How Catholic is the CTSA? Three views

Commonweal, March 27, 1998 by Avery Dulles, Mary Ann Donovan, Peter Steinfels

PETER STEINFELS

Did the most recent convention of the Catholic Theological Society of America reveal a "wasteland"? Did the major addresses constitute a challenge to well-established Catholic beliefs regarding the priesthood and Eucharist? Must Catholic theologians and church authorities make a "drastic choice" between upholding the society as a legitimate venue for Catholic theology or condemning and possibly replacing it as no longer true to authentic Catholic tradition?

My answers to those questions are no, yes, and no.

I attended the CTSA's convention last June. I went as a reporter for the New York Times, as a friend of CTSA members of widely differing views, as a nontheologian who depends on theologians, not the least of them Avery Dulles, for intellectual insight and spiritual nourishment. I also went as an American Catholic more than a little worried about the future of the church.

In no way did the gathering suggest a theological "wasteland." In carefully arguing that a responsum from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith did not establish the teaching of Ordinatio sacerdatolis as infallible, the society's Task Force was, I would maintain, not only respectful and responsible but actually conservative.

I encountered very little of the anger at church authorities, the flippant dismissals, or argument by crowd-pleasing wisecrack that have often marred theological gatherings on both left and right. The morning prayer sessions were filled to overflowing; the convention liturgy was a central event. Most important, in view of widely voiced worries that the frame of reference for Catholic theology was increasingly becoming the academy rather than the church, the concerns behind the convention's papers and comments were unmistakably pastoral. At the Sunday-morning table discussions of the major addresses on the Eucharist, one theologian's questions arose from her efforts at catechizing young people; another's from her experience with Central European Eastern-rite Catholic immigrants; and so on.

At the same time, three of the convention's four major addresses, taken cumulatively, set a direction that Father Dulles is right to flag, even at the risk of courting the inevitable denunciations.

Unfortunately, Dulles's citations do not serve his critique well. Some are unfair. Others ignore the speaker's nuanced formulations or considerable argumentation. Still others read tone and meanings into these statements that I neither recall nor find in the text. I have heard any number of bishops, for example, declare that apparently many parishioners do not distinguish between rituals performed by the ordained and the nonordained. What is shocking about a theologian reporting the same reality?

Nonetheless, Dulles is not imagining that all three addresses moved in a similar direction, a direction away from positions taken from Trent through Vatican II and toward positions much more congenial to the Reformers and in general to their liberal and low-church descendants. Although the major speakers diverged on details, the overall thrust could best be captured by the image of diffusion. Priesthood is diffused into the assembly's leaders, ordained or not, and into the whole assembly. Real presence is diffused into intentional reception of the sacrament and even into spiritual communion. The words of institution and moment of consecration are diffused into other parts of the liturgy and then into the ritual as a whole. The "official" liturgy is diffused into its local, popular instantiations. Traditional methods of theological reflection on texts are diffused into "critical theory of ritual process."