Richard McBrien's blog

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.

Terrence Tilley is chair of the Department of Theology at Fordham University and immediate past president of the Catholic Theological Society of America.

In his presidential address at the recent Catholic Theological Society of America convention in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Tilley spoke of the negative effects of the "stalemate" or "impasses" that currently afflict the Catholic church (for the full text, "Three Impasses in Christology," see Origins 6/25/09).

Religious communities of women have been responsible for many of the good things that the Catholic church in the United States has achieved, both before and after the Second Vatican Council.

It is all the more distressing, therefore, that two Vatican agencies -- the Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith -- have targeted these communities and their principal leadership organization for a "visitation" and "doctrinal assessment" respectively.

In a letter written on Feb. 20, the prefect of the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal William Levada, informed the officers of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious that the Congregation would be conducting a "doctrinal assessment" of the organization.

I did not intend to comment on the Vatican's decision late last year to conduct a visitation of religious communities of women in the United States because I expected such a study, to be done under the auspices of the Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life, to come up more or less empty-handed as did the Vatican's earlier study of U.S. seminaries and theologates.

I may, of course, hear from some seminary quarters itemizing a few of the negative results of that previous study. I would welcome such input and would want to assure the sources in advance of complete confidentiality.

This Saturday, July 4th, is Independence Day in the United States. It is a day for celebration, to be sure, but all too rarely do those Americans who observe the holiday reflect on its original inspiration. The same, of course, holds true for Memorial Day, Labor Day, Thanksgiving, and even Christmas.

Many countries have their own distinctive celebrations to mark the anniversary of their liberation from foreign rule or autocratic government. There is nothing unique about what occurs in the United States on the Fourth of July. Canada Day, celebrated on July 1, offers a close, but not exact, parallel.

History is the great debunker of pre-conceived ideas that are rooted in ideology and false piety rather than in reality.

Without a grasp of history, and of the history of the papacy in particular, many Catholics are led to believe that the papacy must always have been as they have known it, and most popes have been just like the popes of the 20th and 21st centuries: Pius XI, Pius XII, John XXIII, Paul VI, John Paul I, John Paul II, and Benedict XVI.

The Catholic church will commemorate the feasts of Sts. Aloysius Gonzaga and John Fisher on June 21 and June 22 respectively.

Although both saints lived all or part of their lives in the 16th century, there are striking contrasts between them, primarily in their personalities and achievements in life, but also in the institutions which have taken their names.

One is in the Jesuit tradition, Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington; the other, St. John Fisher College in Rochester, New York, was established by Basilians.

Fr. Thomas Reese, S.J., former editor-in-chief of America magazine, wrote an exceedingly important article for the National Catholic Reporter, May 29, on the silence of the presidents of Catholic colleges and universities.

Almost none of them came to the defense of the University of Notre Dame or their fellow president, Holy Cross Father John Jenkins, when the institution and Jenkins were under heavy fire from bishops and conservative laity alike for having invited President Barack Obama to be Notre Dame’s Commencement speaker and to receive an honorary degree.

There's an old saying, "It's an ill wind that blows nobody any good." It appears in many places, but its classic source seems to be Shakespeare's Henry IV.

For our purposes, the "ill wind" is the negative reaction of over 60 U.S. Catholic bishops to the University of Notre Dame's invitation to the President of the United States to deliver this year's Commencement address and to receive an honorary doctorate of laws.

The Anglican Communion and the Catholic church (of which the Roman Catholic church is by far the largest portion) historically have had much to learn from one another.

Anglicans have shown Catholics that it is possible to maintain international unity while respecting local autonomy, and Catholics have shown Anglicans the benefits of a strong central authority.

There have been several events in North America and around the world marking this year's 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth. I write this week about his significance -- and that of Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx -- for our understanding of who we humans are and where we fit into the broader contexts of nature, the inner psychological universe, and society at large.

Political commentators have been reflecting for several weeks on television and in the press about the crisis of leadership facing the Republican Party in the United States.

Larry Sabato, an oft-quoted professor at the University of Virginia, suggested recently that we may now have a one-and-a-half party system in this country, rather than the traditional two-party system.

As we approach the Notre Dame commencement ceremonies (on May 17) at which President Barack Obama will address the graduates and receive an honorary doctorate of laws, much to the consternation of a certain segment of the U.S. Catholic community, it is long past the time when a major theological fallacy needs to be exposed and rebutted.

I received an e-mail recently from a lay pastoral associate, whose ministerial focus is on adult education and who possesses a graduate degree from a Catholic university. I have his permission to cite a portion of our exchange.

On April 19 Pope Benedict XVI marked his fourth year in the papacy. Three days earlier, he had turned 82. At age 78, Joseph Ratzinger was the oldest person elected to the papacy since Clement XII in 1730.