Religion booknotes
Cunningham, Lawrence S
RELIGION BOOKNOTES Lawrence S. Cunningham In the midst of the ongoing sexual-abuse crisis, many Catholics are asking where reform and renewal will come from. The answer is that it will come from...
...Fox covers many other interesting issues, ranging from the relationship of Latin- and Eastern-rite churches in Asia (I would have liked to read more about this), to profiles of Asian theologians and their travails, and reflections on various ways of articulating Christologies from within the Asian context...
...Reluctant Saint: The Life of Francis of Assisi Donald Spoto Viking-Compass, $24.95, 256 pp...
...Sullivan covers each of the documents produced by the council, with due weight given to the more important ones...
...Souls in Motion" was founded by the woman who became his second wife...
...Reading Francis, one is struck by the influence of the reforming impulses unleashed by the Fourth Lateran Council...
...I have a personal connection to Albert Raboteau, though I have never met him...
...What does it say when Asian experts craft texts only to have them translated back into Italian by seminarians studying in Rome, who were once the students of the very experts who wrote the documents in the first place...
...Most tellingly, there is the narrative of his second religious conversion, triggered by an almost mystical encounter with an icon of the Theotokos...
...We get long accounts of the reactionaries of the curia struggling against the more progressive bishops, who came largely from Western Europe...
...As a result, his picture locates Francis in the context of medieval life in general, and medieval Christianity in particular...
...Three months before his birth, a white man who was never convicted of the crime shot his father to death...
...Donald Spoto avoids most of these traps...
...From there, Raboteau went on to a brilliant academic career...
...This book, a general account of the church in Asia, includes Fox's coverage of five meetings of the Federation of Asian Bishops' Conferences (FABC) since its founding in 1974...
...Sullivan relies heavily on journalistic accounts (by Xavier Rynne, Robert Kaiser, et al...
...Maureen Sullivan's book is part of the Paulist 202 Questions & Answers series...
...This is, on the whole, a perfectly serviceable biography that has the added merit of being well written in a breezy sort of way...
...Born in Bay Saint Louis, Mississippi, along the Gulf Coast, Raboteau was raised a Roman Catholic in an African-American family with deep roots in the South...
...One small example: Why, these bishops ask, must liturgical texts be approved in Rome by people who do not speak the languages or know the culture...
...The Harold Wit lectures feature "unusual individuals who radiate in their thought, word, deed, and being" spiritual qualities and values...
...Pentecost in Asia: A New Way of Being Church Thomas Fox Orbis, $25,238 pp...
...Subsequently, he studied literature at Berkeley, theology at Marquette, and ended his graduate education at Yale...
...He taught for a period at Xavier in New Orleans, married, and began a family...
...Most, in place of real biography, get it all wrong by constructing a saint of whom they can approve...
...When he was unable to fulfill that assignment, the editors asked me to write it...
...His mother remarried a former priest, who had been a member of the Society of the Divine Word-a religious order with a strong presence along the Gulf Coast...
...He recounts the rejection of the first proposed working document prepared in Rome by the bishops of Asia...
...The lectures offered here are intensely autobiographical, painful, and radiant in the telling...
...He was asked to write the volume on Thomas Merton for Eerdmans's religious biography series...
...That being said, I think it only a modest advance on the more tendentious works I have read recently...
...He uses the modern scholarship to demystify some elements of Francis's life (for example, he has a decent discussion of the historical tangle surrounding the saint's stigmata), and he makes a serious effort to emphasize the theological and spiritual vision of the saint...
...The timing of this book is appropriate: more than forty years have passed since the council was called, and Sullivan is right to point out that, for this generation of students, the epochal events of that time have no more resonance than those of the Council of Trent...
...He writes about contrasting cultural values, although he sometimes overgeneralizes or minimizes-for example, when he writes of the "far less dualistic" East (are there not great sources of dualism in strands of Buddhism and Hinduism...
...Saint Francis has been the subject of innumerable biographies...
...He also showed that being faithful to a tradition can be a way of becoming catholic in the best sense of the term: one who is universal in outlook...
...A Sorrowful Joy Albert Raboteau Paulist, $6.95, 60 pp...
...Thomas Fox, publisher of the National Catholic Reporter, has long experience in Asia...
...It gave me great pleasure to write the volume (Thomas Merton and the Monastic Vision, 1999), so I owe him a debt that I am happy to repay by praising these luminous pages on one person's religious quest...
...The book tackles the issues chronologically, from the calling of Vatican II to a consideration of the post-Vatican II church...
...That is why so many are attracted to him, as a person and as a subject for study...
...He has had the good sense to look at serious scholarly research done over the past generation...
...Spoto devotes only one paragraph to this, but the demand for reform affected Francis's teaching about, among other things, the eucharistic mysteries, the honor given the clergy, our relationship to bishops and to the pope, the reform of liturgical services, and the restoration of the fabric of the church...
...There are nearly twenty volumes, some of extremely high quality (for example, Joseph Fitzmyer on the Dead Sea Scrolls...
...There are searing pages about his deep contemplative impulses (Raboteau thought about becoming a monk...
...The issues Fox raises are the ones that any reasonable person would have anticipated: the lingering effects of colonialism, social problems, issues of inculturation, the right balance between the rights of local churches and the centralizing tendencies of Rome, and the inevitable issue of Catholic Christianity's close encounter with the other major religions of the world...
...For Francis this was not simply a strategy...
...Raboteau is a well-known scholar of religion and a former dean at Princeton University...
...My own experience in Asia is thin (brief stays in the Philippines and Taiwan), so I read this work for my own instruction...
...The family lived in various parts of the country as Albert grew to maturity...
...While Francis was sui generis in his own life and witness, he was also, as his writings indicate, a supremely orthodox Catholic who was obedient to the hierarchy...
...Many fail to escape from the romantic haze of the rediscovery of the saint during the Victorian period...
...If this were all there was to the story it would be merely a tale of a member of a minority group who, in the face of racism and bigotry, made good...
...I can give the book no higher praise than to say that I will pass it on to friends, urging them to read it...
...He has some moving pages on the connatural link between African-American culture and Orthodoxy, and a coda to the book which describes his teaching and his work at "Souls in Motion," a center in Harlem that teaches the creative arts to psychiatric outpatients...
...Spoto has been a professional biographer of film stars or celebrities, but he has a background in classics and theology...
...Fox records the critical interventions made during the synod, and describes the final report which came from Roman hands, with little or no reference to the work of the local churches...
...He is now a chaired professor of religion at Princeton...
...This is an adequate first look into the workings of Vatican II...
...it was essential to his self-understanding...
...He is now an active participant in a fledgling Orthodox community near Princeton...
...At least four have appeared in the last decade or so...
...Most of these biographies conflate late legends like the Fioretti with earlier sources, and few even look at the writings of the saint beyond the famous "Canticle of Brother Sun...
...She laments the fact that as pope John Paul has not allowed episcopal synods to flourish in the way that Paul VI envisioned them...
...He gives a nice account of Francis's focus on Christ's Passion, by linking the call Francis heard before the cross at the beginning of his conversion to his writings about the Passion and, later, the events on LaVerna which give rise to the stigmata...
...He went to college at Loyola in Los Angeles (now Loyola-Marymount) where he came in contact with the Catholic Worker movement...
...about the death of his stepfather and mother...
...The most interesting part of this book is Fox's close account of the Asian Synod held in Rome in 1998...
...Raboteau's stepfather left the ministry because of the racism he experienced as an African-American priest...
...After all, Francis of Assisi and Dominic Guzman, and not Pope Innocent III, energized the mendicant movement that swept Europe in the thirteenth century...
...Do the struggles to inculturate liturgical expressions and theologies point to something still over the horizon...
...101 Questions & Answers on Vatican II Maureen Sullivan Paulist, $14.95,133 pp...
...In places, her own progressive inclinations come to the fore, but by and large her recounting of the events is fair...
...The most recent trend in Franciscan historiography has been to emphasize the writings of the saint...
...Finally: Was Karl Rahner prescient when he saw Vatican II as the first sign of the World Church (Weltkirche) coming of age...
...The answer is that it will come from the bottom up, as do all great reform movements...
...As he wrote more than once, he wanted his followers to live as good Catholics (more catholico is his phrase...
...The federation was a fruit of the spirit of the Second Vatican Council...
...What does that say about this papacy's trust in the bishops who are on the scene...
...He follows Francis's life chronologically and is usually careful not to read later sources back into the saint's life...
...These studies tend to be mesmerized by the Umbrian countryside and depict Francis as a humble figure, clad in brown, speaking to birds, and generally indifferent to the pomp, circumstance, and pretensions of the medieval church, with its self-promoting papacy and bloody crusades...
...Albert Raboteau's small book is made up of two lectures presented at the Harvard Divinity School in 2000...
...Luckily, she does make reference to the three-volume History of Vatican II (Orbis), edited by Komonchak, which is an indisputable account of those momentous years when the bishops of the world gathered in Saint Peter's...
...At the same time, his interest in the monastic life deepened under the influence of Thomas Merton, whom he had read from his early adolescent years...
...My only criticism is that, having whetted the reader's appetite, Sullivan provides a bibliography with so few resources...
...about the cost of academic success, which included a failed marriage...
...He has lived there, continues to travel there, and has covered Asian Catholicism as a journalist...
...There is a separate series of questions about the preparations for the council, the council itself, and the immediate aftermath...
...His greatest contribution is that,' across the centuries, he teaches us that there is more than one way to do this...
...Subsequently, the highly critical response of the Japanese hierarchy to Roman actions resulted, in Fox's judgment, in the Vatican decision not to use any Japanese language in the opening liturgy...
...Raboteau converted to Orthodox Christianity along with his second wife and one of his children...
...These are the hope-filled thoughts I had while reading this informative book about a church that I hardly know, but about which I am happy to learn...
...and the more scholarly work of people like Giuseppe Albergo of Italy and his American counterpart, Joseph Komonchak...
...In other words, like most of the recent synods, it was a kind of Potemkin village that dodged the very issues about which the Asian hierarchies felt most passionately...
...For me, the most valuable lessons in this book came as spurs to thought: Are the somewhat halting efforts of episcopal conferences, in Asia as elsewhere, first steps in shaping the form of com-munio that lies deep within the documents of Vatican II...
...or waxes eloquent about the virtue of "harmony" in the East, or only looks glancingly at the possible openings offered by the dialogue of contemplatives in the various traditions of the world's religions...
...Even though Pope John Paul II was present as a bishop at the proceedings, he is mentioned only as a participant in the papal commission on contraception (which Paul VI took off the table at Vatican II)- a commission whose meetings he never attended because he was denied a passport...
...There is, however, much more...
Vol. 130 • March 2003 • No. 6
