Religion booknotes

...to the work of three priest-scholars, active in the United States in the late nineteenth century: the Italian-born Jesuit Aloysius Sabetti (died 1898...

...For one thing, it sets out quite clearly the sometimes confusing finanThe Parish in Catholic Tradition: History, Theology, and Canon Law by James Coriden Paulist Press, $12.95,133 pp...

...Over twenty denominations are represented...

...Father Bausch is a retired parish priest and prolific author...

...Likewise, it is in the nineteenth century that theologians had to sort out what was meant by the "ordinary mag-isterium" of the pope (a term first used by Pius IX) as well as what weight must be given to the pronouncements of the Holy Office on doctrinal and moral issues...

...Boquillon was more theoretical and speculative as a thinker, with a deep interest in fundamental moral issues...

...Among the rights of Catholics are: the right to having the Word of God preached...

...Active congregations of sisters, for example, are largely a post-Enlightenment phenomenon who have had some monastic usages grafted onto their life...

...Sabetti was a man-ualist with a keen interest in casuistry...

...The same energies were present in the period after the Reformation, in the post-Enlightenment period, and earlier in this century...

...This led some devoted souls to reimagine monastic life, others to test the eremitical vocation, the life of poverty, or the imposition of a regular life on canons...

...Even the "megachurches" depend financially on constant increases in the size of the congregation, thus sometimes creating the ecclesiastical equivalent of a Ponzi scheme...

...Such congregations should not be confused with the more venerable contemplative orders who possess a much clearer idea of what their life should be and how they should live it...

...In fact, moral theologians did their work from different premises and employed a variety of methodologies...

...Anyone who has read much church history realizes that this has always been the case...

...His writing is peppered with snippets from magazines, bullets setting out statistics, selections from other books with references, anecdotal narratives about horror stories from the daily press, bad jokes, and odds and ends of Catholic trivia...

...Coriden also points out that the new Code of Canon Law sets out a whole series of parishioner rights as well as procedures to insure those rights...

...As a sociologist, Wittberg is aware of this complexity...

...Parishes and other local congregations are not like the branch offices or local outlets of a central corporation, as local banks or auto agencies or service stations often are," Coriden reminds us...

...In addition, Wuthnow has much to say about how churches think in specifically theological ways about money and economic matters...

...Moreover, the intellectual/prophetic character of the church will focus increasingly on the wisdom tradition and parishes will be less program-oriented and more focused on the nurturing of spirituality in the best sense of the word...

...A few may succeed...

...Bausch predicts a swing back to a more traditional emphasis on the iconic, which means an end of those barren church auditoriums built in the last thirty years...

...Had Hogan written after the 1890s there is every chance, as Curran notes, that he would have been condemned as a modernist...

...The bottom line for all churches, however, is that parish receipts lag far behind the rising income of the middle class...

...For all of the research that Wuthnow put into this book, it is amazing to me that most of what he found, at least from my perspective as an observer of the Catholic scene, could have been deduced from personal observation, conversation, and an eye toward Catholic publications...

...It is no secret that religious communities, especially women's religious communities defined in the traditional Pathways to Re-Creating Religious Communities by Patricia Wittberg, S.C...

...As people attempt this re-imagining of religious life they may well wish to use Wittberg's book as a kind of checklist for ways to proceed and ways not to...

...Curran analyzes in some depth the writings of all three men as well as offers a concise and illuminating history of the development of moral theology, with special attention to the influence of Alphonsus Liguori (died 1787...

...Even though moral theology was mostly oriented toward the education of future confessors, there were real moral questions that demanded real moral discrimination...

...He reminds us of how much volunteer work women once did for churches and how two-career families have changed this equation...

...I highly recommend Coriden's brief and readable work to everyone involved in a parish...

...Wuthnow points out that most middle-class churches-he studied both Catholic and Protestant denominations-were founded on the assumption that the congregants had a lot of leisure time...

...Judging their legal approach to moral theology inadequate, he calls for a more holistic framework (none of the three authors studied, for instance, ever thought of human experience as an important element of moral reasoning), and encourages a model of moral reasoning that stresses relation-ality and responsibility...

...It is especially interesting to see how Hogan sensed the need for a more historically nuanced approach...

...Lawrence S. Cunningham teaches theology at the University of Notre Dame...

...the Belgian-born Thomas Boquillon who taught at The Catholic University until his death in 1902...

...This legal model was amenable to the syllogism, but it possessed its own limitations and inevitably left some areas of Christian morality unexplored...

...Essentially, Bausch uses a variation of Baron von Hugel's famous argument that Christianity must balance three basic elements: the institutional or hierarchical, the doctrinal or prophetic, and the mystical or priestly...

...This situation has been addressed by astute commentators such as Sandra Schneiders...

...Bausch's view of the future may be summed up thus: The institutional church will (must) become more lay oriented...

...the sacraments administered...

...Bausch traces these categories along a number of possible future trajectories...

...Nor does Wuthnow discuss in any depth the worrisome financial problems of, say, caring for aging religious women or the negative impact of paying judgments in sexual abuse cases...

...machine-gun prose style put me somewhat on edge...

...Though scholarly, this study should be of interest to anyone concerned with theology...

...Membership is in precipitous decline, the population of those who remain ages, and few communities can boast of many new recruits...

...Even the traditional monastic orders in the West, however, have had good reason to go back to their sources...

...Shared and collaborative ministries will be encouraged by an episcopacy with a keener sense of subsidiarity and collegiality...

...Wuthnow examines pastoral strategies, questions of stewardship and tithing, and the theologies that undergird The Crisis in the Churches: Spiritual Malaise, Fiscal Woe by Robert Wuthnow Oxford University Press, $30,291 pp...

...cial mechanics and structures (at least for North America) of parish and diocesan life...

...The questions appended to the chapters are meant for group discussion in a parish setting, and it is in the parish that I think this book might be used most profitably...

...If somewhat rattled by the style, I nevertheless found Bausch's basic point compelling...

...When the Gregorian reform began to take root there was an impassioned debate about the nature of the experiments...

...That is a fact worth pondering...

...Finally, Curran notes that moral theology was mainly practical and legal because Rome encouraged the use of Liguori (who had been named a "Doctor of the Church" during the reign of Pius IX) to the detriment of a more rounded theological approach of Thomas Aquinas...

...The burning contemporary ethical issues just in the area of medicine and technology illustrate how correct Curran is...

...As a result, Wuthnow feels rather confident of the following three conclusions: (1) There is a serious economic problem facing American churches, (2) the reasons for this crisis are both related to the larger economy and spiritual, and (3) there are solutions to this crisis which will not only help the churches but aid the larger commonweal...

...As a prominent Cistercian abbot once remarked to me, eccle-siology after Vatican II presents a real theological challenge to those who wish to live the vita regularis...

...The three different approaches of the subtitle refer The Origins of Moral Theology in the United States: Three Different Approaches by Charles E. Curran Georgetown University Press, $24.95,311 pp...

...adequate religious instruction, etc...

...Many religious orders are of post-Tri-dentine origin and a fair number derive their charism from the French school of spirituality of the seventeenth century...

...Second, this book amply demonstrates the limits to Thomism and the degree to which moral theologians leaned on casuists who favored the moral theology of Liguori...

...His thesis, in short, is that the church is in sad shape and its travails mirror the larger culture...

...Coriden's observations on these questions would make a fine preliminary start for a consideration of J.M...

...This question leads her, at the end of each chapter, to provide a checklist of problems that need be squarely faced if one is not to fall prey to a kind of romanticism (padding about in sandals with Gregorian chant playing in the background), or to a theological naivete (what constitutes a serious theology of vows would be a good theological reflection-starter), or to a desire to replicate past strategies without asking whether or not they are merely historical epiphenome-na or somehow truly implicated in an authentic version of religious life...

...The responsibilities of the churches to the poor are also covered...

...Coriden's insistence on these rights is not meant to add fuel to the already overdeveloped litigious instincts of Americans, but to underscore the fact that congregations are not supine subjects...

...Wittberg, herself a religious sister, reminds us that religious communities have had a long history in the church, and that not all have ancient pedigrees...

...What this means in practice is that the parish is the primary instantiation of the church and not merely an extension of higher hierarchical realities...

...Nonetheless, Bausch is no hand-wringer and he finds some hopeful signs for the future...

...Of course there is a bond of unity between the local pastor, his bishop, and all bishops with the bishop of Rome...

...Tillard's work, like that of other ecclesiologists, for example, Joseph Komonchak, draws out in detail what Coriden says briefly but clearly about the centrality of the local church...

...I must admit that his The Parish of the Next Millennium by William J. Bausch Twenty-Third Publications, $14.95,288 pp...

...In an epilogue, Curran looks back irenically to the times of these three American professors...

...To cut a position is often to invite some people to worship elsewhere...

...The theological significance of the parish in the light of recent writings in ecclesiology, the rights and obligations of parishes under Canon Law, and a useful summary of American law as it impinges on Catholic parishes are some of the areas touched on...

...Although it is true that many traditional ways of ordering religious congregations have seen their day, it is also true that new experiments are aborning...

...The parish itself will consist primarily of witness and service and the priest will operate more out of weakness than power...

...As a sociologist, she has studied nascent communities, and in her final pages she provides some profiles (thinly disguised) of both male and female communities in the United States as models for discussion...

...canonical sense, are in crisis, at least in the West...

...This book exudes a realistic optimism, and I share its hopefulness...

...there will be an inexorable move away from pyramidal to community-based life...

...and John Hogan, an Irish-born but French-educated priest, who taught both in Boston and at The Catholic University until his death in 1901...

...And as always, there is the problem of a charismatic leader who attracts people to his or her person but perhaps not to a genuine vision of gospel life...

...The index is adequate and each chapter has a brief list of books and articles in English for further reading...

...Coriden even provides an appendix featuring a few case studies that allow the reader to apply canonical legislation to specific problems...

...Nor were all moral theologians, even those in the "manualist" tradition, rig-orists with an undue interest in sexual matters...

...As Curran notes, these three priests, who at one time lived within fifty miles of each other, had quite different views on the teaching of moral theology...

...The same dilemma confronts the mendicants and the religious orders in general...

...That solution requires that churches learn how to support the middle-class membership that is the backbone of American Christianity...

...grounded in baptism and charism rather than in ordination and office...

...Rather than making a caricature of the older casuist approach or lamenting the sterility of the "scholastic" method, Curran is able to show how a compelling moral vision was derived from a model of morality rooted in a framework of law...

...A few years ago, according to Wittberg, the Jesuits had 40 entering novices in the entire United States, but Indonesia had over 350...

...What is needed, Curran concludes, is a Catholic "both/and" approach that is rooted far deeper than in the matrix of law and that combines a broad theological set of principles with genuine attention to individual cases...

...After having worked through this somewhat repetitious book, with its longish reportage of what various pastors had to say about money and the church, I was somewhat unfairly reminded of a quip of the late Eric Sevareid: sociology is sometimes just slow journalism...

...parishes will be more relational and less defined by numbers...

...In other words, a careful reading of Curran helps frame issues in ecclesi-ology as well as questions in the development of moral theology...

...They are unique communities of Christian people...

...No bibliography is provided, but there are some thoughtful points for reflection at the ends of the chapters...

...He does not have any startling hypotheses (like Andrew Greeley) about why people don't give more...

...Finally, Curran shows how one can benefit from reading even rather unpromising material (Latin textbooks) if you have the right questions in mind and the right historical knowledge at hand...

...The increased professionalization of the ministerial staff, from music ministers and ministers of education to office managers, creates enormous expense and high expectation...

...His observations that many middle-class people have either overly materialistic expectations or good reason for a sense of malaise seem plausible but hardly original...

...Paulist Press, $14.95,166 pp...

...Wittberg's book is not a consideration of the crisis but a discussion of the possibilities, desirability, and practical strategies for the founding or re-founding of religious communities...

...The title of Curran's book may tempt only those interested in moral theology, American Catholic intellectual history, or a combination of the two...

...It is also happening today...

...Hogan's reflections on seminary education were quite critical of the manualist tradition...

...Finally, in what is obviously an ideal characterization, he envisions the future parish as a kind of counterbalance to the more priestly religion of the past...

...In the interim, we should not count out all of the traditional orders...

...As the author notes, this is not a "how-to" book nor an extended canonical commentary but a survey that treats of the historical development of parishes...

...First, Curran's close reading of the texts reminds us that all moral theology before Vatican II was not neoscholastic...

...Lay groups such as the Patarines in Milan and, later, the Be-guines, took shape...

...This modestly sized work, economic in price, should be in the hands of every parish staff member, including pastors...

...Tillard's extraordinary recent book on ecclesiology, L'Eglise locale-a book that I hope will appear in English soon...

...the Eucharist confected...

...The most interesting part of her book, the second half, concerns itself with the opportunities and pitfalls of actually imagining how religious communities might start and, perhaps, flourish...

...church giving and spending...

...The moral theology of this period was, in Bernard Lonergan's phrase, "classicist...