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Revolution or Rejection?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 August 2021

John Cavadini
John Cavadini*
Affiliation:
University of Notre Dame; [email protected]
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Extract

Mark S. Massa’s The Structure of Theological Revolutions: How the Fight Over Birth Control Transformed American Catholicism is a study on two levels. On one level, it is a study of the responses of select American moral theologians to Pope Paul VI’s 1968 encyclical on contraception, Humanae vitae (hereafter, HV). On another level, it is a second-order reflection on these theological responses, using them as data, as it were, for a theory about how theology changes or does not change over time. The book certainly succeeds on the first level. I am not sure, however, that that success translates easily to the second level. To the extent that it is possible, I would like to work with these levels successively, even if, for Massa, the two are accomplished simultaneously, since the narration of the “brilliance” (passim) of the individuals treated is tied to the narration of how each of them radically broke with the paradigm of natural law that Massa claims is enshrined in HV.

Type
Review Essay
Information
Harvard Theological Review , Volume 114 , Issue 3 , July 2021 , pp. 417 - 429
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Copyright
© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the President and Fellows of Harvard College

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Footnotes

*

Mark S. Massa, S.J, The Structure of Theological Revolutions: How the Fight Over Birth Control Transformed American Catholicism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 218 + viii pp., $31.95 hb., ISBN 9780190851408. Page references appear within parentheses within the text.

References

1 Emphasis in original unless otherwise indicated.

2 Emphasis added to quotes by Massa unless otherwise indicated.

3 Second Vatican Council, Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation, Dei Verbum (Boston: Pauline Books & Media, 1965) 8.

4 John Henry Newman, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (6th ed.; Notre Dame Series in the Great Books 4; Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989) 169–206.

5 HV 13.

6 Encyclical Letter of the Supreme Pontiff Francis, On Care for Our Common Home, Laudato Si’ (Boston: Pauline Books and Media, 2015) 115–16.

7 Ibid., 68–69.

8 Ibid., 155.

9 Ibid., 155 [emphasis added].

10 See ibid., 156.

11 Ibid., 122.