Modem Catholicism
Cunningham, Lawrence S.
longish essay on Great Britain and Ireland, not surprisingly, is a full chronicle of the SOMETHING LEFT OUT attempts of a very conservative church to MODERN CATHOLICISM Vatican II and After...
...are of such brevity that they cannot reach the level of theological sophistication found, say, in Alberigo's The Reception of Vatican//(1987) with its sug- gestive pages on conciliar hermeneutics and its nuanced sense of Reception Theory as applied to the council...
...The Jesuits get a separate essay but there is none on the collapse of women's religious orders in the West which would have made a stunning companion piece to the parlous statistics recorded in the essay on the state of the priesthood...
...Other areas of the book concern them- selves with what I like to call "The Higher Chit-Chat": what pope x thought of the- ologian y; what bishop tried to head off which curial members...
...Modern Catholicismrepresents a free idea very im- perfectly realized, which may well be a direct result of its overly ambitious inten- tions, l~ IN BRIEF ABORTION,edited by Janet Podell, H.W...
...and (3) survey the state of the church in various parts of the world as a result of those conciliar sea-changes...
...Like others in a series called "The Reference Shelf' issued by the same publisher, it is a compilation of articles, interviews, transcribed debates, and book excerpts, all dealing from one perspective or another with one aspect or another of the abortion debate...
...Precisely because it was both important and is now becoming his- tory (all the students I teach were born into the postconciliar church), it is useful to sum up where we have come from and where we are in relationship to that council even if many of us have lived through those changes and think we understand them...
...an event which was, it might be safely said, a watershed in the long history of Catholicism...
...The somewhat gossipy spirit of much of this book (one senses the presence of Peter Hebblethwaite everywhere in it) is, paradoxically, the source of much of its strength and much of its weakness...
...A bibliography uses the same categories to group thirty-five books and pamphlets and thirty-one abstracts of additional articles from periodicals...
...2) describe once again the thrust of all of the conciliar debates and the documents that emerged from those debates...
...The editor's selections are fair and judi- cious...
...Its very impor- tance has spawned enough literature to sink a fair-sized ship and enough comment to stagger even the most dedicated student of its significance...
...The twenty-four selec- tions are grouped in five sections: "The Right to Choose," "The Right to Live," "If Abortion Were Illegal," "Ethical Debates," and "Approaches to Compromise...
...The very scope of what this volume attempts limits its thoroughness as does its desire to provide both narrative history and theological analysis...
...The very handy section on the conciliar documents them- selves, for example, many of them written by recognized authorities (Robert Taft, S.J., on the Eastern church...
...What I have noted above are only a sam- pling of essays among the sixty-two that make up this anthology...
...Some of the indi- vidual pieces are informative enough (and some are very good) but on the whole I found this a rather quick and bewildering view of that complex reality known as the postconciliar Catholic world...
...Wilson Co., New York, $13,231 pp...
...The entry on North America is, in actuality, about the United States with nary a word about Canada in general or Francophone Canada in particular...
...so also her introductory comments on each of the sections (though some read- ers may be offended that she uses "proabor- tion" and "antiabortion" rather than "pro- choice" and "prolife," and "developing baby" rather than "fetus...
...By contrast, the essay on India and Sri Lanka is almost a textbook description of how difficult the problem of inculturation can be when Western assumptions, say, about liturgy are mod- ified through the impact of another culture...
...The fullness of that essay contrasts sharply with the relatively few pages devoted to the vibrant (but problem-filled) church in Africa...
...Aylward Shorter on the missions...
...Two other articles from these pages (by David Carlin, Jr., and Daniel Maguire) are abstracted in the bibliography, and other current or for- mer Commonwealcontributors (Mary Ann Glendon, Daniel Callahan, Jo McGowan, John Leo, and Cardinal Joseph Bernardin) 300: Commonweal...
...The come to grips with the council...
...The sec- tion on "Aspects of the Church after the Council" is, by turns, banal and informa- tive...
...Richard McBrien on ecclesiology...
...The essays in Hastings's collection are, of necessity, more descriptive than analytical...
...and so on...
...Adrian Hastings, an English academic, has put together a hefty collection of essays, composed by scholars on both sides of the Atlantic, to (1) recall the events leading up to the council...
...Whatever opinion you may hold on the abortion question, you are likely to find it ably defended and ably challenged in this book...
...This is an interestingvolume which is both read- able, informative, and yet--and yet-- unsatisfying...
...longish essay on Great Britain and Ireland, not surprisingly, is a full chronicle of the SOMETHING LEFT OUT attempts of a very conservative church to MODERN CATHOLICISM Vatican II and After Edited by Adrian Hastings Oxford University Press, $29.95, 544 pages Lawrence S. Cunningham e are now a quarter of a century away from the Second Vatican Council...
...Two of the selections are reprinted from Commonweal(one by Sidney Callahan, the other by Daniel Degnan, S.J...
...In the section devoted to the different regions of the Catholic world we find Enrique Dussel citing the Sandinista Revolution of 1979 as emblematic of the prophetic spirit of the council (!) but not a word about the increasing strength of evangelical/fundamentalist Christianity in Latin America...
...Spirituality gets no essay and the one headed "devotion" is thin beer indeed with its preoccupation with such epiphenomena as Matthew Fox and the Madonna in Yugoslavia...
Vol. 118 • May 1991 • No. 9
