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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 May 2016
In his important 2005 analysis of the Catholic Church in America, Peter Steinfels observed that
in some respects, the future of lay parish ministry is assured. Catholics are willing. The church needs them. The parish of 2025 will employ them. What remains to be determined is who will be drawn to these positions and how they will be trained, appointed, promoted, retained, and supported in their work and their personal spiritual growth. With sufficient neglect and discouragement, of course, their numbers could level off…, turnover could increase, those with greatest potential for leadership could be driven away, or polarization that has injured other aspects of lay parish ministry could settle in here, too.
1 Peter Steinfels, A People Adrift: The Crisis of the Catholic Church in America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2005), 337.
2 Although I agree with Joseph A. Komonchak that the term “lay ministry” is problematic—one who is engaged in any ministry is in some sense “ordained” to that ministry and so not “lay”—the term is ubiquitous and the distinction is not going away soon, so I leave aside the question of ministry and ordination here and will use the term “lay ministry” as a convenience. See Joseph A. Komonchak, “‘Non-Ordained’ and ‘Ordained’ Ministers in the Local Church,” in The Right of a Community to a Priest, ed. E. Schillebeeckx and J. B. Metz, Concilium 133 (New York: Seabury Press, 1980), 44–50. See also David Power, Gifts That Differ: Lay Ministries Established and Unestablished (New York: Pueblo, 1980). What is clear is that, as the Decree on the Missionary Activity of the Church puts it, “the Church is not truly established and does not fully live, nor is it a perfect sign of Christ, unless there is a genuine laity existing and working alongside the hierarchy.” Second Vatican Council, Decree on the Missionary Activity of the Church (Ad Gentes), December 7, 1965, §21, http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_decree_19651207_ad-gentes_en.html; hereafter AG.
3 John W. O'Malley, What Happened at Vatican II (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), chap. 2.
4 Quoted in Ian Ker, John Henry Newman: A Biography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 479.
5 The laity “exercise their apostolate both in the Church and in the world, in both the spiritual and the temporal orders…the mission of the Church is not only to bring the message and grace of Christ to men but also to penetrate and perfect the temporal order with the spirit of the Gospel.” Second Vatican Council, Decree on the Apostolate of the Laity (Apostolicam Actuositatem), November 18, 1965, §5, http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_decree_19651118_apostolicam-actuositatem_en.html; hereafter, AA.
6 Bernard Lonergan, Method in Theology (New York: Herder, 1972), 351.
7 For a postconciliar perspective on coresponsibility and the balance needed between the center and the periphery in the church, see the reflections of Cardinal Suenens in Jose de Broucker, ed., The Suenens Dossier (Notre Dame, IN: Fides, 1970), 7–45.
8 Lawrence, Fred, “Money, Institutions, and the Human Good,” Lonergan Review 2, no. 1 (2010): 193CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
9 For a balanced evaluation of the so-called New Ecclesial Movements see Dennis M. Doyle, “Extraordinary Love in the Lives of Lay People,” in God Has Begun a Great Work in Us, ed. Jason King and Shannon Schrein (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2015), 149–63.
10 On the need for physicians and other health-care workers to be open to these opportunities for spiritual ministry in their work with patients, see Sulmasy, Daniel, “Spirituality, Religion, and Clinical Care,” Chest 135 (2009): 1634–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
11 For background, see Steinfels, People Adrift, 203–52. See also Steinfels' discussion of preaching: 198–202.
12 Longenecker's essay, “What Do We Mean by the Real Presence?,” can be found on this blog, Standing on My Head, at http://www.patheos.com/blogs/standingonmyhead/what-do-we-mean-by-the-real-presence.
13 Interview with Anthony Spadaro, published in America, September 30, 2013, http://americamagazine.org/pope-interview. Even within the context of higher education one can find ideology in recommended web resources. One ideological website succeeded, at one college at least, in becoming the librarians' sole recommended Internet location for researching the category “Catholicism.” Although the college is not a Catholic institution, the Catholic student population is about 30 percent, as it is in many non-Catholic colleges and universities. Catholicism.org, a website published by the Slaves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, is a good site to visit if you want to hear audio recordings of Fr. Leonard Feeney's sermons from the 1950s on the topic of why non-Catholics are going to hell, but it is not good for much else.
14 See Joseph A. Komonchak, “Subsidiarity in the Church: The State of the Question,” in The Nature and Future of Episcopal Conferences, ed. Hervé Legrand et al. (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1988), 298–349. This article is available on Komonchak's website, https://jakomonchak.wordpress.com/.
15 The universal Church exists and “comes into being” only through the local churches. Second Vatican Council, Dogmatic Constitution on the Church (Lumen Gentium), November 21, 1964, §23, http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_const_19641121_lumen-gentium_en.html; hereafter, LG.
16 Komonchak, Joseph A., Foundations of Ecclesiology (Supplementary issue of The Lonergan Workshop 11 [1995])Google Scholar, available on Komonchak's website, https://jakomonchak.wordpress.com.
17 Pope John XXIII, Gaudet Mater Ecclesia, October 11, 1962.
18 On contemporary efforts to affirm Jesus' humanity while missing the meaning of the ancient affirmation that Jesus was a “divine person,” see William P. Loewe, “Two Revisionist Christologies of Presence: Roger Haight and Piet Schoonenberg,” in Sacramental Life: A Festschrift Honoring Bernard Cooke, ed. Michael Horace Barnes and William P. Roberts (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2003), 93–115.
19 Lonergan, Method, 48.
21 For example, a series of sessions sponsored by Quality Matters in the fall of 2015 (“QM Live! Fall Back to Learning”) focused on “learner engagement.” The sessions promised to be “highly interactive and engaging, with timely and useful resources.” The participants discussed “learner interaction and engagement in groups,” identified “materials to use to encourage active learning” as well as “methods of designing group work to engage learners,” and analyzed teacher “activities to determine how to incorporate active learning.” https://www.qualitymatters.org/live-fall?utm_source=Quality+Matters+Digital+Communications&utm_campaign=29e7a5ca99-2015_QM_Live_Fall_Back_to_Learning9_4_2015&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_355a0627da-29e7a5ca99-33535657.
22 The mathematician Henri Poincaré tells the story of his discovery of an insight when he was least expecting it: “Just at this time, I left Caen where I was living, to go on a geological excursion under the auspices of the School of Mines. The incidents of the travel made me forget my mathematical work. Having reached Coutances, we entered an omnibus to go some place or other. At the moment when I put my foot on the step, the idea came to me, without anything in my former thoughts seeming to have paved the way for it, that the transformations I had used to define the Fuchsian functions were identical with those of non-Euclidean geometry. I did not verify the idea; I should not have had time, as, upon taking my seat in the omnibus, I went on with a conversation already commenced, but I felt a perfect certainty. On my return to Caen, for conscience sake, I verified the result at my leisure.” Henri Poincaré, “Mathematical Creation,” excerpted in The Creative Process, ed. Brewster Ghiselin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1952), 37. In the same volume, a letter from Mozart records a similar experience of insight as an unplanned if not surprising arrival: “When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone and of good cheer—say, travelling in a carriage, or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep, it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence and how they come, I know not; nor can I force them” (44).
23 Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 164.
24 Alexander Astin, What Matters in College: Four Critical Years Revisited (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1993), 375. I am grateful to my colleague Dan Sheridan for alerting me to the Arum and Astin texts.
25 Hege, Brent A. R., “The Online Theology Classroom: Strategies for Engaging a Community of Distance Learners in a Hybrid Model of Online Education,” Teaching Theology & Religion 14, no. 1 (January 2011): 15CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
26 Ibid., 19.
27 Bernard Lonergan, “Healing and Creating in History,” in A Third Collection, ed. Frederick Crowe (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1985), 100–112.
28 The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, ed. Charles Dessain (London: Nelson, 1961), 20:465. Newman was responding to the historical and literary methods of biblical interpretation.
29 Trans. Stephen B. Bevans, cited in Bevans and Jeffrey Gros, Evangelization and Religious Freedom (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 2009), 44.
30 Timothy Matovina, Latino Catholicism: Transformation in America's Largest Church (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 249.
31 Ibid., 249–50.
32 Frederick Crowe, “Theology and the Future,” in Appropriating the Lonergan Idea, ed. Michael Vertin (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1989), 267.
33 See Bernard Lonergan, “Doctrinal Pluralism,” in Philosophical and Theological Papers, 1965–1980, ed. F. E. Crowe and R. M. Doran, vol. 17 of Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 70–104.
34 Cardinal Levada, who served on the editorial committee that prepared it, identified what he considered to be the need for a universal catechism: “Let me recall for a moment why it was felt a new, universal catechism was necessary. First, in the confusion that had arisen after the Council, due in some measure to the competing views about what had changed and what had stayed the same in Church teaching, the bishops generally, many priests, theology professors, religion teachers and catechists asked for help.” Cardinal William Levada, “The Council and the Catechism: Anniversaries to Mark with a ‘Year of Faith’” (keynote address, Catholic University of America Symposium, “Reform and Renewal: Vatican II after Fifty Years,” September 26, 2012), http://trs.cua.edu/news/vaticanIIsymposium.cfm. Pope John Paul II described the Catechism as a reference text in the Apostolic Constitution introducing it, Fidei Depositum, section I, October 11, 1992, http://w2.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/apost_constitutions/documents/hf_jp-ii_apc_19921011_fidei-depositum.html.
35 Sloyan, Gerard S., “Religious Education as a Correlate of ‘Religious Knowledge’: Some Problem Areas,” Religious Education 61 (1966): 286–91, at 298CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
36 Gerard Sloyan, “The Role of the Bible in Catechesis According to the Catechism,” in Introducing the Catechism of the Catholic Church, ed. Berard Marthaler (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1994), 32–42. See also Francis Holland, “Dei Verbum: Its Historic Break from Curial ‘Theology’ and Its Subsequent Official Use,” in Vatican II: Forty Years Later, ed. William Madges (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2006), 113–44.
37 I am not, of course, suggesting that the condition of biblical studies in the mid-1960s is normative. Indeed, much has changed in the field, shifting in a positive way from a preoccupation with historical questions of fact, such as the quests to reconstruct the Jesus of history, to an approach more sensitive to the literary styles and genres manifest in the ancient texts, and the concomitant “reader response.” The point is that the enhancement of our appreciation of Scripture depends on an ongoing, self-correcting scholarship.
38 Ratzinger, Cardinal, “Catechismo e inculturazione,” Il regno-Documenti 37 (November 1, 1992): 587Google Scholar; quoted in Joseph Komonchak, “The Authority of the Catechism,” in Marthaler, Introducing the Catechism, 166 n. 18. See also Bernard Lonergan, “Pope John's Intention,” in Crowe, A Third Collection, 224–38.
39 Steinfels, A People Adrift, 358.
40 I have been using “communication” in Lonergan's sense. See Lonergan, Method, 355–68. See also the recent statement of the International Theological Commission: “Putting faith into practice in the concrete reality of the existential situations in which he or she is placed by family, professional and cultural relations enriches the personal experience of the believer. It enables him or her to see more precisely the value and the limits of a given doctrine, and to propose ways of refining its formulation. That is why those who teach in the name of the Church should give full attention to the experience of believers, especially lay people, who strive to put the Church's teaching into practice in the areas of their own specific experience and competence.” International Theological Commission, “Sensus Fidei in the Life of the Church” (2014), 59, http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/cti_documents/rc_cti_20140610_sensus-fidei_en.html.
41 On the difference between a classicist mentality, which imagines that there is only one normative culture, and historical consciousness, which grasps the legitimacy of many cultural forms, see Bernard Lonergan, “Theology in Its New Context,” in A Second Collection, ed. William F. J. Ryan and Bernard Tyrrell (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1974), 55–67.
42 Pope John Paul II, Apostolic Exhortation, Catechesi Tradendae, October 16, 1979, §53, http://w2.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/apost_exhortations/documents/hf_jp-ii_exh_16101979_catechesi-tradendae.html. See also Paul, John II, “One Church, Many Cultures,” Origins 14 (1984–85): 498–502Google Scholar, as well as Joseph Komonchak, “The Local Realization of the Church,” in The Reception of Vatican II, ed. G. Alberigo and J. Komonchak (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1987), 77–90.
43 Karl Jaspers, Philosophy and the World: Selected Essays and Lectures (Chicago: Regnery, 1963), 22. See also Frederick Crowe, “The Janus Problematic,” in Appropriating the Lonergan Idea, ed. Michael Vertin (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1989), 277–96.
44 Sloyan, “Role of the Bible,” 36.
45 According to some scholars, the Catechism's remedy for that confusion seems to be the centralization of authority rather than encouragement to think more carefully about ancient texts and their contexts. See the articles by Robert Murray, Gabriel Daly, and Gerard O'Hanlan, in Marthaler, Introducing the Catechism, as well as Holland, “Dei Verbum,” 132–37.
46 In support of his position Fr. Longenecker quotes Pope Paul VI's 1965 encyclical Mysterium Fidei, but there the pope did not identify the Eucharist in a simplistic way as the corporeal or physical presence of Christ. In his explanation of transubstantiation, Pope Paul makes a critical distinction: “the appearances, under which Christ, whole and entire, in His physical ‘reality’ is bodily present, although not in the same way that bodies are present in a given place.” Pope Paul VI, Encyclical, Mysterium Fidei, September 3, 1965, §50 (my emphasis), http://w2.vatican.va/content/paul-vi/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-vi_enc_03091965_mysterium.html. For a helpful historical survey of the theology of the Eucharist that takes Lonergan's critique of naïve realism as the “upper blade” of interpretation, see Raymond Moloney, The Eucharist (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1995).
47 Although most moderns no longer share the ancient mentality that Henri de Lubac called “ontological symbolism,” faith gives us other resources. We recognize in faith the power of God to enter into God's own creation in the Incarnation. The benefits of the Incarnation are then extended to us in the sacraments. See Henri de Lubac, Corpus Mysticum: The Eucharist and the Church in the Middle Ages, ed. Laurence Paul Hemming and Susan Frank Parsons, trans. Gemma Simmonds, CJ, Richard Price, and Christopher Stephens (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006).
48 See Longeran, Method, 330: “No one should pass judgment on matters he does not understand, and no one with a less differentiated consciousness is capable of understanding accurately what is said by a person with a more fully differentiated consciousness.”
49 On the necessity of affirming the culture of modernity as capable of embodying the gospel, see Godzieba, Anthony, “Fear and Loathing in Modernity: The Voyages of Capt. John Milbank,” Philosophy & Theology 9 (1996): 419–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
50 See Lonergan's 1952 essay, “The Role of a Catholic University in the Modern World,” in Collection: Papers by Bernard Lonergan, vol. 4 of Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, ed. F. E. Crowe and Robert Doran (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988), 108–13. For a dialectical analysis of two different theological approaches to modern and postmodern cultures, see Kaplan, Grant, “Widening the Dialectic: Secularity and Christianity in Conversation,” Lonergan Workshop 24 (2013): 133–68Google Scholar.
51 For an example of a pastoral application of the differentiation of consciousness, see Doyle, Dennis M., “Lonergan to the Rescue,” Commonweal 134, no. 19 (2007): 31Google Scholar. See also Avery Dulles, “The Hermeneutics of Dogmatic Statements,” in The Survival of Dogma (Garden City, NY: Doubleday/Image, 1973), 176–91.
52 See Dennis M. Doyle, “Vatican II and Intellectual Conversion: Engaging the Struggle Within,” in A Realist's Church: Essays in Honor of Joseph A. Komonchak, ed. Christopher D. Denny, Patrick J. Hayes, and Nicholas Rademacher (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2015), 99–116.
53 Quoting Pope Paul VI, Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation (Dei Verbum), November 18, 1965, §8, http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_const_19651118_dei-verbum_en.html.
54 See his Co-Responsibility in the Church (New York: Herder, 1968). See also Joseph Komonchak, Foundations in Ecclesiology, 97–189, for an explanatory account of the self-realization of the church as a community of faith in history.
55 On the manipulation of religious imagery by capitalist marketers, see Vincent Miller, Consuming Religion: Christian Faith and Practice in a Consumer Culture (New York: Continuum, 2004).
56 See Bernard Lonergan The Triune God: Doctrines, vol. 11 of Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), 29–255. The explicit shift to theory that medieval scholasticism represents is a permanent achievement even if its limitations and decadence had to be overcome through various modern movements of ressourcement and the turn to the subject that, as Lonergan puts it, allowed for “the enrichment of the technical formulation by the vital, the personal, the existential.” See Bernard Lonergan, “Pope John's Intention” in Crowe, A Third Collection, 226–27.
57 For a brief essay on the differentiation of consciousness and the implications for both doctrine and religious education, see Bernard Lonergan, “Unity and Plurality: The Coherence of Christian Truth,” in Crowe, A Third Collection, 239–50.