| Bernard
J. LEE, S.M., The Beating of Great Wings. Mystic:Ct:
Twenty-Third Publications, 2004. pp.184. $16.95 pb ISBN 1-58595-310-5. Going through Joan Chittister's book The Fire in These Ashes for a second time in doing some work for my Franciscan community, the opportunity to review Bernard Lee's text stood as a welcome complement. Lee seeks to offer a series of reflections that provide "A worldly spirituality for active, apostolic communities." While the latter did not engender the same fire of enthusiasm as Chittister's text, Lee's book does offer some thoughtful challenges to move upward, out of the ashes. The most challenging, and
exciting concept presented by Lee comes early in the text and finds
expression at key moments throughout.
The author
distinguishes between a community's charism and its "great story." The
latter serves as the mythic history telling the story of how the community
has and has not been a vibrant charism at different points in time. True
charism requires more than repeating by word or attempted imitation the
events of the great story. Charism arises when the community offers in
its own time and place something vital to the world and church. The Beating of Great Wings rests on solid scholarship, well documented by the author. Lee draws on process thought and other contemporary philosophies, as well as critical social analysis. It is not a quick and easy read. However, the quality of the scholarship strengthens the author's argument. Lee proposes not a thorough theological treatment of religious life or the vows. He proposes to offer a series of reflections, several revisions of earlier work. Completing what he has proposed the text is held together with a repetition of the theme, the beating of great wings, but has a much greater coherence with the repetition of key ideas and select authors. Though the reader recognizes a certain "piecing together," Lee does provide a solid overview to each chapter, solid development of each theme, and good questions for further thought and discussion. Taking on the contemporary challenges of individualism, corporate mission and forgiveness Bernard Lee offers a firm hope that religious communities can move well beyond surviving to actually thrive. That hope offers reason enough to read his text. Daniel Speed THOMPSON, The
Language of Dissent, Edward Schillebeeckx on the Crisis of Authority
in the
Catholic Church. Notre Dame: The
University of Notre Dame Press, 2003, 235 pp, ISBN 0-268-03359-5 (paper) The Language of Dissent by Daniel Thompson is a book with passion, coherence, and eloquence. It reveals the pastoral passions of Edward Schillebeeckx, O.P. and Daniel Thompson in their respective searches for truth in theology, the coherence of writers who believe reason can craft basic lines of understanding out of graced human experiences as we encounter the mysteries of Christian faith, and the eloquence of artists whose works reflect the deep insights into unspoken needs and realities for themselves and others. In the book's penultimate paragraph Schillebeeckx says that the God of our faith, hope, and love is silent because "he is listening to our life story," our entire story made up of all our words, thoughts, desires, actions and passions, joys and sufferings. Schillebeeckx, born in Antwerp Belgium in 1914, one of fourteen children, has lived a full life as a Dominican priest and theologian at the service of the church. In the mid 1930s he did his philosophical and theological studies at Louvain as a Dominican and worked with Chenu at Le Saulchoir, Paris where he eventually completed his doctoral work on Sacraments. He taught at the Dominican House of Studies, at Louvain, and the Catholic University of Nijimegen in the Netherlands until retirement in 1983. He advised the Dutch Bishops at Vatican Council II. Did the close scrutiny of his writings by the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith in 1968, 1976, and 1982 make his works more popular than they already were? The scrutiny gave more publicity to Schillebeeckx's publications. Thompson seems to leave no major work
of Schillebeeckx, his context, or his commentators unexamined as he
walks the reader through his revised
doctoral dissertation at the University of Chicago. One must read patiently
through five chapters to reach the discussion of authority and dissent,
titled "Symbols of the Church to Come: Theological Dissent and Critical
Communities as Sacraments of the Future Church." The five chapters
are lenses or stages on the way to the chosen topic of debate for Thompson:
1. epistemology, 2. salvation and revelation, 3. ecclesiology and its
subset, 4. early and 5. later meanings for apostolicity in church sources
and teaching. The major shift in S's theology is represented by pre and
post Vatican II works; the latter involved him in the type of hermeneutical
dicussions begun in the Frankfurt School for Social Research. Due to limits of time and space the chapters on revelation and salvation, and ecclesiology will be summarized in terms we learned during and after Vatican II, that Christ is the sacrament of the human encounter with God and the church is the sacrament for the consecration and salvation of the world. Thompson provides a clear and precise development of these expanding and expansive creative relationships envisioned by Schillebeeckx. Apostolicity is the major theological key that opens the ecclesial door to democracy and the role of dissent and critical communities, a late life interest of Schillebeeckx. The critical task of theology is to unmask ideological language and practice in the church, society, and one's self. This opens the church to "the subversive memory of Jesus, the cumulative narratives of human suffering, and the eschatological proviso of God's fulfillment of the humanum." Critical Christian communities may originate in negative contrast experiences, (like WW II, the Shoah, poverty, world hunger), and histories of human suffering, but they move to create emancipatory movements that challenge political and economic structures of oppression. The later Schillebeeckx is a liberation theologian. That leads Thompson to Schillebeeckx's notion of authority as the critical, cognitive, and productive force of an experience or a tradition of experiences that rest on truths that unmask ideological distortions to disclose meaning and effect liberating praxis. A Christian community needs prayer and praxis in the memory of Jesus and hope for the future to provide a vision for all humanity that anticipates the reign or rule of God to come. The whole church community of faith carries the entrusted pledge of the apostolic mandate, not just the Magisterium, particularly each local Church, to mediate the Christian experience and its social-historical context. This sounds like a version of the Dominican charism of preaching. There are fine points concerning the when and how of dissent, and the Magisterium is guided by the Holy Spirit, but theological dissent and critical communities "are a necessary part of a living church." As a Dominican whose history involved the critical dissent of St. Dominic against the medieval dualists, the Cathars of southern France, Schillebeeckx's dissent is always part of a "nonantithetical dialectic". Thompson returns to this refrain like a mantra throughout the book. Dialectical arguments for understanding, yes, but antithetical absolutes that either contradict one another or require a Hegelian aufhebung, no. There is no dualism in Schillebeeckx's theology, only improved, deepened, and expanded relationships. Like the prolific Neoplatonist, Origen, heaven for Schillebeeckx may be imagined as one great conversation in post sacramental, post ideological classrooms where divine communication continues with humans who through the experience of risen bodies, faces, speech, voice, thoughts and movements now know even as they are known. The book is prefaced with a short "Forward" by Edward Schillebeeckx which enunciates the challenges that face theology in the third millennium. Schillebeeckx writes, "Ethical coherence and credibility are, therefore, the most important presuppositions of the church's service to the world and at the same time are the consequences of its message that God's kingdom is among human beings." The book has 50 pp of helpful notes, a bibliography of primary and secondary works, and a complete index.
The work consists of three parts (1. Focusing the issues; 2. The contradictions; and, 3. Considerations toward transformation) and four appendices. In Clerical Culture: Contradiction and Transformation Papesh helps us understand the contemporary clerical system and its current conditions. His narrative describes the origin and the formation of the clerical culture, as well as the contradictions in which the contemporary clerical system is trapped. He calls for a spiritual approach to cultural transformation through leadership in holiness, love, and justice. He embarks on this path with a narrative where both problems and solutions could be found within the matrix of clerical culture, as the latter is an embodiment of all what Christianity should have been ideally but fell short of actually. He sets to define the problem of the clerical culture in U. S. by going through the history of spiritual growth within the framework of the Christian Churches in the West. This enables him to come up with a functional definition of both "culture" and "clerical culture;" it will be of assistance to him in his critical appraisal of the practical theology within American Catholicism, in general, and of the sexual abuse in particular. In the second part of the book, Papesh focuses on the contradictions that the clerical culture may encounter in its interaction with society at large. He approaches this problem with a critical analysis of the history of seminaries which have greatly influenced the formation of the priesthood, as we know it today. In his view, there are fundamental contradictions that have come to pose great challenges by generating a fractured clerical culture. Priests, ministers and others within church were formed to bring a new spiritual perspective to the world; without overcoming these contradictions there is little hope for the future. In the third part, Papesh offers practical considerations for the transformation not only the clerical system but also the worldview that underpins our understanding of existential questions and our spiritual yearnings. The cultural transformation Papesh has in mind is based upon a "spiritual approach." Although he presents a very pessimistic picture of the clerical culture nevertheless he believes that the transformation of the Catholic Church in U.S. is possible. But its possibility hinges upon how serious we are about the spiritual heritage that envelops the very existence of the Church. Although the author mentions explicitly that he is not an anthropologist, sociologist, or ethnographer, his work is an excellent example of empirical research based on good observation and deep reflection. His work is also an attempt to come to terms with the daunting responsibility of being (or claiming to be) an authentic representative of Jesus Christ. Or to put it differently, this is a work that attempts to depict the dangers and hazards of religious life in a world that does not offer much time for personal as well as communal reflection and communion. This work could have gained from a brief history of "clerical culture" as a religious phenomenon found in other major world religions. However this is a significant piece of reflexive research for those interested in the clerical state and the contemporary church.
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