Richard McBrien's blog

Sandra Schneiders is a Sister of the Immaculate Heart of Mary (known to many as the "IHMs") and professor of New Testament Studies and Christian Spirituality at the Jesuit School of Theology of Santa Clara University, in Berkeley, California.

David Gibson, author of The Coming Catholic Church (HarperSanFrancisco, 2003), has written an excellent piece on the American Catholic theologian David Tracy in the Jan. 29 issue of Commonweal. It is titled “God Obsessed: David Tracy’s Theological Quest.”God Obsessed: David Tracy’s Theological Quest

There is a new book out, entitled Reclaiming Catholicism (Orbis Books) and edited by my friend and former colleague at Boston College, Thomas Groome, chair of its Institute of Religious Education and Pastoral Ministry, and by Michael Daley, religion teacher at St. Xavier High in Cincinnati.

Perhaps the book will help younger Catholics to better understand and appreciate Catholicism’s roots in the pre-Vatican II era, and older Catholics to recall the spiritual assets that contributed to their own religious formation.

Fr. Michael Ryan has been pastor of St. James Cathedral in Seattle since 1988. His recent article in America magazine, "What If We Said, 'Wait'?: The case for a grass-roots review of the new Roman Missal" (December 14, 2009), has evoked a heavy and largely positive response. By the latter part of January, well over 12,000 people had submitted signatures in support of Ryan's efforts.

Ash Wednesday, which begins the season of Lent, is observed this year on Wednesday, Feb. 17.

The word "Lent" is derived from an old English word which means "springtime." The Latin adverb lente means "slowly."

On the basis of etymology alone, Lent signals the onset of spring and invites us, at the same time, to slow down our usual pace of activity and to take stock of our lives.

One of the fast-diminishing number of theological giants died Dec. 23. Edward Schillebeeckx, a Flemish Dominican priest, was 95 years old.

Unlike Jesuit Fr. Karl Rahner, (d. 1984) and Dominican Cardinal Yves Congar (d. 1995), for example, the bulk of Schillebeeckx's major work was done after rather than before or during the Second Vatican Council (1962-65).

This coming Saturday, Jan. 30, is the day of death of one of the 20th century's spiritual giants. He has never been canonized, however, nor even put on the canonical track leading to canonization.

This individual, though not a Christian, was, in the literal meaning of the word, a martyr (or "witness") for peace and reconciliation. He was a Hindu holy man and modern pioneer of non-violent resistance, who inspired many others, including the American civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., to follow this same path against all odds.

Clint Eastwood's latest film, "Invictus" (Latin, "Unconquered"), stars Morgan Freeman as Nelson Mandela, the former president of South Africa who served 27 years as a political prisoner in that country, and Matt Damon as Francois Pienaar, the captain of the national rugby team that Mandela used -- successfully -- as a means to bring the racially divided nation together.

During his long years of incarceration, Mandela studied his Afrikaner enemies, not only learning their language but understanding the role that sports, especially rugby, played in their psyche.

This column has called attention for a number of years (the first time in 1969) to the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. This ecumenical program, observed annually between Jan. 18 and Jan. 25, was originally proposed in 1908 by an Anglican (later Roman Catholic), Paul Wattson, as a "church unity octave."

This coming weekend the Church in England observes the feast day of one who is known by few Catholics in the United States and Canada, namely, Adrian of Canterbury. Meanwhile, the churches of the East, as well as Benedictines and Cistercians in the West, celebrate the feast of an emerging major figure in the history of theology, Gregory of Nyssa, one of the three Cappadocian fathers (along with his older brother, Basil the Great, and Gregory Nazianzen).

I have thus far refrained from commenting on the recent Vatican initiative regarding Anglicans who wish to become Roman Catholics. I did not think that we have given the initiative time for the dust to settle. In my opinion, that situation remains.

Some things, however, are already clear. First, it was an act of insensitivity on the part of certain Vatican officials that the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, was not given adequate notice of the initiative.

One wonders, therefore, why he consented to appear in a joint press conference with the new Roman Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, Vincent Nichols, to greet the news.

Archbishop Williams subsequently met briefly with Pope Benedict XVI in November–a meeting that had been scheduled prior to the announcement of the initiative–at which meeting the subject of the initiative reportedly did arise.

The conversation between the two religious leaders was described as frank, but cordial. Indeed, so cordial was the meeting that the pope gifted the archbishop of Canterbury with a pectoral cross -- an implicit, even if unintended, recognition that Rowan Williams possesses valid episcopal orders.

An annual column at Christmas always runs the risk of lapsing into boilerplate rhetoric. It is the time of the year when people are supposed to have warmth in their hearts and a generous spirit to match.

But this is not a happy time for many families, even in once prosperous lands. Although there are tentative signs of an economic recovery, at least in comparison with last fall, unemployment continues at a high rate and young people are finding that even seasonal jobs are scarce.

If anyone wonders why the Catholic church presents such a different face to the world and to the Body of Christ today in comparison with the world and the church of the 1960s and 1970s, we need look no further than the extraordinarily abbreviated pontificate of John Paul I.

To appreciate the significance of that brief pontificate, the eleventh shortest in the history of the church, one must have some sense of the mark left by John Paul I's predecessor, Paul VI.

The First Sunday of Advent, which we celebrated yesterday, marks the beginning of the church's liturgical year, which, of course, makes no sense to most people who are satisfied that the new year begins Jan. 1.

But that is only the case where the Gregorian calendar, traditionally attributed to Gregory XIII (pope from 1572-85), is normative. In fact, Christians, who had followed the Julian calendar until 1582, used to celebrate New Year's Day on March 25, the feast of the Annunciation.

For the Chinese and other Asian communities, New Year's Day has a changeable date, falling somewhere between January 10 and February 19. This year the Lunar New Year begins on Sunday, February 14.

The Jewish New Year (Rosh Hashanah) is also a moveable holiday, observed sometime in September or early October. This past fall it was celebrated beginning at sundown on Friday, September 18, and continuing on Saturday, the 19th.

The church's First Sunday of Advent usually occurs in late November, as it did this year, but it can fall as late as Dec. 2. When that happens, as it last did in 2006, the Fourth Sunday of Advent is also Christmas Eve.

This week's column offers some concluding reflections on Sister Sandra Schneiders' exceedingly important four-page article, The past and future of ministerial religious life , in the Oct 2 issue of the National Catholic Reporter.

Last week, I began a look at one of the Catholic church's greatest assets, namely, the extraordinary contributions over so many years of religious women to the church's missionary, ministerial, and spiritual life.

Sandra Schneiders is a member of Sisters, Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary of Monroe, Mich., and is professor of New Testament Studies and Christian Spirituality at the Jesuit School of Theology in Berkeley, California.

Over nine years ago one of the Catholic church's finest canon lawyers, Fr. James Provost, a professor at The Catholic University of America, published an exceedingly important article in America magazine, "What If the Pope Became Disabled?" (7/30/00).

He had pointed out that the Catholic church's Code of Canon Law makes no provision for the situation in which a pope becomes completely disabled, by lapsing into a coma, for example. The concern had become progressively acute as then-Pope John Paul II began to manifest signs of severe physical frailty.

The feast of All Saints will be celebrated this coming Sunday. I was surprised that I had devoted only three columns to this feast, and those in the years 1994, 1996, and 2002. I am retrieving some of their main points in this week’s column with the hope that they might be of enduring value, both theologically and spiritually.

At the end of May of this year I did a column on "The crisis in Anglicanism," prompted by an important address given in Houston, Texas, by the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord George Carey.

Cardinal Roger Mahony, archbishop of Los Angeles, spoke recently at the University of Notre Dame on the topic, “Fostering the Baptismal Priesthood in the Year for Priests.”

He departed from his prepared text at the outset, referring to Notre Dame as “the premier Catholic university” in America. His standing-room-only audience gratefully applauded.

Anyone with a newspaper subscription or an Internet connection does not lack for opinions about the legislation on health-care reform working through Congress.

There is a Latin phrase in the Easter Vigil liturgy, "O felix culpa" ("O happy fault, O necessary sin of Adam, which gained for us so great a Redeemer!" -- from the Easter Proclamation, also known as the Exultet, from its first word, "Rejoice").

In clerical circles at least, the expression "felix culpa" has frequently been used to describe an unfortunate event or circumstance that has a good, though unintended or unexpected, consequence.

Judging from the comments, some readers thought last week's column on the "Year for Priests" unduly pessimistic about the present state of the Catholic Church. To the contrary, one of latest developments inside the Vatican only underscores the point of that column.

Pope Benedict XVI declared this a Year for Priests, beginning on June 19, the feast of the Sacred Heart, and ending next June with an international gathering of priests in Rome. The pope named St. Jean Vianney, the Curé d'Ars, as universal patron of priests to mark the 150th anniversary of his death.

There was a front-page story in The Boston Globe last month signaling the return of perpetual eucharistic adoration to Boston.

In the 1940s a group of cloistered nuns began the practice of eucharistic adoration at St. Clement's Shrine, a former Universalist church that had been purchased by the archdiocese of Boston to accommodate the overflow crowds from St. Cecelia's parish in the Back Bay section of the city.

Just before every Labor Day weekend in the United States and Canada, this column devotes its full attention to the general issue of justice in the Catholic church and to the particular situation of ecclesial ministers and other church employees in parishes, dioceses, schools, hospitals, and similar Catholic institutions.

There are observations made in last year's column and in 2006 that I believe need to be repeated this year.

While most of the attention was focused on President Barack Obama's audience with Pope Benedict XVI on July 10, there was an important bit of news in a column published the day before in Commonweal's on-line edition.

The article, written by Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne, a Catholic layman who often addresses issues related to religion and politics, was entitled, "Does Obama have a friend in the Vatican?"

Pope Benedict XVI's new social encyclical, Caritas in Veritate ("Charity in Truth"), is in the tradition of previous social encyclicals, going back more than a century to Pope Leo XIII's landmark encyclical, Rerum Novarum ("Of New Things"), published in 1891.

What is remarkable about this latest social encyclical is that Benedict XVI suggests that the new starting-point for Catholic social teaching in this modern age is Pope Paul VI's Populorum Progressio ("The Progress of Peoples"), published in 1967 (see n. 8). Indeed, Caritas in Veritate is filled with praise for Paul VI and for the encyclical he authored.

The first impression one has of Pope Benedict XVI's new social encyclical, Caritas in Veritate ("Charity in Truth"), is that it is long and dense -- too much so in both categories to expect the document to be read by a significant minority of Catholics, not to mention other Christians and non-Christians.

The encyclical is very much the work of someone with many years of careful research, writing, and teaching in his background. Few would question the opinion that Benedict XVI is the most gifted theologian ever to occupy the Chair of St. Peter.