Religious booknotes

...Prayers, old and new, liturgical and devotional, have been gathered from every country of the world...

...2) outside of Rome there was a good deal of resistance to the force of these claims...

...Those who follow such matters might be interested in a new catechism, written by a group of French Orthodox pastors, which has been recently translated into English...

...Catholic teachers might not find the work useful as a basic text but would certainly benefit by using it as a resource for providing depth to their instructional materials...

...His aim is to eradicate the image of the young nun sweetly dying on a pallet, rose petals showering down upon her, while she cheerfully poured out pious ejaculations of faith and trust...

...Faivre's historical study of the notion of the laity in the early church makes a nice complementary study to that of Eno's on the papacy...

...For example, he twice mentions, without identifying, "Pranzini," who was, in fact, a condemned murderer for whom the young Carmelite prayed as he awaited execution...

...Finally, it is rooted in biblical faith in an unabashed and straightforward fashion...

...Nonetheless, Martin does write well and he knows the period (he has published a study of Newman's contemporary, John Keble...

...It is a rich book for such a modest investment...

...This inexpensive volume seems to me a natural for a wide audience both professional (clergy could use it as a rich resource) and lay...

...forbids me to single out any individual country but, suffice it to say, there is an ecumenical generosity in the selections...

...RELIGIOUS BOOKNOTES Prayers & lives of the faithful Lawrence S. Cunningham It has been one of my deepest convictions that theologians should pay close attention to prayers as a source for theological reflection...

...The old ecclesiology which "proved" the primacy of papal power from a proof text in the Gospel of Matthew (16:18) and a catena of uncontextualized patristic citations has long given way to close studies of the evolution of church authority...

...Until the fourth century, the term layman (which had not come into common use until the third century) meant an adult baptized male who had a certain position in the church and from whom ordained ministers (clerics) could be chosen...

...My suspicion is that he would allow for the legitimacy of the petrine office as an authentic development in ecclesiology while calling on the court of history to trim any excessive claims of centralized power emanating from Rome...

...A decade ago, Archbishop Oscar Romero was shot down while saying Mass in his see city of San Salvador...

...and she was the subject of well meaning but appallingly ignorant medical ministrations available at the time...

...she experienced moments of near despair...

...There has been a continuing interest in Saint Therese of Lisieux as the success of the fine volumes of her writings published by the Institute of Carmelite Studies in Washington, D.C., and recent studies by Patricia O'Connor (1987) and Monica Furlong (1987) attest...

...This is a time-honored strategy exemplified by Augustine in his De catechizandis rudibus and was the usual practice in fourth-century Jerusalem where, as the traveler Egeria tells us, the bishop explained all of the events of Scripture to the neophytes during the period of Lent...

...The Brazilian poet-bishop, Pedro Casaldaliga, had it quite right when he wrote that "none shall ever still/that last homily...

...it could well whet the appetite for a plunge into Ian Ker's authoritative/o/m/Zenry Newman (1988) which is now, blessedly, available in paperback, or, even better, a rereading of such classic works as the Apologia or The Idea of a University...

...His conclusions are twofold: (1) the clear assertion of papal authority appears full blown only with Pope Damasus in 366, but earlier evidences of such authoritative claims can be detected in the sources...

...its attention to art (specifically to the tradition of icons) and liturgical texts as sources for instruction steadfast...

...That is a point with which Newman was in sympathy even before he entered the Roman Catholic church and about which he had much to say both on the eve, and in the aftermath, of Vatican Council I. Robert Eno's closely argued monograph on the rise of papal authority summarizes a good deal of recent scholarship on the evolution of the role of the bishop of Rome as an authoritative voice in the early church down through the sixth century...

...In fact, as Gaucher amply demonstrates, her agonies were protracted...

...The synthesis of historical material makes this work a welcome update of Yves Congar's classic Lay People in the Church (1957...

...1990 marks the centennial of John Henry Newman's death...

...One finds striking prayers composed by contemporary authors and traditional prayers coming from the various countries...

...What happened, in short, to use Faivre's term, is that difference of function slowly changed into inequality of rank as the clerical orders swelled...

...It would be anachronistic to think of the lay/clerical distinction as we know it today in other than developmental terms...

...Faivre also believes that the Christianization of the Roman upper classes largely depended on the recruitment power of aristocratic women like the fourth-century matron Proba who paraphrased the gospel story in Vergilian Latin in an attempt to "incul-turate" the inherited literary past and the Good News...

...The distinction of lay person/cleric had a long evolution in the church...

...Nonetheless, its singular merits would be instructive for anyone attempting to do a rewrite of the now largely discredited (by both liberal and conservative critics) text which recently has come from Rome...

...The work, in short, is not a biography but, as the subtitle indicates, an act of homage to a man who is widely regarded as a saint in his native land and abroad...

...This catechism would hardly "translate" into the Western church tout court...

...Blanket charges that liberation theology is "Marxist" or "Communist inspired" will have to come to grips with the life of this gentle priest who simply would not tolerate the torture and murder of people in the name of public order...

...and (2) the timeworn words "prophet" and "martyr" take on texture and depth when seen, not as abstract categories of hagiog-raphy, but as lenses through which one views his life...

...Gaucher concentrates on the final years of the saint's life when, racked by intractable tuberculosis, Therese had to live the life of an invalid in the Carmel of Lisieux...

...it suffers from a kind of timeless character that floats over the real problems of the world...

...Gaucher's close reading of the available sources for those last years is meticulous and careful but the book presumes that one knows the story of Therese's life as a whole and the names of persons closely and not so closely associated with her...

...A more serious flaw of the work is Gaucher's resistance to cutting through the rather rococo pieties of Theresian language in order to explain why she so gripped the imagination of so many people, including such tough-minded and unsentimental admirers as the novelist Georges Bernanos...

...It makes good background reading as we attempt to get heft on many contemporary issues about ministry and service in the church...

...One result of the revolution wrought by Vatican Council II has been an insistence on a theology set more firmly into historical context...

...His life, which he documented by the careful preservation (and prudent culling) of his letters and correspondence, spanned most of the last century (1801-1890...

...It is that rare book which can delight the browser and nourish the person interested in reflective spiritual reading...

...What Eno does not do is to come to any theological conclusions from his historical study...

...This form of lay evangelization would be an important part of missionary life well into the early Middle Ages...

...I am happy now to add A World at Prayer which is the second edition of a work first published under the aegis of the World Council of Churches in 1978...

...Similarly, in the first four centuries, duties which were once common to the people generally (like that of teaching and catechesis) became slowly absorbed into offices as the church became increasingly bureaucratized and clericalized...

...What comes through very clearly in Sobrino's analysis are the following: (1) Romero was, to use the phrase of William James, a "twice born" Christian, changing from a conventionally pious prelate to a fearless witness to basic Christian values...

...Space (and justice...

...Originally, as Faivre notes, every Christian was a kleros, i.e...

...She endured all this while living in the somewhat stifled environment of a cloister which was inhabited by a goodly number of her own blood relatives as well as others not always kindly disposed toward her...

...This is most definitely a work for those already conversant with the life and writings of the saint...

...one set apart by baptism...

...First of all, it is an organic work which hews very closely to the worship experience of the church...

...By necessity, Martin concentrates on the facts of Newman's life: what he did, when, and for what plausible motivation...

...There is almost no discussion of Newman's ideas nor an analysis of such subtle works as The Grammar of Assent...

...its approach to Scripture is patristic...

...The origins and limits of papal authority are especially important in ecumenical discussions because, as the late Paul VI observed, the papacy is the neuralgic point of such conversations...

...Eno's book is coherently written, pays careful attention to the textual evidence, and has a good deal of interesting bibliography in his notes (I especially appreciated his references to works on early archaeology, art history, and epigraphy) and in an appendix to the book...

...The particular merit of this work is in its analysis of how the non-ordained functioned in the early church...

...Therese, in short, experienced the desolations of the noche oscura in far more than a spiritual way...

...Furthermore, classes of women like the widows and the virgins functioned in the church in a status midway between lay and cleric...

...The entire catechesis is framed within the story of salvation...

...Newman's published correspondence runs to over thirty volumes in the Oxford edition, which explains why his major biographers (Ward, Trevor, and Ker) have produced such massive works on him...

...Sobrino's book consists of a personal reminiscence of Romero the bishop (they were close collaborators) and five essays which reflect on the theological significance of Romero's life and death for the church in El Salvador...

...Published in England in the early 1980s and recently reissued for the centennial by Paulist, it is an engaging, if somewhat breathlessly brisk, life of one of the most important ecclesial figures of modern times...

...One gets a feel for biblical narrative rather than a barrage of biblical snippets used as proof texts for beliefs...

...the catechism begins with the meaning of Genesis and ends with eschatological reflections rooted in the Book of Revelation...

...Since most of this book consists of previously published pieces, there is a certain repetition in the work and a presumption of familiarity with the twisted intricacies of Central American politics...

...Faivre's book is replete with solid information and interesting insights...

...Beyond the spiritual nourishment there is also an enormous amount of factual information to be found within its covers...

...As a first entry to Newman's life, this would be a quite satisfactory work...

...There has been much discussion of the proposed compendium for a universal catechism recently circulated to the world's bishops and much of it has been negative...

...Like the Roman compendium, it is not meant for children but as an aid to pastors and teachers who have the task of teaching the faith...

...Guy Gaucher's book (he was the French editor of her writings), first written in 1973, is further evidence of that ongoing interest...

...The countries are divided into weeks and their religious profiles head each of the weekly cycles along with a map of the country...

...Together with the volume done by a team of Catholic and Lutheran scholars, Peter in the New Testament (1973), we now have a judicious pair of studies in English which give us a clearer picture of the early papacy and a standard against which we might judge its claims to authority...

...Martin's biography, by contrast, weighs in at well under 200 pages and those pages are garnished with a goodly number of illustrations and photographs...

...Sobrino, one of the most distinguished liberation theologians of our day, has given us a book which, while theologically exacting, is, in essence, an act of pietas to the memory of a contemporary martyr of the church...

...Secondly, it avoids the moral-ism so endemic to Western catechesis and resists the temptation to overintellectualize religious truths into dogmatic propositions...

...If Faivre's book only argued for an increasingly clericalized church it would be repeating a truism...

...Impelled by that conviction my bookshelf includes a hefty collection of prayer anthologies both new and old...

...The author of this filial tribute, Jon Sobrino, escaped death in 1989 because he was away from the Jesuit residence where six of his colleagues (and two lay persons) were gunned down by elements of the Salvadoran military...

...Eno's ancillary conclusion is that attempts on the part of the bishops of Rome to enforce uniformity with Roman practice (even in the West) met with what Eno calls "indifferent success" and, with what I would call "benign neglect...

...The rise of monasticism-which was a lay phenomenon-is one instance, with its antipathy to clerical members, an antipathy encapsulated in the early dictum that the monk should flee from the company of women and bishops-the former because of their power to seduce and the latter because of their power to ordain...

...The Living Godhas, not suprisingly, all of the earmarks of the Orthodox sensibility: its Christology is high...

...His name is now part of that sad litany of martyrs who have been murdered by death squads in that unhappy land...