Who's doing Catholic theology?
Egan, Robert J.
WHO'S DOING CATHOLIC THEOLOGY? ROBERT J. EGAN AND WHY, HOW & WHERE? The word "theology" means discourse about the divine mystery, an organized way of thinking and talking about God, or the...
...This means that Catholic theologians are now both men and women, both single and married...
...I want to return to this topic now and look at three of these changes in the way theology is done nowadays, especially in the United States, and to consider some of their implications...
...Several important articles have appeared on the future of Catholic theology in the United States, including articles in America by Robert Wister and by Thomas O'Meara (both, February 3, 1990), and Matthew Lamb (May 26, 1990...
...These three types of authority also correspond to three different types of answers that might be given to our questions about the faith, and three different ways in which answers might be found satisfying: emphasizing the fuller engagement of our minds with the truth, the fuller conversion of our hearts to the good, or the rootedness of the tradition in the whole community and its reception of the integral apostolic testimony...
...We need to think more about what it means to hand on a tradition in an age of historical consciousness and cultural pluralism...
...There is pressure toward "neutralization" at Catholic universities...
...If in the emerging church, membership will mean an active participation in the work of the church for everybody, theology will have to become a discourse guiding our Spirit-filled lives in new directions, an essential discipline for all the faithful, like setting our hearts on God's reign, breaking bread together, and forgiving our enemies...
...The work of theology needs to be brought more into relationship with the prayer, discernment, action, and dialogue of the whole community as it defines itself in response to its cultural matrix...
...But this does not mean that the church should remain indifferent to the claims made by its official representatives...
...In the last twenty-five years, Catholic theology has lost its "compacted" authority...
...But Catholics practice their faith in a bigger world...
...This was a small pool within a small pool from which to recruit for the theological enterprise...
...We need to ask ourselves: What are the institutional conditions of possibility for the faithful maintenance of Catholic identity in theology...
...Now they teach in most of these places as well...
...In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, theology began to migrate from the universities to the more specialized settings of seminaries and divinity schools...
...it loses its ability to shape the ethos of a whole community...
...This produces a heated and disturbed view of one another, and a cacophony of vain and importunate claims, whipped up with sarcasm and displays of shock and dismay...
...A complex ecumenical discussion is inescapably part of the world of Catholic theology today...
...but in talking about the practice of theology, it cannot be avoided...
...These changes concern those who do theology, where they do it, and with what authority they do it...
...In any human community there are always different kinds of authority, which is to say, reasons for listening to someone and caring...
...But it is no longer possible to predict what all these people will have studied or to take for granted a sense of common heritage or a shared frame of reference...
...Only then can questions arise which require reflection—and then perhaps also: discussion, research, prayer, analysis, and argument...
...And concerns about tolerance, social justice, and human rights, and a desire to be critical of our own assumptions, have helped advance a dialogue with people who have no religious affiliations and who may be quite suspicious of religious claims...
...All kinds of authority need to be respected...
...In the last twenty-five years, this picture has changed dramatically...
...Let's call it "the authority of the saint...
...In trying to find its voice again, it appeals now to a more differentiated and circumscribed kind of authority...
...Today we are witnesses everywhere to a war of partial truths in the church...
...This affects even the way we now envision the role of priests who become theologians...
...Let's call it, here, "the authority of official leadership...
...Over the centuries theology has been institutionalized in very different settings: from the schools of late antiquity and the households of bishops, through the great monastic centers of the Middle Ages and the cathedral schools, to the new universities of the thirteenth century and afterwards, then to the separated and more specialized seminaries, theologates, and divinity schools of the modern period, and now to some extent back into the departments of universities, and into publishing houses, professional societies, journal offices, scholarly conferences, and research institutes, as well as into the lives and struggles of local Christian communities...
...Liberals tend to neglect the importance of these bonds, putting more energy into defending the rights of dissenters, minimalizing the danger of loss of identity, and making concessions to American individualism...
...It gave great importance to definitions, distinctions, appeals to authorities, unchanging verbal formulae, passages quoted out of context, and proofs...
...How will Catholic theology maintain its identity, its integrity, in this context...
...Theology was being dislocated and relocated among the wider People of God...
...But they do not always...
...This system emphasized clarity, certainty, and obedience...
...ization in current intellectual debate, as well as the bad prose style of many theologians...
...Then there is an authority that comes from virtue and character, from wisdom of the heart, from contemplative or prophetic vision, from compassion and suffering...
...Theologians were among the "learned few...
...Also, in the 1950s and '60s, Catholic colleges and universities began to improve the quality of their theology departments...
...When this much distrust invades the church, it tends to create a climate of suspicion, anxiety, and cynicism...
...This ecumenical discussion is most advanced among the Christian churches, but more and more it also includes a dialogue with other religious traditions—Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism, among others—as well...
...These have become important centers for the theological enterprise...
...Even now the divinity school remains what Van Harvey has called "the agenda-setting institution for theology...
...Single ideas become absolute standards and ruthless causes...
...Yet in the contemporary university the place of religion in general and theology in particular remains uncertain and heatedly contested...
...As a result, everyone is now required to develop a reverence for mystery and a more reflective relationship with the saving truths of the faith...
...But beyond what is done in the seminary and the university, there is a kind of theological activity that needs to be connected to a community, to a shared spirituality, and to a prophetic mission in the world...
...But is she not, in some serious sense of the phrase, a "Catholic theologian...
...The foundations of theology shift from authority to experience, but then from experience to the suffering of the oppressed and to the awakening of a deeper life in each of us...
...It is no longer a monologue of the learned and the separated...
...Theologians are able to work alongside historians, scientists, philosophers, literary critics, and scholars in many other fields...
...It presupposes the embodiment of the way we live our lives and a primary kind of religious language, in which trust, amazement, gratitude, and love come into speech...
...The antimodernist campaign had successfully stifled the boldness and deep honesty a living theology requires...
...and nothing in their job-descriptions will mention it...
...These three kinds of authority can come together, as they do in a learned and holy bishop...
...This crucial remembering of our whole history is essential for Catholicism...
...It is never possible for these different kinds of authority to be neatly ranked and subjected to one another...
...It may be able to take its place again as a serious intellectual discipline in the wider culture...
...If it is to be Catholic theology, it will have to go on in remembrance of all those who 18: 13 March 1992 Commonweal have gone before us in the faith, with whom we remain one family before the mystery of God...
...f the membership of the Catholic Theological Society of America (CTSA) is a rough indication, there are around fifteen hundred Catholic theologians in the United States...
...This inescapably raises questions about authority...
...Some are among the most important centers of serious theological research and reflection in the world...
...And, in the same years, more and more Catholics—both priests and lay people—were entering doctoral programs in theology and religious studies at places like Harvard, Yale, and Chicago...
...Some schools are practical to the point of being anti-intellectual...
...and most of us would be dismayed or indignant if she were fired from her job for the views she expressed...
...As a result, it tended to institutionalize itself elsewhere as professional education for priests and ministers, so much so that the phrase "theological education" became barely distinguishable from the idea of training clergy...
...These have enriched theology, but they have also added to its difficulty and its pluralism...
...University teachers are among the least religious people in the nation...
...The effect of recent changes in the practice of theology has been to break open the Catholic arcana to the light of day...
...There was a new variety among Catholic theologians, who now brought different life-experiences to the field, along with a wide range of new questions, assumptions, and causes...
...In traditional societies there is a fundamental distinction between the elites, those few important people who (in their own eyes) say and do memorable and decisive things, and the countless others who do not, the common people...
...and the purpose of the Word is to redeem the imagination of our hearts—to gather us in communion, to summon us to conversion, and to inspire us to messianic mission...
...Whose version should we trust...
...Why should I listen to you...
...The growth of religious studies as a field has helped create space for theological disciplines in secular schools...
...They work in an ethos that emphasizes professionalism, pluralism, and academic freedom, Their "religious beliefs" are private matters...
...The way theology is practiced is one element in this larger problem...
...We expect not only competence, but also criticism, independence, and frankness...
...There are profound differences among these theologians, of course, even within the Catholic community...
...Besides this, Catholic theologians have usually been priests...
...In these settings, seminaries and divinity schools, theology has developed into a maze of more specialized inquiries—in biblical studies, church history, fundamental theology, systematic theology, moral theology, spiritual theology, pastoral theology, liturgical theology, homiletics, counseling, canon law, and various related disciplines...
...What do we mean when we say certain things...
...They all have Commonweal 13 March 1992: 17 a legitimate place in the conversation...
...They can be blurred and faked and used to serve the interests of the powerful...
...In the past, a theologian was almost always a "teacher of the faith" not only as a scholar of the tradition but also as an officeholder in the church...
...The same is true in secular and interdenominational schools...
...In addition, at many non-Catholic universities, Catholic chaplains or Newman Clubs were sponsoring lectures, discussions, and courses on issues in contemporary theology and aspects of the Catholic heritage...
...Some things seem clear...
...In what kind of places do we find theologians...
...it is always, first of all, a question about how we are living and what we are doing...
...No one has the responsibility to make judgments about the maturity, prudence, or courage of the aspirant...
...Eight of them now have doctoral programs in theology: Catholic University, Notre Dame, Boston College, Marquette, Fordham, Duquesne, St...
...In life, if someone answers our questions credibly, we are thankful and we go on with our lives...
...During these same years, many secular universities created new religious studies departments which offer courses in a wide range of religious traditions...
...and the priest in this situation was less and less easily perceived as being in a parental role in relation to "the many...
...There is little support for serious research and publication...
...Summer schools of theological and pastoral studies began to flourish...
...Louis, and Loyola (Chicago...
...Before that time, they had been mainly catechetical in their orientation, staffed mostly by priests without research degrees, who explained and defended Catholic beliefs and moral norms in a sequence of required courses...
...It makes sense that when a priest-theologian is widely perceived to be crossing the boundary of orthodoxy, it should be of concern to the church...
...The general intellectual climate of the church was changing...
...and in the last twenty-five years many Catholic seminaries—now fully two-thirds of them—have decided to admit lay students and religious, sometimes even into their Master of Divinity programs, which are conceived as professional programs preparing students for ecclesial ministry...
...Theology is not so much the faith we are practicing, but more the conversation we are having together about this practice, which of course, in turn, may inform and reshape this practice...
...some encourage disdain for most actually existing forms of Christian faith...
...Of course, these need not be forced options...
...Who really speaks with authority about the meaning of the gospel...
...Yet something valuable has been endangered in this transition...
...A sharply increasing number of American Catholics were going to college and into graduate studies...
...This brings us to our second question...
...True, they speak about the loftiest things, the communal reception and enactment of God's own redemptive love and self-revelation in history, but they speak of these matters in their own voices...
...Today full-time lay students make up over a fifth of those studying at Catholic theologates...
...And then there is an authority that comes from a role of leadership that one might be asked to play within a community, from an office of responsibility, with all its burdens and graces and hazards...
...Many young Catholics, especially women, have also been studying "for the ministry" at Protestant seminaries...
...It needs to be thought of, today, as a heartfelt, educated conversation— sometimes an argument mediated by many teachers, writers, and pastoral workers, encompassing the whole community of faith...
...Conservatives tend to remain attached to obsolete cultural forms of authority, minimalizing the contradiction between the gospel and authoritarian social orders, and further delaying the development of more adequate expressions of a Christian understanding of "authority...
...The speech of Jesus raises this kind of question: Who has it right about how we stand with God...
...We need to think more about the idea of religious education and what canon law calls the "right" of all Catholics to a serious theological education...
...it will require new structures, new occasions, and new levels of trust and candor among us...
...Furthermore, this gospel is not merely about how things stand...
...Catholics were increasingly studying in ecumenical settings and programs...
...Eventually, monastic theology itself became highly sophisticated, weaving together "the love of learning and the desire for God...
...Within a surprisingly short time, Catholic theology went through a sea-change...
...In these societies, theology, like other kinds of literacy and learning, is confined to small groups of specialists, who are usually associated in some way or other with the world of the wealthy and the powerful—though the Christian ascetic and monastic traditions in some ways modify this connection...
...And it will have to go on in communion with all Catholics in every city, in every class, in every nation, in every subculture...
...It belongs mainly to professional scribes and an urban intelligentsia...
...In addition I mentioned the very significant changes that have occurred in the last twenty-five to thirty years in the practice of Catholic theology...
...It became necessary to hire faculty with doctorates and to establish professional criteria for hiring, promotion, and tenure...
...So what does it mean to speak with authority about this new thing that is happening through Christ in the Spirit...
...It became more and more odd to speak of them as the "simple faithful...
...Being Catholic becomes something entirely private, a personal preference, an interior attitude or sense of allegiance...
...These questions indicate the shift going on in our perceptions...
...This is challenging...
...Quite apart from the percentages, there has been something like a "laicization" of theology...
...why should we care?—about authority...
...There I mentioned the inherent difficulty of its subject matter, the complexity and diversity of the intellectual frameworks it employs, its fragmentation and specialization, and its marginalROBERT J. EGAN, S.J., is assistant to the academic vice-president and teaches fundamental theology and spirituality at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington...
...In my previous article, I said: "We are used to treating theology as the virtuoso performance of solitary individuals...
...Considered as a whole, though, and shared among God's People, gathered in the knowledge, love, and service of one God, they can lead to more abundant life...
...As a kind of discourse, it concerns self and others, God and world, all at once...
...At some of these universities, recent developments in philosophy and science have tended to restore intellectual and moral seriousness to religious questions viewed broadly and in multicultural terms...
...each treatise usually occupied the span of one semester...
...Catholic" means whole...
...Those who hold offices of public leadership in a religious community have the authority and the responsibility to speak on behalf of the community and its tradition...
...This means that in practice the maintenance of Catholic identity has become more ambiguous and, in some ways, more obscure...
...All theologians have serious responsibilities...
...Of course there is nothing to prevent a lay theologian from having impeccable tact, a cultivated interior life, a regular spiritual director, a serious philosophical education, or a practical involvement in ecclesial ministries...
...If they are believably good and holy people, they speak also with the elusive but powerful authority conferred by sanctity...
...We do not want to hear a party-line from them—no one would believe it anyway...
...There are risks involved with this, but if a theologian does not speak in this way and with this kind of authority in American culture, as one adult to another, he or she will speak with no effective authority at all...
...But divinity is never, in the first place, a speculative question for human beings...
...the party of the human Jesus battles the party of the divine Jesus...
...In this environment, a strong contrast tends to develop between "us" (the insiders) and "them" (the people out there...
...Finally: with what authority do theologians teach...
...In this long history, monks complained 14: 13 March 1992 Commonweal about the vain, speculative theology of intellectuals, who in turn complained about the naiveté and primitivism of monkish theology...
...Some create an ethos of piety and healthy-mindedness...
...Many of these schools now have large, strong departments, well-attended master'slevel programs, and year-long renewal programs...
...Would it make a difference if she taught at a Catholic university (say Notre Dame...
...Whatever is distinctive of the Catholic imagination and culture threatens to vanish, as these authors see it, in a genial cosmopolitan blur...
...But the Latin and the neo-Scholasticism have faded now...
...American Catholicism, left and right, has an alarming propensity to stage these dramas nowadays...
...Still, for most of church history, theology has been of concern primarily to a small minority of educated believers...
...They have studied at Catholic seminaries and universities, but also at Protestant divinity schools and state and private universities in this country and abroad...
...Are the claims we are making intelligible and believable in the contemporary situation...
...Everyone who takes seriously the cognitive dimension of Catholic faith acknowledges the need for some kind of boundary-maintenance...
...So theology arises as a question in the context of some concrete way of being religious...
...Theology can be understood as a disciplined way of thinking and talking about the practice of our religious faith: asking questions about it and trying to answer them in the context of our own time and culture...
...New graduate programs in theology became possible and were opened to qualified lay students...
...Even thirty years ago, it was still being taught, written, and discussed in Latin...
...So the question arises inevitably: Who has really fathomed this mystery—which Jesus himself taught in parables...
...Theology becomes everybody's business...
...16: 13 March 1992 Commonweal From the beginning, Christian speech and theology have been tangled up with the issue of authority...
...Theology may be able to come out of its social isolation and its identification with the training of clergy...
...And would young Catholics who dream of serving the church as theologians therefore generally be better off remaining lay people—and, perhaps, seeking jobs in nonCatholic institutions—to protect their freedom of conscience and speech...
...This does not mean that threats, silencings, and firings are necessarily the most appropriate or effective responses, or that the judgment should usually be made at the highest level and taken out of the hands of friends and colleagues, professional societies, religious superiors and local ordinaries, or the agencies of regional bishops' conferences...
...Cutting through layers of taken-forgrantedness, prophetic language reconstructs the very meaning of authority...
...This evangelical inclusiveness is also essential...
...Many factors were involved...
...Why should I care about your answer...
...Even though priests still outnumber lay members in the CTSA, something has happened that has broken theology's inner connection with church office...
...but as an interpreter of the faith who is also a representative of the church, the priesttheologian plays a more complex role...
...Who are they...
...This was an astonishing innovation—an invasion of the ecclesiastical inner sanctum...
...The truth we live together as Christians we have from God on the authority of Jesus...
...Why do we do certain things...
...and ever since then complaints have been raised in the church about the arrogance and rationalism of "academic theology...
...They may or may not have concerns about the practice of faith or the life of the church...
...Authority is a thorny problem in Catholic theology today, and here it is only possible to touch on a few points...
...The party of the mind battles the party of the heart...
...By custom and habit, a distinction may come to be made between what "we" say "among ourselves" (or in "scholarly journals") and what "we" say "to them" (or in the "mass media...
...The ability to read and to write long texts in these societies is usually rather rare...
...There are advantages and disadvantages to these new developments...
...In addition, most of the two-hundred-andthirtysome Catholic colleges and universities in this country have made the serious study of theology an ordinary part of the Commonweal 13 March 1992: 15 undergraduate curricula for all students...
...If we think of the church as a system of communication, in which some raise questions and some others respond, carrying forward a prayerful conversation about the conduct of our common mission, helping one another to think what we are doing as Christians, it becomes apparent that, in our time, the system is breaking down again and very badly...
...and this truth, though it is proclaimed from the rooftops, remains a mystery, overflowing the mind's capacity with its fullness...
...This new kind of theology must include a heightened awareness of sociological factors and political responsibilities which has made all theologians more self-critical...
...They interpret the meaning of the faith with a double authority: the authority of their competence as intellectuals and the authority of their leadership role within the community...
...So in addition to lay theologians, we now have a large number of "lay people" in the church who have been, in some sense, "formed for ecclesial ministry...
...their teachers and classmates were more and more diversified...
...Yet after the rise of the universities in the medieval period, an entirely different kind of sophistication was required...
...Many of us Americans tend to think of theologians, now, as professional intellectuals who do their work in a public space...
...What we are living together as a gift—God's own life—becomes for us both a mystical path to follow and a prophetic mission in society...
...Vividly aware of the limits and temptations of academic theology, they urge a practice of theology that is rooted in the daily life and commitment to justice of a local community or organized movement...
...For all that was gained in critical intelligence and systematic reflection, theology and spirituality have tended to go in separate ways—to their mutual detriment...
...some are hyper-intellectual to the point of being wildly impractical...
...We will have to bring theological education back in the direction of soul-making—of a mystagogy, as Karl Rahner argued, that initiates us into a deeper understanding of the faith...
...And although this may be less true of Catholic universities, Avery Dulles has said recently that most of them are drifting inevitably toward "total secularization...
...Now many people speak of doing theology in new places...
...The pursuit of holiness and the invigoration of pastoral service were the primary framework of its reflection for the first millennium...
...In general, American Catholic seminaries were notable neither for their intellectual caliber nor for their pastoral relevance...
...Students memorized these theses and were expected to be able to explain and defend them in oral examinations and to refute stock adversaries...
...This split was reinforced by the peculiar form this theology took in seminary classrooms...
...This is a momentous change, but it's something we have not reflected much about as it was happening...
...Gradually these departments came under critical scrutiny according to standards applied throughout the universities...
...For the first time it became possible, as a matter of course, for Catholic women to pursue theological studies, and for young Catholics, men and women both, to aspire to be theologians and to be married...
...By the '60s, students at many Catholic universities were being exposed to all the latest developments in Catholic moral thought, biblical scholarship, and systematic theology...
...How could this keep happening...
...To do theology will mean to think what we are doing as God's family, to cultivate the common share of intelligence and wisdom we need today to be heralds and servants of more abundant life in American society...
...This compacted authority, in fact, was one of the most characteristic features of theology...
...These are questions—why should we listen...
...Theology is no longer—necessarily—conceived as an ecclesial vocation and ministry...
...In regard to these issues of authority, the laicization of theology has been confusing...
...Our present confusions about authority erode the bonds of communion and mutual respect among us...
...It has begun to lose its familiar institutional modes of expression, confirmation, and transmission...
...Logic, argument, and scientific knowledge created the new framework for theology...
...Prophets speak on behalf of God, even in the face of human power...
...In these Catholic colleges and universities, the members of the theology faculty may or may not be Catholics themselves...
...The treatises were divided into theses, twenty to thirty short propositions, which were listed, explained, and defended in approved textbooks...
...Would she be held to a different standard than non-Catholics in the same department...
...The authority of intelligence and study, the authority of wisdom and holiness, the authority of office and responsibility: these are always part of the texture of religious living...
...Each of these contexts helps to shape the conception of theology being practiced, what it takes for granted, and what it aims to achieve...
...We emphasize their rights and their needed autonomy and we emphasize the importance of fair procedures...
...It is "faith seeking understanding," a faith which is only possible within a community and within a tradition...
...What do we believe...
...What is at stake in theology is our understanding of the gospel, which we see as a testimony and a revelation...
...But nothing in their theological education will require it...
...These bewildering developments—what is a "professionally" trained "lay" minister?—also affect the contexts in which theology in general is studied and taught...
...But it is also possible to step back and ask: Says who...
...If a theologian is not a priest, but a Catholic (say a laywoman) who has a doctorate in theology (say from Yale) and who is teaching (say at Northwestern or the University of California at Santa Barbara), then it would seem even stranger for a bishop or a Vatican agency to threaten or try to sanction her...
...These writers warn that the practice of authentic Catholic theology is now on shaky ground in the American Catholic community...
...In these programs, the courses in dogma were the serious courses, and everything else was, at best, secondary...
...Who are we...
...There are no requirements involving tact, prayer, spiritual formation, prior philosophical studies, or accumulated pastoral experience...
...Theologians are interpreters of God's Word...
...It is primarily about the ongoing story of salvation...
...Not only were theologians mostly priests, therefore, but their intended audiences were mainly other priests and seminarians...
...We Americans do not expect our theologians to speak "for" the church exactly, but more concretely and modestly to speak for themselves...
...Considered as alternatives, these can lead to an arid cleverness, a pious sentimentality, an autocratic lazy-mindedness...
...In some of its earliest uses, now rather forgotten, "theologians" were people who knew God from their own experience...
...and it seems clear that universities have been an important agency of secularization in this country...
...As the influence of the German model of the research university spread, the place of theology in the university was increasingly questioned and attacked...
...We would be shocked if Rome ordered her not to speak publicly for a period of time (under threat, say, to annul her marriage...
...Whenever we ask such questions, or others put such questions to us, and we try to answer them through reflection and conversation, and by reference to memory and experience, we are doing theology together...
...Theology has tended to become primarily an academic specialization...
...In a previous Commonweal article (March 8, 1991), I tried to give several reasons why people don't read serious theology any more...
...Let's call it, in this context, "the authority of the scholar...
...It is no longer part of the way theology as such is being institutionalized...
...Whether to ourselves or others...
...If we are to prevent the dissipation of these saving truths, their dispersal in the surrounding secular air, we must somehow recover the idea of theology as a habitus of the Catholic heart and mind...
...Even in this system, of course, extraordinary things could happen—as the work of Bernard Lonergan and Karl Rahner shows—but in many places a tyranny of mediocre minds took over the scene...
...New voices were heard in the conversation...
...One enters the field by doing graduate work in an accredited institution and, usually, by being hired by another one...
...Our hearts have to learn how to include a lot of reality in order to be Catholic...
...Commonweal 13 March 1992: 19...
...The credibility of theology as a serious intellectual enterprise was being threatened by the new philosophies and sciences and by a more skeptical and privatized attitude toward religion...
...Christian theology is reflection on a messianic movement, erupting into history, that carries a word of God's action and that aims at change: liberation, transformation, sanctification, reconciliation...
...Before Vatican II, the charism of the priest was thought to be appropriate for the public service in the church performed by the theologian...
...At the same time, many Catholic seminaries and schools of theology that before had admitted only men preparing for ordination now opened their classes to lay men and women as well...
...This means theology is a secondary phenomenon...
...There is, for example, an authority which comes from study, from close attention and long familiarity, from thought and argument, from competent investigation, from being good at what one does...
...Theology's credentials are constantly being challenged, and it loses much of its energy defending its elemental plausibility to learned skeptics...
...Certainly through the middle of this century the primary institutional setting of Catholic theology was the seminary or religious house of studies, places where candidates were educated for holy orders...
...This means that, until recently, Catholic theologians have usually been: unmarried men who felt called to public ministry in the church, who had the talent and interest to do serious intellectual work, who were educated as priests and Commonweal 13 March 1992: 13 ordained, and who having pursued higher studies successfully became university or seminary teachers...
...The recovery of the prophetic dimension of faith has made more urgent the recovery of the mystical dimension of faith as well...
...The word "theology" means discourse about the divine mystery, an organized way of thinking and talking about God, or the gods...
...To understand the meaning of the gospel it is necessary to be transformed, to die to an old self and be born anew...
...The old dual loyalties which theologians experienced with other intellectuals and other believers have been complicated by an awareness of other more questionable loyalties—of nationality, class, race, status, and gender...
...These types of authority can be pitted against each other—there are such conflicts in the story of Jesus himself as recorded in our Gospels...
...More and more lay people (including women religious) have finished graduate studies in theology and entered the field...
...The subject matter of this theology was divided into several treatises...
...In a democratic culture, this is its best hope for an honest and a wholesome future...
...Not only had the windows been flung open, but the doors as well...
...Now we have to conceive it as a social process...
...So we tend to become more and more a city of warring factions, limited interests, and halfhearted promises...
...beyond that, it was conceived in the technical language of neo-Scholasticism...
...Over the past two-and-a-half decades, the center of gravity in the practice of theology has shifted more and more away from the seminaries and toward the university...
...But is there a discussable, nonauthoritarian way of doing this...
...It was no longer an exclusively clerical form of discourse...
...We need to think more about the role of listening and responding and the need for discernment in the tasks of theological reflection and ecclesial leadership...
...The quality of these programs varies a great deal from one place to another...
Vol. 119 • March 1992 • No. 5
