American Catholic Biblical Scholarship:
McKenzie, John L
IN BRIEF
American Catholic Biblical Scholarship: A History from the Early Republic to Vatican II, by Gerald P. Fogarty, S. J., Harper & Row, $34.95,424 pp.
This volume tells the story of Catholic...
...There are some basic concepts of the church involved here...
...hence I find it difficult to mount any adverse criticism...
...Here, of course, is the rub: the spiritual heirs of Vagnozzi and Fenton will claim they have been wronged...
...If I were still teaching, I would recommend this book to my students as a model of historical research: thorough, objective, critical, uses all the right documents and interviews all the right people...
...There one can see that the story which Fogarty tells so well is not dead history but live news, and that the Catholic church is never less the church of Jesus Christ than when it exercises its prized magisterium, its security blanket...
...I do find Fogarty objective, but his sympathies are obviously with the scholars...
...IN BRIEF American Catholic Biblical Scholarship: A History from the Early Republic to Vatican II, by Gerald P. Fogarty, S. J., Harper & Row, $34.95,424 pp...
...it is ugly and basically un-Chris-tian...
...If they feel this, this book is a challenge to them to put up or shut up...
...It shows all the worst features of the magisterium: bullying, thought control, vindictiveness, envy of power-all the features of the medieval Inquisition without the physical violence...
...Recently I received a copy of Charles Curran's Faithful Dissent...
...But they will do neither, preferring the knife in the back to honest confrontation...
...This tells of the character assassination of a man against whom no charge has been proved...
...JOHN L. McKENZIE Rev...
...For that the reader must go to other sources, which I am sure can be found-although the defenders of orthodoxy rarely feel obliged to justify themselves...
...In some of these encounters I played a small part, so perhaps I am not the one to review this book...
...All this is set forth with clarity and fairness to those concerned...
...And it furnishes evidence for the conclusion that violence is no longer used, but only because it is against the law...
...Calif...
...I found things I did not know about episodes in which I was personally involved...
...This volume tells the story of Catholic biblical scholarship in the U.S.-brief- and in the twentieth century, controversial and filled with encounters between biblical scholars and their enemies (who included some members of the hierarchy...
...The story reminds us that Jesus founded a church, not a school or a magisterium, and that he organized a college of apostles, not of rabbis, and that he proclaimed love, not torah...
...The story of Catholic biblical scholarship in this century is neither beautiful nor edifying...
...John L. McKenzie is a renowned Scripture scholar, now retired and living in Claremont, Calif...
Vol. 116 • September 1989 • No. 16
