Trent launches world revolution in theology

Sounds like a liberal love fest to me! Hardly fitting that it should be held in Trent, the site of that most holy Council of Trent. I mean this is about theology isn't it? So why don't they talk about God? Look at the breakout of five, where is God?

What they really are about is hominology (forgive the Latin attempt!) - the study of man. For the moderns, liberals & heretics, humankind is god. Sad, that this is the Catholic Church today.

Father Keenan's efforts are laudable. This kind of cross-fertilization in the ethics community is essential. But I think his hope for continued outreach and networking using technological advances will in fact marginalize those who have no access to these kinds of things, in part because they have no electricity or limited access to computers or the internet. I've recently returned from West Africa where the desire to participate in these kinds of conversations is present, but the infrastructure to carry them out is almost entirely absent. Since it is their voice that is so important for doing contemporary ethics it is essential to make personal contact, to go and listen to those in places that we too often neglect.

"five key themes that emerged in Trent"

Excuse me! I thought this was a theology conference, not a meeting of secular academics worried about global warming and the survival of chimpanzees in the Congo.

No mention of God, scripture, tradition, the liturgy, the catechism, or the disappearance of Catholics from Catholic churches?

I stopped reading when I saw that.

Fascinating! This shift could be a great gift to the life of the Church as a whole---will be intreted in seeing how it plays out over the next couple of decades.

So, where's the content? They met; that's all? Sounds like a Vatican meeting.

Thanks for an encouraging word.

Someday the Catholic Church may actually be the most full expression of Jesus the Christ.

It is a revolution because Rome did not even attempt to dominate and there were ample lay and women theologians present. With the present papacy continuing as a virtual train wreck help will be needed by other parts of the church. So far there does not appear any clear specifics that arose from this Trent. But the fact that it happened is a paradigm of sorts.

John Allen begins by a dramatic comparison between the recent gathering of theologians at Trent and the Council of Trent almost five hundred years earlier. But then his comparison goes off the track, as the Council of Trent is characterized with the positives that Mr. Allen hopes will flow from the recent Trent gathering. Allen says that the Council of Trent “engineered the Counter Reformation, thus equipping Catholicism to respond to the most significant megatrend of the day: the Protestant Reformation and the dissolution of Christendom.” Many Catholic historians in the last century have asserted that (allegedly) there was no need for, and never was, any Catholic Counter Reformation; and these Catholic historians have asserted that the Council of Trent merely affirmed the medieval institutions such as the seven sacraments, the Scholastics’ Aristotelian doctrine of transubstantiation (that replaced what Luther urged be restored), and so on.
Of course, we do know that there was a Catholic “Counter Reformation.” But it was not a positive, forward-looking gathering dominated by humanist-minded theologians – the nearest parallel, in sixteenth-century modes of thought, to the forward-minded theologians that Allen describes in attendance at the Trent of 2010. The humanists of the sixteenth century held back from the Council of Trent, for their writings clearly supported the voices of Luther, and more so, Calvin, Zwingli, and other Northern reformers.
The Council of Trent, clearly, did not espouse Revolution in the Church. It bolstered the Church’s teachings and institutions that had been formed in the Middle Ages, and it did little more.
John Allen’s description of the recent Trent is tantalizingly silent about another major point. Where is the Vatican in this Trent story? The Council of Trent was all about the popes that ran the sessions of that long gathering. Theologians, to the minor extent that there were any of them at that Council, played only background roles. This Trent – at least, the story that Allen offers – implies that Catholic theologians, lay and clerics, put it together on their own. I am really glad about this – but this makes for another difference from the Council of Trent. And sooner or later, unlike the reformers who essentially were only playing support roles at the Council of Trent, the attendees at the recent Trent, especially if it turns out that the gathering and its agenda were never approved by the Vatican, might yet enjoy consequences paralleling the treatment that the Church tried to mete out on the early Protestant reformers.
I look forward to John Allen comparing the agenda proposed by the recent Trent for the global Church of the coming global century, with the issues that he himself has outlined in his other writings along the same line. It does sound as if the recent Trent’s discussions have the makings of a Revolution, the likes of which the Council of Trent was not. As an historian, I admit that revolutions intimidate me. Yet the message of Christ has always preached revolution of spirit. Sometimes I am almost intimidated by how the message of Christ might be preached in the future. If I lived to 2050 and had a 111th birthday party, should I worry that that more global Church might be preaching an apparently different Christianity? But it would be silly to translate to the future of the whole Church and for the whole world any trepidation I have – which is merely a projection of some personal fear about how well or not so well I have interpreted that revolutionary message in my own life. I will read what this Trent has to offer, and pray that I can translate it for myself and pray that others do, too.
Thanks, John Allen, for another stimulating report!

Vincent

"Hominology?" Interesting (sad from my perspective) that someone in the only Incarnational religion, the religion that celebrates the definitive revelation of God in Jesus, the human, should not see the connection between human dignity and God. And, as St. Ignatius, among others, reminds us we are called to find God in all things - I take that to include the environment.

This is just a breath of fresh air. To be effective, the Church must reflect it's constituency at all levels. And it must reflect the concerns of the greater global world. This is truly being my brother's and sister's keeper!

I believe Christ tried to change his faith of origin, only to fail.
2000+ years later Catholics are frightened of necessary change, supporteres of the status quo such as some of thse respondents, do enormous damage

"*Human dignity (and not just in the context of health care and “life” issues);
*Justice (North/South, but also within cultures);
*The environment;
*New technologies;
*The position of persons within institutions."

“'Today, there’s a new Catholicity taking shape,' Keenan said."

At last! People seem to be allowed to THINK again! New Wine in New Wineskins!

Wow! 88 women theologians present and contributing their expertise. This is a much longed for development in contrast to the thinking of our anachronistic, xenophobic Pope. It appears that a large group of theologians is actually listening to the Holy Spirit!

Many blessings to you and to your outstanding group, Fr. James Keenan!

The Council of Trent was a disaster. The Council fathers barred the doors and locked the windows. Luther and the other reformers were 90% right in their allegations of the corruption and abuse in the Roman church. Yet they did not get a hearing. Trent was about theological rigidity and control. Because of Trent our official theology is still based on the scholastic theoloians of the late middle ages. Any theologian who seriously tries to break new ground is silenced. Rome acts as if no philosopher or theologian who has written since Trent can possibly have anything to say that would more clearly articulate the gospel messsage to the 21st century.
I am a 74-year-old born Catholic. I was raised in a Catholic Church environment that acted as if nothing had happened between the Council of Nicaea and the Council of Trent. Most of what happened between the death of the last apostle and Nicaea was ignored. Trent was not a counter-reformation. It was a hunkering down in rigid positions that pretended there was no need for fundamental reform. We lay Catholics are still paying for that bunker mentality by being excluded from any significant voice in the governance of our church. The Vatican has said that power in the church flows top down through the Pope, the Bishops and the clergy. Baloney! The Pope, the Vatican bureaucracy, the bishops and the clergy have forfeited the moral high ground (if they ever possessed it!) through doctrinal rigidity, suppression of intellectual freedom and freedom of speech, oppression of women, and lack of openness and accountability.
Pay, pray and obey still is the norm amoung our clergy.

“Today, there’s a new Catholicity taking shape,” Keenan said. “We recognize that we have to be voices with others, not just for others.”
This principle should apply to the Catholic Schools here in the USA.
We cannot allow our Catholic Schools to serve more and more the middle class and rich while the poor are "marginalized". A "preferential option for the poor" should be maintained in our Catholic Schools. If we find that we cannot afford to keep our schools open to the poor, the schools should be closed and the resources used for something else which can be kept open to the poor. We cannot allow our Church to become a church primarily for the middle class and rich while throwing a bone to the poor. The priority should be given to the poor even if we have to let the middle class and rich fend for themselves.
Practically speaking, the Catholic Schools must close and the resources used for "Confraternity of Christian Doctrine" and other programs which can be kept open to the poor. Remember, the Church managed without Catholic Schools for centuries. We can get along without them today. The essential factor is to cultivate enough Faith to act in the Gospel Tradition, namely, THE POOR GET PRIORITY. The rich and middle-class are welcome too. But the poor come first. Thus, we wiil be better able to be "voices with others, not just for others.”

Whether people (both catholics and non-catholics) like it or not, like the bishops of Trent the current crop of church authorities are guided by history. One reason this church has survived is because the leadership is somewhat flexible mentally but not theologically, although many times it doesn't seem so. They can understand how in each period of history the institution must expand or contract in response to the culture it exists in. Practically speaking in the present time the church in the northern hemisphere is losing members so it's necessary for the Vatican to reallocate resources to the southern hemisphere. It's a contraction in Europe but an expansion in South America and Africa. So Benedict's idea of a smaller more conservative church may be true but in a different way than pundits have described it.