His Eminence of Los Angeles: James Francis Cardinal McIntyre. - book reviews

National Catholic Reporter, Sept 12, 1997 by Karen Kennelly

There were murmurs of indignation in some Catholic quarters when a recent survey of U.S. theological faculties disclosed that while Catholic colleges and universities hire significant numbers of faculty trained in non-Catholic schools, non-Catholic institutions do not reciprocate. Indeed, they hire very few graduates of Catholic universities.

In a story that accompanied the survey results, a few unnamed Catholic and Protestant theologians acknowledged the validity of the survey findings. One Protestant said it would be "unthinkable" for a major non-Catholic school to hire a graduate of a Catholic program. Another said that Catholics have "nothing to teach us."

A Catholic theologian did concede that Catholic programs have an image problem made worse by the embarrassing publicity about oaths of fidelity and canonical mandates.

While it is surely not true that Catholic doctoral programs in theology are inherently inferior to non-Catholic programs, it cannot be denied that Catholic programs are vulnerable to indirect and sometimes even direct interference with their work by nonacademic, ecclesiastical forces.

Does Yale or Harvard, for example, have an external board of religious leaders, none of whom is involved in theological or biblical scholarship, with the power to remove a theologian from his or her academic post, not for poor scholarship (a judgment only one's scholarly peers can make) but for coming to theological conclusions at variance with their own?

That happened at The Catholic University of America several years ago in the case of Fr. Charles Curran, now a chaired professor at Southern Methodist University.

Are doctoral students at the University of Chicago or Emory University, for example, discouraged from writing dissertations on issues of sexual morality or ecclesiastical authority, lest they attract the attention of church officials and land the dissertation director in difficulty with his or her religious superiors?

That has been, and may still be, the case in at least one national Catholic institution.

Are there theologians on the faculty of Princeton or the University of Virginia, for example, whose published work has been subject to public discrediting by a tiny committee of nonacademic church officials under pressure from the Vatican?

That has been the case, even within the highest-ranked Catholic theological faculty.

Such developments, however, are blatantly inconsistent with a theological tradition that has always been richly pluralistic.

For centuries Catholicism has not had one official theology but several schools of theology. Some of the fiercest theological debates, long before Vatican II, have occurred between Jesuits and Dominicans, with the Franciscans poking their noses in at key points.

Moreover, the various theological approaches one finds in the Catholic West have been, almost from the beginning of church history, markedly different from those adapted in the Catholic East.

Catholicism has embraced the theology of Athanasius and Cyril of Jerusalem alike, of Gregory Nazianzus and Augustine, of Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventure, of Robert Bellarmine and Johann Adam Mohler, of Karl Rahner and Hans Urs von Balthasar, yes, even of Hans Kung and Joseph Ratzinger.

It is a spriritual tradition open to The Cloud of Unknowing and to the Introduction to the Devout Life, to Francis and Clare of Assisi and to Bernard of Clairvaux, to Ignatius of Loyola and to John of the Cross, to Abbot Marmion and to Thomas Merton.

It is also an ecclesiastic tradition broad enough to accommodate popes as diverse as Gregory the Great and Boniface VIII, Pius IX and Leo XIII, Pius X and Benedict XV, John XXIII and John Paul II.

One would not realize how pluralistic the Catholic tradition has been if one had only the present ecclesiastical situation by which to judge. It is as if today that rich Catholic pluralism had been swept aside and there were no longer any room for different schools of thought, different theologies, different approaches.

It is as if only one theological approach were possible now, while all others are to be dismissed as dissident and their proponents punished and degraded.

As the national rankings make clear, there are Catholic universities with doctoral programs in theology far stronger academically than those in many non-Catholic institutions. Some of those non-Catholic schools would do well to hire the young Catholic graduates of our best Catholic universities and theologates.

But that said, we Catholics have no cause to be simply dismissive of the stated skepticism, even the occasional hostility, of many faculty at non-Catholic institutions.

We may be convinced that their blanket criticisms are inaccurate and unfair. But they are surely not inaccurate and unfair in all cases.

That is something we need to work on, not they.