Religion booknotes

...He was, as it is universally admitted, a world-class scholar...

...Since historically women did not have many opportunities to write, these scholars read carefully in ancillary material...

...Many of the things he has not missed are shared with us in these pages...

...There is an opening prayer consisting of texts taken from John...

...In this volume on Mark, for example, the peri-Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture: Mark edited by Thomas C. Oden and Christopher A. Hall InterVarsity Press, $29.99,281 pp...

...In a fascinating essay by Jacqueline deVries, we learn how the women's suffragette movement in Great Britain borrowed quite consciously from Free Church methods of mass evangelization to rally support for the right of women to vote...

...Westminster's Cardinal Manning, a leader of the ultramontanes at Vatican I, stressed the critical need for church unity...

...It certainly reminds us that biblical exegesis did not begin in the postenlightenment period—there is hardly a textual problem in the entire Bible that Origen did not spot in the third century...

...We both graduated from the same Florida high school—I was an altar boy at his first Mass...

...Thus, this series is a highly salutary call to take part in the great conversation about the meaning of the Word of God...

...Manning believed that papal authority was a sure bulwark against the increasingly secularized, positivistic, and agnostic forces abroad in English culture...

...there are seven reflections) to John...

...he preferred "message," but the original translator, not wanting to use "message," reluctantly called John's work the "gospel message...

...The Kiezle/Walker collection of essays has a very precise focus: How did women "preach" (or: Did women preach...

...The result will be somewhat similar to what the Middle Ages called the "glossed" Bible...

...As the Second Vatican Council wisely said, the apostolic preaching contained in the sacred books was "to be preserved by a succession of preachers until the end of time...

...Such studies are interesting in their own right, but for a theologian they raise important questions about the meaning of preaching and its relationship to teaching...

...Even though it is tempting to argue that this approach of seeking the patristic consensus is a deeply ecumenical enterprise, as the editors intend it to be, it is equally true that it is only partial and not to be seen as normative...

...In future volumes the editors may wish to say something about this as a guide for the uninitiated...

...Medieval, Reformed, and modern commentators have equally interesting and perceptive things to say about the Bible...

...In a curious way, to borrow from Manning, history did not overcome dogma, but it most decidedly shaped it...

...One final cautionary note...

...As some of these essays show, for the cardinals from Germany and France—and to a degree even those from Ireland and Italy—the exaltation of the papacy was a conscious strategy to combat the hegemonic character of secular authority...

...Finally, the struggles over preaching and teaching influenced movements for social justice and equal rights in ways that now seem obvious, but did not at the time...

...At the council he argued against the historical objections to infallibility made by Dollinger and others...

...Those who use these commentaries will need to know something about the different levels of patristic interpretation...

...Since the power of the bishop reflected the power of the papacy, he wanted no dilution of papal authority...

...Other readers, to be sure, will use it as a resource for sermons, lesson plans, and so on...

...The editors, thanks to the enormous data bases now available, found thousands of citations and comments from the Greek, Syr-iac, and Latin writers of antiquity...

...On the other hand, it was also explained away in order to laud the fact that Mary of Magdala was the first witness of Christ's Resurrection, and hence the apostle to the Apostles (apostola apostolorum), or to justify the polemics against the learned pagans described in hagiographical accounts of Saint Catherine of Alexandria...

...Women were active, for example, in the Society of Friends and among the Moravians— two groups that put a high premium on religious experience as the source for authentic religious testimony...

...It is also true that although someone might believe that he or she is reading the Bible "alone," the plain fact is that all biblical interpretation, either consciously or not, stands on a vast tradition...

...shocking news of his death last August...

...He imagines himself a "translator" of Commonweal % 6 January 15,1999 John, querying the Beloved Disciple (whom he describes as a "crusty character") about what he wrote...

...Commonweal 28 January 15,1999...

...We stayed in touch over the years...

...I have a great love for the patristic writers, and I read both the biblical text and the comments in this handsomely turned out book with great pleasure...

...One offshoot of that movement was its concern with the rights of women within the church and the concomitant worries of Anglican divines that too much elasticity in these matters (we are talking about the 1920s) would inevitably lead to demands for women priests...

...Later, in the nineteenth century, women had central roles as preachers and evangelists in the Salvation Army...

...One of the authors (Nicole Beriou) points out that some medieval scholastic writers considered the public reading of Scripture a form of preaching, since the reader proclaimed the literal sense of the text in the very act of reading aloud...

...These minor observations are made while the author explains to the translator what he means and how he understands the person and significance of Jesus...

...Brown takes an original tack in introducing a reader (presumably one on retreat...

...But while composing his massive commentaries, Ray always found time to write books of a pastoral quality meant for the ordinary Christian...

...Ultramontanism is the name given to that tendency, most conspicuously prevaVarieties of Ultramontanism edited by Jeffrey von Arx, S. J, Catholic University of America Press, $19.95,152 pp...

...It is a caricature to paint the ultramontanes only as a hide-bound group of reactionaries combating the more liberal streams of Catholic thought...

...My admiration for Brown's work goes back nearly forty years, but our ties were even deeper than that of admiration...

...I received a copy of Ray Brown's retreat notes just two weeks after the A Retreat with John the Evangelist by Raymond E. Brown Saint Anthony Messenger Press, $8.95,102 pp...

...The prophetic impulse, in other words, allowed for some exemption from the Pauline prohibition...

...Ireland's Cardinal Cullen sought a similar end, if one more focused on the rights of the church, especially concerning education...

...The public preaching of a Hildegard of Bingen or the public remonstrations of Catherine of Siena or the mystical gifts of a Rose of Viterbo are good examples...

...At the end of each chapter, the translator, in lieu of a technical summary of the main points, appends both a contemporary reflection and a final prayer summarizing the discussion...

...He gets off to a bad start by mentioning the writer's "gospel" only to be told that the author did not use the word...

...Origen, for example, does not "read" the way, say, the Venerable Bede reads...

...Another common thread is the belief that if a woman of sanctity was inspired to speak (if she had a prophetic gift, for example), then it became a grace from God that was not to be easily ignored...

...The precise merit of this little work is to remind us of how seamlessly Brown interweaves historical-critical scholarship into a deeply felt spirituality...

...One leitmotif is the different ways in which Paul's injunction for women to remain silent in church (1 Cor...

...Pace John Henry Newman, Manning was convinced that the assertion of papal power in general, and papal infallibility in particular, would instigate a mass conversion of Anglicans to the church of Rome...

...Roman Catholic women who supported the suffragette movement entertained the same idea...

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

...How valuable is this project...

...What is very clear from these essays is the perComtnonweal 2 W January 15,1999 sistent attempt to restrict women from any activity in the public sphere...

...Each "day" of the retreat follows a pattern...

...The Roman theologian Camillo Mazzella, S.J., who taught for a time at Maryland's Woodstock the-ologate, was the theorist behind such claims...

...In other words, this useful new series should be regarded as the first stage of an extended immersion in Scripture...

...Such a broad understanding of preaching is not special pleading since it has the warrant of the tradition...

...Among other things, Mazzella was a shaper of the anti-Americanist condemnation issued under Leo XIII...

...There are nearly twenty essays in this volume...

...Varieties of Ultramontanes is short but very instructive...

...In France it was the postrevolutionary anticlerical secular state...

...The essayists focus on six cardinals whose lives cross a continuum of time from roughly 1844 (when Cardinal Johannes von Geissel became archbishop of Cologne) to 1945, the year the less-thanlovable William O'Connell, archbishop of Boston, died...

...In Germany the threat was Prussia...

...It is this kind of writing that reminds us how much Ray Brown is going to be missed...

...As Gregory the Great reminds us, Scripture is like a vast river where lambs can wade near the shore and elephants swim farther out...

...cope describing the stilling of the storm (Mark 4:35-41) is meditated upon and scrutinized by Athanasius, Origen, Gregory Nazianzus, Basil the Great, Ephrem the Syrian, Saint Augustine, and the ancient hymn writer, Prudentius...

...Indeed, the various canons, synodal laws, and episcopal restrictions forbidding women to teach and preach in the medieval period suggest that many women were in fact speaking and teaching in their cloisters to audiences that included those from outside the monastic congregation...

...In a few pages, and with some wit, he shows how the book came into its present form (the Beloved Disciple refuses to say whether he is John the Apostle but, teas-ingly, says, he is never mentioned by name in what came to be known as the New Testament...

...The studies in this instructive collection of essays argue that, even among papalists, there was a spectrum of views about papal power and jurisdiction...

...In other words, by appealing to a supreme jurisdiction-al authority beyond the confines of the state, these churchmen found a way to stand against the pretensions and considerable power of the nation-state...

...lent in the nineteenth century but still apparent in certain contemporary quarters, that exalts the prestige, power, and authority of the papacy...

...Thus, female "Orantes" figures from paleo-Christian art as well as other iconographical, hagiographical, and sermonic sources are analyzed...

...Dei verbum, 2.8...

...Dogmatic certitude was Manning's aim...

...Thirteen volumes of Old Testament and twelve of New Testament commentary are planned...

...Over the past two decades there has Women Preachers and Prophets edited by Beverly Mayne Kienzle & Pamela J. Walker University of California Press, $17.95, 362 pp...

...Avery Dulles once called it "papalism...

...in the Christian past...

...There were other motives as well...

...Conventional wisdom would have it that the ultramontanes were all of a piece...

...Both the editors and the contributors understand the word "preach" to include public teaching, uttering prophecies, writing for the public, constructing messages through song, and so on...

...As these well-written essays demonstrate, at least some of the ultramontanes had good reasons for their passion for papal privilege, reasons deeply rooted in the convulsions of European society in the nineteenth century...

...At times the commentators gloss the plain sense of the text and in other places they seek for the "spiritual" sense or allegorize the passage for moral or eschato-logical reasons...

...The essays fall into four groups: studies of early Christianity, the Middle Ages, the early modern period, and the nineteenth and twentieth centuries...

...Dogma overcomes history," Manning famously asserted...

...Casting the reactionary elements who controlled Vatican I against the progressives of Vatican II (and the latter did correct the direction of the former) as good guys versus bad guys oversimplifies...

...how John's words could be misread, for example, by those who do not understand the context of some of the anti-Jewish polemics, is also touched on...

...Brown points out that he wrote his first article on John in 1955, but, after many books and articles, he says he can still pick up the text and find things he has missed...

...Cardinal William O'Connell of Boston notoriously instrumentalized papal allegiance as a way to consolidate his own hold over his archdiocese and his influence over the American church...

...These works have either been anthologies of translations of works by women or studies of women in the Christian past...

...In the case of the seventeenth-century Ursulines, the admonishment was hauled out to force women to keep silence even when they only taught catechism to youngsters...

...I keep this volume on Mark at my desk and read a bit each day...

...been a steady stream of publications, of varying quality, attempting to retrieve the voices of women in the Christian tradition...

...If we take that medieval observation seriously, it follows that every reader at our liturgical assemblies is, in fact, a preacher...

...Our understanding of the Scriptures did not end with the eighth century...

...As such, the ultramontane forces of the last century crystallized in Vatican I's definition of papal infallibility...

...In the body of each chapter the author explains to the translator why he wrote a particular scene, how it might have differed from the other Gospels (the translator explains something about these Gospels because John did not know them at first hand), how some of the things in the gospel message were elaborated in the writings of others in his circle (that is, the three "epistles" ascribed to John...

...14:34-36) played out...

...Commonweal 2 4 January 15,1999 RELIGION BOOKNOTES Lawrence S. Cunningham Hnder the general editorship of Thomas Oden of Drew University, InterVarsity Press is publishing a series of books drawn from the writings of patristic biblical commentators...

...In discussing the early modern and modern period, these essays tend to focus on the new forces brought about by the Reformation, where women had more space to preach and teach...