus," whose more cau- tious expressions do not so much reflect pastoral sensitivity as scholarly perception of the error of over-simplification...
...And perhaps the point is not to salvage Catholicism or Christianity but to let go of them so that one can discover what they were supposed to be about...
...Where the tradition must first prove itself worthy of trust, we have left the realm of historical Catholicism...
...Nothing makes the decline from pious agnosticism to impious gnosticism to materialism to suicide inevitable...
...I do not agree with him, but he is ready to engage in rational debate...
...Bothell, Wash...
...Moreover, one may hold that by his resurrection Christ attained the condition which constitutes him as the enduring foundation of the church...
...The business of the educated (I include pulpit preachers and elementary school teachers) is to learn and convey all they can about the nature of this mythos from a modern perspective...
...Ask me about that church and I'll tell you it's the church that the blood of Jesus don't foul with reden:iption...
...His method of retrieval of traditional themes in the light of contemporary questions, including questions arising from current exegesis, is quite different from Hans Kiing's more biblical approach...
...They are sure only that their work is unfinished, and that it must not be halted...
...The ~ontemporary con- sensus reacts on many points to liberalism...
...I have great feelings of sympathy for his feelings...
...Perhaps that will show how liberal we really are...
...There are allusions to the" scientific exegesis" of the Scrip- tures...
...Divinity School University of Chicago I lllll Biblical history rediscovered t READ WITH interest the replies of David Tgcy and Andrew Greeley to Thomas Sheehan's article...
...After allowing for the fact that these assertions are made in an unnuanced way that would make the average scholar wince, one can concede that Sheehan is correct in attributing to the "liberal consensus" these disagreements with traditional Roman Catholic theology...
...Nobody with a good car needs to be Justified," he says, and he means it...
...But, as Rahner suggested, these distinctive traditions possess in their very plurality an already given unity-in-difference that becomes especially apparent in the context of a world church faced with new questions...
...What is needed is a climate of perfect freedom in the church while the life-giving, love- begetting story is being told and pondered...
...I prescribe Fergus Kerr's "The Need for Philosophy in Theology Today" (New Blackfriars June 1984) as the begin- ning of a cure...
...But faith and skepticism may be refuted as logical positions and survive as existential ideals...
...Louis Rahner & world church I I N HIS REVIEW Thomas Sheehan signals his ambivalence about the losses and gains for the church that are the result of its recent theology...
...In the present situation they tend to obfuscate rather than illuminate issues and options...
...For some time now the leading intellectuals in both camps have been raising serious questions about the most fundamental ideological tenets of their respective traditions -- whether those be surplus value or the dictatorship of the proletariat on the one hand (cf...
...The basic point is, Do we have faith in the Incarnation and Resurrection...
...He is the weakest of the exemplary group of liberals instanced and Eternal Life...
...The discussion continues- responses from readers and Thomas Sheehan I N ITS August I0 issue, Commonweal carded responses by David Tracy and Andrew M. Greeley to an essay that had appeared last June 14 in the New York Review of Books...
...26:64...
...That is, the founda- tional crisis within Catholic Christianity has a lot to do with the fact that, as far as one can humanly discern, Jesus went to his death without knowing(or wishing) that his followers would soon declare him the founder and titular head of Christianity, not to mention the consubstantial Son of God...
...PETER CHIRICO, S.S...
...For example, Sheehan states that according to the "liberal consensus" it seems that Jesus "ordained no priests and con- secrated no bishops, indeed he did not know he was supposed to establish the Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic church with St...
...Andrew Greeley noted the use of words like "scientific" and "proof...
...Third, we may well have exhausted the usefulness of epithets like "liberal" and "conservative" in matters religious...
...When pious agnosticism becomes impious gnosticism, there is the danger that it may become anxious, vulnerable materialism --as if to say, nobody without a good car can be justified...
...But at best one makes this kind of wager without knowing what the stakes are...
...Older readers will notice that Divino Afflante Spiritu appeared that same year...
...Nevertheless, the editors managed to sign up some very interesting writers in various creeds and denominations...
...One day Dr...
...That the church, following the direction set by Gaudium et Spes, is in its better moments less concerned with its own distinctive identity and more concerned with what it does in a politically torn world, strikes many Catholics, both in the theological community and in the pew, as appropriate...
...Kiing, but he did not want to worry about his new-found contentment...
...F. would ask me why it took me to the 1960s to raise basic doubts about doctrine...
...Her crisis is comparable to a similar one in contemporary Marxism...
...In their responses, Tracy and Greeley challenged both Sheehan's de- scription of the "liberal consensus" and the conclusions to which Sheehan thought it led...
...Hazel Motes does not rely on himself after his break with Jesus...
...It seems to me that Sheehan's treatment of the foundation of the church exemplifies the faulty pattern of argumentation that he uses throughout his article: (1) he highlights the differences between traditional Roman Catholic theology and the "liberal consensus...
...I suspect that most of the others would (or will if the occasion arises) also...
...I don't like slippery-slope arguments if only because most positions lie on some kind of slippery slope...
...And no matter how much these Marxist and Christian "liberals" proclaim their loyalty to their respective traditions, both Moscow and the Vatican seem intent on condemning these efforts as a new and very dangerous trahison des clercs...
...So, I would like to ask David Tracy and Andrew M. Greeley: When all is said and done, do you believe...
...I am persuaded that this is the more pressing issue and the one which, perhaps, inspired Commonweal to devote its attention to Sheehan's article...
...The chemist Michael Faraday once wrote, "Nothing is too wonderful to be true...
...The invaluable positive contribution of biblical criticism is that it deprives us of a Jesus who gave us our church and our faith in a quite plain-and-simple way, told us just who he was and what we were to do about it --no mystery, no scandal of the cross, no challenge...
...meaning the Incarnation and Resurrection and a lot in between...
...I think they have learned that theology is not the church but that it ought to serve the church, whose members are legitimately interested in what they are doing...
...I'm member and preacher to that church where the blind don't see and the lame don't walk and what's dead stays that way...
...There are also many extraordinary statements about what Jesus knew or didn't know about himself, about the "Trinity," etc...
...This judgment must be read, however, in conjunction with the statement of the German bishops on January 7, 1980: it was only "specific points" in Kfing's theology, not the whole, that had been repudiated...
...Rahner's theological vision of the wholeness of the life of grace in which death makes definitive the (often anonymous) yes or no to God which is freely chosen and expressed in the life of the human person in time, and his firm insistence on resurrection as the irrevocable gift and response of God to all of humankind in Christ, represent a powerful impulse in the pluralism of Catholic theology at present...
...His basic technique is to list a number of conclusions of the "liberal consensus" which, taken in isolation, sound destruc- tive of traditional Catholic theology...
...These I I THOMAS SHEEHAN iS a professor of philosophy at Loyola University of Chicago...
...It comes back to faith...
...For most of the next eighteen years I dealt annually with several versions of the question, "Now it's Adam and Eve, next it will be the Resurrection," repeated with insistence and with varying degrees of discourtesy and answered with monotonous regularity...
...The dismantling of traditional Roman Catholic theol- ogy," Sheehan affirms in the opening sentence of his article, "is now a fair accompli...
...J.M...
...An extraordinary number of readers have now joined this discussion...
...The moral rather than the logical complications are the ones that intrigue me and ought to intrigue Sheehan as well, given his vision of an orthoprax church...
...A future issue will carry further responses from David Tracy and Andrew M. Greeley...
...What is essential to the faith is that (1) Christ established the church and (2) he now constitutes its enduring foundation...
...And yet.., if Sheehan cannot make a case for a "liberal consensus," does he at least insinuate the reality of a "liberal trajectory" which could indeed eventuate in "the end of Cath- olicism...
...More than one critic who (on Sheehan's ac- counting) belongs to the "liberal consensus" in Catholic theology has faulted Kiing for a kind of Catholic sola scrip- tura: making a quantum leap from the New Testament to the dialogue with contemporary Protestantism in its German aca- demic guise...
...That earlier essay, by Thomas Sheehan, had argued that a "liberal consensus" in Catholic theology had effectively dis- mantled traditional Catholic beliefs and was "bringing the church to what can be called the end of Catholicism...
...Ratzinger never used tradition uncritically, however...
...In any case, Cardinal d'Ail- ly's words, adapted to the new situation, can have an even greater meaning for us todajr than they did for the Council Fathers five-and-a-half centuries ago...
...He said Dr...
...I believe that the "liberal consensus" needs criticism to keep it honest...
...Tracy but not Greeley FEEL THAT David Tracy has said all I should want to say...
...He knows there is no redemption...
...In developing his analysis, Sheehan also makes a disjunction between the pre-revolu- tionary "folk religion" of "most practicing Catholics" and the beliefs of Catholic exegetes and theologians who have already dismantled traditional Roman Catholic theology...
...Paul calls it "knowing according to the flesh...
...Second, while "liberal" theologians dispute methodology and deprecate "Denzinger-theology," non-theologians draw their own conclusions from the seeming absence of conclu- sions...
...Impious gnosticism seems to me to be the principal pitfall of pious agnosticism, and O'Connor's story can be read as a fable about the consequences of passage from the one to the other...
...For many Episcopalians the essence of Christianity is not the divinity of Christ or the promise of life after death --it is a social and ethical message that might some day be as respectable as Buddhism or Con- fucianism --if we can get rid of the mumbo-jumbo...
...LORING W. BATTEN, [] Port Washington, N.Y...
...We ought to avoid the implication that salvation demands the achievement of the full potentiality for wealth and the exploitation of nature which seems to lie within the grasp of contemporary Western civilization...
...Why must papal utterances quote the church Fathers appo- sitely on the Bible but fall silent on the critical studies of the last two hundred years...
...I preach the Church Without Christ...
...The essay was centered on the question of Jesus' alleged Resurrection from...
...Motes makes Pascal's wager in reverse, only he does not think it is a wager at all: he knows that what's dead stays that way...
...not so many years ago I would have said to you with total faith that our wives are now in a better world than we can know, so that our grieving has to be for us and not at all for them...
...Chris- tianity has to come back to belief...
...As this seems to be the wager I have made with my own life, so --as among Tracy, Greeley, and Sheehan --I find I have most in common with Sheehan...
...Was he expressing obliquely his own disbelief...
...What they disagree with is the manner in which traditional Roman Catholic theology ac- counted for these points...
...They took away --or caused us to let go of -- some deep and old beliefs...
...In this regard I offer three brief observations...
...brought the doubts into focus...
...Wisdom traditions and hellenistic materials, originally discarded as unhistorical, have been shown to have roots in Palestine...
...Let me illustrate by a reaction I heard to Hans Kiing's book on belief in God...
...F. said to me: "Do you know...
...I would wel- come a discussion of the stakes...
...His at- tempt to build a case for a supposed "liberalconsensus" in Catholic theology actually misrepresents the views of some of those invoked in support of his thesis...
...3) he concludes that the" liberal consensus" makes shipwrec k of the traditional theology...
...However limited, however faulty in its individual expressions, however timeconditioned and hence in need of restatement for our times, tradition held the field until there was proof that one of' its elements was inconsistent with the whole, and must be jettisoned...
...And Rahner's vision of the self-communication of God to the depths of the individual and to the very structures of the world of human experience -- a "world of grace" --was formulated not on the basis of the Bible and new exegesis but on a retrieval of central themes in the Greek Fathers and especially Thomas Aquinas...
...But we did not, and I have some feelings of discomfort about the theologians...
...Are there safeguards in Catholicism against the repetition of this scenario --the scenario to which Sheehan himself seems committed...
...To establish this thesis Sheehan would have to show (1) that the conclusions of the "liberal consensus" contradict ele- ments of traditional Roman Catholic theology and (2) that these elements are essential...
...When a sadistic highway patrolman runs Motes's car over a cliff, Motes acts as if his life is over...
...We have no choice but a choice of gambles...
...I was surprised to find that, in his list of exegetes and theologians, Sheehan did not mention the single thinker who was and is probably the most influential of the Vatican II era: Karl Rahner...
...To equate this figure with the Jesus who actually lived and breathed, and is part of our present experience, is an injustice to the living past such as we would never do to our great grandparents...
...In doing so the rebuilders of Catholic theology will surely rediscover what one of his biographers has called the "innovative tradi- tionalism" of Pope John XXIII...
...Yet recent research, especially Roman Catholic research, has gone in the opposite direction...
...Thus to appeal to Newman as a "liberal" would appear strange to one for whom" liberalism" represented just that denial of determinate truth and authority in religion which Newman deprecated...
...We have to trust the collective integrity of Catholic scholars...
...A papal encyclical letter of 1943, an instruction of the Pontifical Biblical Commission of 1964, a document of the Second Council of the Vatican of 1965, all acknowledge hesitatingly that the Bible is no modern historiography...
...But in my judgment the man had not settled anything...
...People tried to bring a charge of heresy against him when he was a pioneer in critical analysis of the Scriptures...
...Why use phrases like "Jesus' alleged resur- rection," "Jesus knew nothing about the Trinity...
...Sheehan establishes the first point...
...Like the householder bringing out of his storehouse "things new and old" (Matt...
...By focusing on the minimal consensus about the consciousness of Jesus and the use of explicit christological rifles, Sheehan overlooks what the contemporary consensus endeavors to show as the basis for the move from an implicit to an explicit christology, and from eschatology to ecclesiology...
...Then why speak of the consequences of all this as' 'immensely promising" for the Catholic church...
...My grandfather was an Episcopal priest and an Old Testament scholar...
...The sweeping generalizations of Sheehan, neither nuanced accurately nor contextualized criti- cally, were unfairly projected into classrooms of universities and seminaries...
...Paradoxically, I find myself more comfortable with his straightforward demarcation of alternatives than with David Tracy's well-meaning but rather promiscuous vision of a great "catholic" synthesis presided over by Geraldine Ferraro and Thomas Sheehan...
...Similar disparities can easily be shown for Sheehan's "con- sensus" on the empty tomb, immortality, etc...
...Kiing's book, but on the reaction I heard, which could be summed up in this sen- tence: "Oh, thanks be to Ki~ng, we can go on believing in God...
...what kind of "proof" is it reasonable to require to validate claims in history, in science, in theology...
...The list of exegetes marshaled into a single category combines people who are not united by any "liberal consensus" but rather by a conviction that the histori- cal evolution of ideas is an essential element in the process by which God reveals truth and salvation to and through the church...
...Spirituality can be avoided by the believer as well as the nonbeliever -- each in support of his or her position...
...In the case of the disciples of Jesus, this opening of the heart had to endure the total desolation of his horrible death, and so was brought into the vision of him victorious over death that is the abiding power of Christian faith...
...We print a selection of their comments below, as well as a reply by Thomas Sheehan...
...The history of Modernism and of biblical and theological scholarship in the church since 1907 suggests that thought control is not possible without sins against charity, justice, and veracity...
...Let me borrow a phrase from the late Father Frank Gerst who once said to a Jesuit domestic official, "You are entitled to reprove me, but neither you nor any other S.O.B...
...This systematic agnosticism about what, for the authors it studies, was passionately known, is a distorting factor that the believer must bear in mind...
...In her novel, Wise Blood, Flannery O'Connor's boy preacher, Hazel Motes, cries...
...JOHN JAY HUGHES Director of Renew Archdiocese of St...
...As I see it, I propose with all due modesty that we ought to avoid the danger of turning salvation into a fairer distribution of wealth or implying that the Reign of God will be achieved when all of mankind and womankind will have made it to the middle class...
...For in accord with the biblical evidence one may hold that, by his activity with his followers, Jesus set in motion the movement that developed into the structured church...
...I also accept Tracy's contention that "what is new in mod- em Catholic theology is a greater recognition that the tradition which is fundamentally trusted . . . is . . . ambiguous and thereby in constant need of correction and self-reform...
...Are these safeguards suf- ficiently clarified and respected by Catholic theologians...
...The essay that I published in the New York Review of Books (June 14) and that evoked the responses of David Tracy and Andrew M. Greeley in Commonweal (August 10) dealt with this foundational crisis in Catholic Christianity...
...It would be an irony worthy of Kierkegaard were theologians to succeed in showing the illegitimacy of Sheehan's theoretical construct concerning a "liberal consensus," only to discover that it had for all practical purposes prevailed among the rank and file of "communal Catholics," whose vague "sense" of community and sacramentality will surely wither without theological and institutional support and challenge...
...By .a supreme irony it is these zealous defenders of the faith who are today's true modernists, clinging with the desperation of drowning men to a tradition that is very recent...
...Do we believe in at least the Incarna- tion and Resurrectio/Lq If not, then I think we have to move on to something other than Catholicism or Episcopalianism...
...As I see it, the basic question in a debate with Thomas Sheehan is not what we can learn from reason and argumevt...
...I did not say in 1944, but I have said more than once since and not in secret, that I would rather trust the integrity of my fellow scholars (not without reservations) than I would trust the integrity of those officials of the Roman Curia who handle thought control...
...I think we (if I may be included in the "liberal consensus") should accept the invita- tion...
...I think my colleagues have shown a charming uncertainty and malaise, befitting those who are not sure where they are or where they are going...
...My reaction is from the point of view of an Episcopalian, I do want to say that Thomas Sheehan's article got to me deeply --not as a theologian, of course, just as a person...
...Too bad, if so, because the assimila- tion of the implications of scriptural research for the under- standing of doctrine is an occasion for intellectually exciting renewal, a challenge rather than a threat...
...We met as often as we could to keep busy and possibly to help each other...
...FREDERICK J. CROSSON University of Notre Dame Is there a 'liberal trajectory...
...F.'s wife died and my second wife died...
...JACK MILES University of California Press God is not well served by lies I I I N 19431 BEGAN tO teach exegesis at a Jesuit seminary...
...What he does so neatly is now a commonplace, but one that can have escaped many a mid-life Catholic with academic training in some other field...
...Although I often find Sheehan provocative and helpful, his review of Kiing proved disappointing...
...Increasingly, these conclusions approximate Sheeh'an's own...
...It represents a Kiing...
...as we should have noticed he had spent a lot of his life in critical study of the Bible...
...However, he falls to show that these elements of disagree- ment are essential to the faith...
...He is not a pious agnostic, but if you will, an impious gnostic...
...If church history is any guide, it is certain that in time Catholic theology will emerge reconsti- tuted and renewed...
...Thus, if you tell a skeptic that he does know a thing or two, aut tacet aut consentit: either he says nothing or he agrees, because saying anything involves knowledge, which entails agreement...
...Christianity's historic doctrinal quarrels over Scripture and tradition, grace and works, are indeed tran- scended in the framework of a world church and a collabora- tive ecumenical theology...
...In the case of Marxism it is as though Communist intellectu- als were finally beginning to pay attention to Karl Marx's disclaimer before the First International: "Moi, je ne suis pas marxiste...
...Most "liberal consensus" theologians known to me hold these two points...
...It has shown how the early Christian creeds sought to explicate dimensions of the life and praxis of the historical Jesus...
...3. The manner as well as the matter of Sheehan's essay raises questions...
...But as far as I know his sharp eye on the words of the text never made him doubt the essential message of the Testaments...
...Nor have I improved the answer I gave then: "We will cross that bridge when we come to it...
...George Kelly and The Wanderer...
...And in the case of Catholicism it is as if her leading theologians were at last taking seriously Jesus' rejoinder to the religious establishment when they asked him if he were the Christ:" You have said so" (Matt...
...The owners ranked religion at the bottom of the scale of what anyone would want to read about...
...Kiing had given him those reasons...
...The gains are an important intellectual creativity and a deeper understanding of the Christian religious story, thoughtfully elaborated by David Tracy and Andrew Greeley...
...It is not his determination to lead a good life that holds him together...
...I I I N ONE RESPECT I would be harsher in my assessment of Sheehan's piece than either of the respondents...
...Today the church is facing a crisis at the level of the foundations, not the surface, a crisis in fundamental theory rather than day-to-day practice...
...Pour ~pater les bourgeois...
...It is otherwise that the church knows her Lord...
...Likewise the recent application of categories from sociology and anthropology, for example, those concerning messianic movements and cognitive disso- nance, have shown how apocalyptic expectation and commu- nity formation were not exclusive but inclusive...
...Where wisdom is taught and learned, the teacher opens the heart of the disciple to the reality of spirit, to a sense of people and their life that differs, as chalk from cheese, from common-sense knowing...
...MOST REV...
...I do not mean to side with the fundamentalists and call the Bible unquestionable...
...can tell me what I think...
...The two lacunae are connected, of course...
...The bishops also recognized the "pastoral concern" evident in Kiing's writings and acknowledged that he had effectively commended Catholic faith to many earnest seekers after truth, though at the price of sowing confusion among many believers...
...The rediscovery of biblical history, indeed of the history of the unfolding of faith within the context of Scripture itself, is one of the primary contributions of the past forty years of Catholic exegesis...
...There is just no such consensus expressible in such bold and bald state- ments...
...Their knowledge of tradition seldom antedates Vatican I. Such elements of the tradition as they do know they treat with a magisterial fundamentalism that is almost the mirror image of Protestant biblical fundamentalism (itself an American invention, not yet a century old...
...The seminarians who initiated me, if they survive, have reached or are approaching the fortieth anniversary of their ordination...
...Pascal's wager in reverse is the gamble Sheehan proposes...
...It is doubtful that many Catholic teachers or preachers of the first half of this century were making distinctions in college classes as correctly as Tracy does in his article, between commitment to the Catholic tradition in faith, and certitude about apparent historical details in the gospels...
...He blinds himself, wanders off, and is found face-down in a ditch...
...F. replied that he of course did not take the Bible literally...
...Sheehan's formulations seem intended to be shocking...
...Not at all: he relies on his car...
...It is otherwise that the poet knows her past...
...Now we have come to the bridge mentioned above...
...It is a pity Kiing has been given so much attention...
...But he falls to indicate that there are positive discoveries of this same consensus which reestablish on a different basis the essentials of the faith...
...The foundational crisis in contemporary Catholicism is neither reducible to nor the sum total of such surface conflicts and problems as the dramatic decline in religious vocations and church attendance in the developed countries, or the open defiance of Vatican pronouncements on certain moral ques- tions, or the near revolt of women against Pope Wotyla's refusal to let them assume a greater role in the church...
...We trivialize him when we say that he is too naive for our sophisticated world, or that his simple village wisdom cannot speak to our complex world and the complex mess we have made of it...
...A year or two later Dr...
...Of course, "the historical Jesus" is only what can be known of Jesus by strictly scientific historical research...
...exegesis nor Catholic education seems well served by such a broadside...
...RICHARD J. SKLBA Auxiliary Bishop of Milwaukee 'I come back to faith' T HIS LETTER is not strictly relevant to your discussion "The End of Catholicism: Is liberal theology undermin- ing the faith...
...Or does Sheehan know something he isn't telling us...
...One day at a meeting an editor said: "Come on now, Dr...
...In fact, a good case can be made that they are not...
...He had lived next door to Paul Tillich and really knew a lot about modem theologians (includ- ing Roman Catholics...
...One can trace through the New Testament period a gradual develop- ment of the contours of the church from the free-wheeling community of First Corinthians to the more structured later church of the Pastoral Epistles...
...One of them was an elderly and distinguished Episcopal priest, writer, editor, and author- ity on the Bible (he was one of the group that produced the Revised Standard Version...
...the French Communist Party's 22rid Congress in 1976) or the Resurrection and divinity of Jesus on the other...
...He did not treat Scripture in the manner of the neo-scholastic manuals: as a quarry of loose stones in which one could find proof-texts...
...It is Rahner who is studied in Catholic seminaries, colleges, and universities as a kind of contempo- rary Aquinas...
...Peter as the first in a long line of infallible popes...
...I don't think the Andrew Greeley piece will do as a criticism of Sheehan...
...2) he omits further aspects of that consensus which preserve the essentials of the faith in a new context...
...He acts unjustified, lost...
...They are like the eerie moans and murmurs that windowpanes in San Francisco make during those frozen few seconds before an earthquake rips upward from the depths...
...But the modem theologians I have read so long leave me without that faith...
...It is as an ideal that pious agnosti- cism merits consideration...
...Now while modem biblical criticism has been indispensable to the renewal of our theological understanding, it has a very serious lacuna, pointed out by Donald Evans in his liberating article in Commonweal [July 13]: It has no room for spiritual, mystical, discipular knowing, on which Christianity, like the other world religions, is based...
...Since I agree with their re-sponses, I simply want to underscore some further points of disagreements with Sheehan's analysis...
...CAMERON St...
...These insights may result in the restate- ment of commonly held Catholic doctrines in more nuanced and existential terms...
...The wide variety of contemporary interpretations within Chris- tianity and within Catholicism further suggests that Sheehan is right in speaking of "the most vigorous intellectual renais- sance since the high Middle Ages...
...My sense is that many Catholics, at least, have absorbed not a dismantling so much as a genuine, theolog-ical renewal of understanding since Vatican Council II, a renewal that is based on very traditional sources...
...The church, in celebrating a living mem- ory of a man who totally transformed human existence, no more expects the context of this memory to be served up by scientific historical research, than anyonewith a vibrant sense of his or her ancestry (and of what Eliot cal]s the presentness of the past) would expect the content of that precious sense to be so served up...
...It was in the way of discipleship...
...For example, while quoting Raymond Brown in a footnote that "the scientifically controllable evidence" of scriptural investigation leaves the question of the virginal conception unresolved, Sheehan in his text says, "Most likely Mary told Jesus what she herself knew of his origins: that he had a natural father...
...Is it really not possible to maintain that Jesus could have both a divine and a human understanding...
...13:52), Ratzinger ranged widely over our two-thousand-year-old tradition, including Scripture, to fashion his doctrine of the church...
...It is quite distinctive, as is the American Catholic tradition, and the Calvinist, the Lutheran, the Episcopal, and the Methodist...
...In the interest of rescuing that church, the cardinal was beseeching the assembled fathers not to be too harsh on certain members of the hierarchy who, despite their unsavory morals, just might be able to see the Bark of Peter through the rough seas ahead...
...The answer, I think, is that religion's proper business is the transmission of a life-giving mythos about a love stronger than death...
...Michael's College A challenge, not a threat I T HERE ARE THREE things that should be kept in mind in thinking about the issues raised in the essays by Sheehan, Tracy, and Greeley...
...Unless "the end of Catholicism" is what is promising...
...ROBERT IMBELLI Maryknoll School of Theology Our trust in tradition 0 F THE TWo replies to Thomas Sheehan it is that by David Tracy to which I relate most readily...
...First: his description of the "liberal consensus...
...His overarching theological vision has "trickled down" in distinctive personal and collective ways to the average pulpit and pew...
...This fundamental trust in the tradition is utterly lacking in champions of frantic orthodoxy such as Msgr...
...With other members of Sheehan's "liberal consensus," I find this fundamental trust in tradition sufficiently conditioned in the writings of Hans Kiing to justify the judgment of church authority in December 1979 that he "can no longer be consid- ered a Catholic theologian...
...he had simply shifted the grounds of the debate so that he said "I believe in Kiing, therefore I believe in God...
...As far as Adam and Eve (or Moses, or the Red Sea, or Mount Sinai, or the Virgin Birth, or miracles) are con- cerned, you must bear in mind what we will read in Job: God is not well served by telling lies on his behalf...
...I praise Sheehan for candidly posing the choices as he sees them...
...While we are on the way, we have to follow our stars...
...The scholastic refutation of skepticism claims that any re- sponse in argument implies knowledge...
...Why must resurrection be the exception to this rule...
...F., you don't really believe all that stuff, do you...
...David Tracy has already demurred...
...Today, at the dawn of her third millennium, the Catholic church, like the rest of Christianity, is facing a much deeper crisis, one in fact that cuts to the very foundations of what she is...
...This "fundamental trust" is crucial...
...Liberalism postulated a dichotomy be- tween the historical Jesus of Palestine and the dogmas of hellenistic Christianity, between the imminent apocalyptic expectation and the emergence of church order...
...REV...
...It seems altogether fitting that in a world hori- zon, an ecumenical context, there appears to be less difference between Protestant and Catholic thought, as Christian theol- ogy as a whole encounters the religious stories and theological claims of the other world religions: Judaism and Islam, Hin- duism and Buddhism...
...Central among those questions are the function of the church and the task of Christians in a world of massive oppression, dehumanization, poverty, hunger, and exploita- tion, a world threatened by nuclear and ecological disaster...
...GERARD S. SLOYAN Department of Religion Temple University I Misconstruing the direction B OTH TRACY and Greeley rightfully point out some sig: nificant inadequacies...
...he neglects the second...
...JOHN L. McKENZIE Claremont, California On Satan & Catholic liberals II I THOMAS SHEEHAN "Only the devil in person can now save the Catholic church, and you ask for angels...
...If it succeeds in alerting Catholics to some of the real perils we, as a community, confront, Thomas Sheehan's tendentious article may actually promote a more self-conscious ecclesial responsibility on the part of us all...
...These themes --of grace as God's personal self- communication, of the unthematic but conscious revelation of God in human historical and worldly experience --have provided a broad theological context in which the developing results of critical biblical exegesis are interpreted in the church today...
...As an example of this fundamental trust in tradition I offer my still vivid recollection of the lectures on the tractate de Ecclesia that I heard at the University of Miinster nineteen years ago by a man whose name has already figured in this controversy: Joseph Ratzinger...
...When the only American dream being dreamt is, as it now is, the dream of a level of material comfort that most of the young people in the country will never enjoy, then we should not be surprised that teen-age suicide rates are climbing...
...We trivialize I A RESPONSE TO DAVID TRACY Jesus when we say that without the understanding made possi- ble by modem theology (nothing personal intended for David Tracy) or modem sociological analysis (nothing personal in- tended for Andrew Greeley) or modem historical and critical analysis (perhaps something personal intended for me) the New Testament, written without these things, says nothing meaningful to the moral and social problems of contemporary men and women...
...I I I :and other such problems are, of course, important in them- selves, but at best they are only surface tremors, symptoms of something that lies deeper...
...What can it mean to speak of the absence of any "proofs" such as an empty tomb...
...THE EDITORS A pattern of argumentation LIMrr MY response to Thomas Sheehan's article to a single point, namely, to examine the pattern of argumentation which leads him to state that the conclusions of the "liberal consensus" effect the dismantling of traditional Roman Catho- lic theology...
...Most of them have shown no readiness to renounce theology or their Catholic belief nor any desire to give it all up and turn, as Sheehan seems to suggest, to more important things like raising the quality of life or the standard of living...
...Has that been settled by some philosophical or "scientific" conclusions...
...When these terms are used as status-conferring, as honorific rather than as proffered descrip- tions, the same caution aroused by used-car salesmen should be awakened...
...Neither...
...The heart of the disciple ~IHE "LIBERAL CONSENSUS" is that far less is known of the II historical Jesus than the Catholic Christian tradition Ill claims to know...
...What, at bottom, has led to Hans Kiing's difficulties with church authority (apart from the technical arguments over infallibility, christology, and ministerial priesthood) is Kiing's frequent refusal to trust the tradition until it has proved itself to his satisfaction...
...He or she would also do well to hear the lament of Northrop Frye on the nearly total absence of literary criticism of the Bible -- the sort of thing the great.critics have done to enhance our,enjoy- ment of Shakespeare...
...The losses include a sense of cer- tainty, of absolute authority, and a certain literalism in the understanding of Scripture and church dogma...
...I don't think "we...
...For that we must look to what Cardinal Suenens calls "the extreme center...
...It did not...
...And he subjected the statements of Fathers, councils, and popes to a rigorous criticism that showed them to be conditioned by time, circumstance, and language...
...I am not sure what salvation or the Reign of God is but I know it is not that...
...I should now add that a great many Episcopalians, including the one who questioned Dr...
...The faith is enriched, not im-poverished, by being deprived of such a Jesus...
...Moreover, they prevent our mustering adequate and comprehensive resources for the task at hand...
...Neither Wal- ter Mondale nor I would be greatly amused...
...ANNE CARR, B.V.M...
...It is a scandal when anyone in authority in the church deals with another person as if the mythos were historically true in all ,its details or, worse, through failure to read and study, thinks that such is the case...
...This pluralism suggests that Sheehan's "liberal consensus" is far from uniform, even in method and presuppositions...
...In limiting their attention to methodological and epistemological matters (as was their pre- rogative), Tracy and Greeley may have avoided the less tract- able but ultimately decisive ecclesial question...
...He also felt driven to find what he considered scientifically respectable reasons for belief...
...for as risen he animates the church, gives it life and growth, makes fruitful its sacraments, and enables it to maintain its basic identity while undergoing adaptations to different times and places...
...1. Sheehan's "liberal consensus" is his liberal consensus...
...But the criticism must contain a rounded presentation of the views criticized...
...Thomas Sheehan has shown that the question has neither disappeared nor changed in substance in forty years...
...SEBASTIAN MOORE Boston College Life-giving mythos about love IIII W HILE I want to credit sheehan's outlook fully, he writes like a Catholic to whom too much was "proved" in undergraduate courses by teachers who studied under graduates of the Roman universities...
...To explain, let me go back twenty years and more to the time when I was social studies and religion editor for an ency-clopedia...
...Unfortunately there is a grounded lack of trust in church authority today, a feeling that it will continue to sell this authority-supporting image of Christ, if it can get away with it, drawing for support on the current wave of Catholic fundamen- talism...
...And it was originally otherwise that the disciples knew Jesus than in the way of straight common-sense observation...
...Cardinal Pierre d'Ailly, cited by Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte...
...As David Tracy has pointed out, Sheehan is not to be lumped with the witch-hunters of the Vatican or The Wanderer or Catholics United for the Faith...
...First, there is certainly historical cause for concern~ The development of Protestant liberalism, despite its genius and undoubted achievements, often resulted in a reduction of Christian vision to morality within an almost exclusively this-worldly horizon...
Vol. 111 • September 1984 • No. 16
