Who Produced Early Conciliar Acta and How?

I am endlessly fascinated by historiography, not least the exploration of how certain reputations in ecclesial history get traduced and trashed as "heretics." Yes, I'm thinking of Origen here, and derivatively of his ostensible follower Evagrius of Pontus (on whom, in this connection, the definitive "rehabilitation," as it were, has been written by Augustine Casiday. I interviewed him here about his book on Evagrius which everybody must read.) But we could ask such questions of every person of prominence, and especially of every council in ecclesial history--though it seems we rarely do ask such questions. 

As someone who has over the years often played secretary to various academic committees, I am only too aware of how one can shape the record for good or ill. I alert my colleagues to this problem by making them watch two clips of the invaluable and hilarious Yes, Prime Minister, as here and here. 

But we rarely--in my experience at least--pay sufficient and critical attention to the crucial question of who was involved in the writing of the minutes or acta of councils in the Church. How much credibility ought we give to such people if we can even find out who they were in some cases? How reliable is their record? How many machinations were going on behind the scene to make sure something was or was not on the agenda (and when!), did or did not get minuted, came up for discussion or was then decided or shelved, etc? 

Perhaps more rarely do we attend to the socioeconomic conditions in which councils were held and their records produced. (John O'Malley's great book on Vatican I, as I showed here, is a recent and prominent exception.)

If you read the uproarious diaries of Congar, as I did here, you get the low-down on all these things: committees that overran their time, leaving everyone hopping on one leg with full bladders; people furiously pulling levers behind the magic curtain to promote or forbid discussion of certain things, to get their favourite candidates onto drafting committees (or have their enemies on them silenced or evicted), and to ensure that their hands remain on the levers of power, not their enemies'. Other diaries, including those of Bouyer, even more shocking in some respects than Congar's, or of Hermaniuk's (much the tamer of the three), all show this. 

Every time I am doing a clinical intake with a patient, I am asking myself the question "How reliable an historian is this person" in telling me of, say, their childhood, or the violence they saw, or any other thing? For human memory is malleable and fallible, and that includes the memories of churchmen gathered in council. But too many Christians seem blithely unaware of these difficulties, and too anxious to press too far into inquiring about them. 

A new book, however, does not shy away from doing so but instead looks set to draw some welcome and overdue attention to this problem: The Acts of Early Church Councils Acts: Production and Character by Thomas Graumann (Oxford UP, 2021), 352pp. 

About this book the publisher tells us this:

The Acts of Early Church Councils Acts examines the acts of ancient church councils as the objects of textual practices, in their editorial shaping, and in their material conditions. It traces the processes of their production, starting from the recording of spoken interventions during a meeting, to the preparation of minutes of individual sessions, to their collection into larger units, their storage and the earliest attempts at their dissemination.

Thomas Graumann demonstrates that the preparation of 'paperwork' is central for the bishops' self-presentation and the projection of prevailing conciliar ideologies. The councils' aspirations to legitimacy and authority before real and imagined audiences of the wider church and the empire, and for posterity, fundamentally reside in the relevant textual and bureaucratic processes. Council leaders and administrators also scrutinized and inspected documents and records of previous occasions. From the evidence of such examinations the volume further reconstructs the textual and physical characteristics of ancient conciliar documents and explores the criteria of their assessment. Reading strategies prompted by the features observed from material textual objects handled in council, and the opportunities and limits afforded by the techniques of 'writing-up' conciliar business are analysed. Papyrological evidence and contemporary legal regulations are used to contextualise these efforts. The book thus offers a unique assessment of the production processes, character and the material conditions of council acts that must be the foundation for any historical and theological research into the councils of the ancient church.

We are also given the table of contents: 

Abbreviations and Conventions

Introduction

Part I: The Quest for Documentation

1. The Earliest Church Councils: A Documentary History

2. 'Council Acts' and the Variations of Conciliar Documentation and Recording Patterns

3. The Conference of Carthage (AD 411): An Imperial Model Case

Part II: 'Reading' and 'Using' Acts

4. Examining the Records: Two Inquiries into Eutyches' Trial (AD 449)

5. Original Acts and Documents at Chalcedon (451)

6. 'Authentic' Documents: Visual Features, Annotation, and Administrative Handling

7. Assessing and Performing Authenticity: A View from Later Councils

Part III: 'Writing' Acts: The Council's Secretariat in Action

8. All the President's Men: Administrative Aides and the 'Official' Secretariat

9. The Stenographic Protocol: Professionalism, Conventions, and Challenges

10. 'Transferring' Shorthand Notes to Long-hand Transcript

Part IV: The Written Record

11. The Hypomnemata: Production and Qualities

12. Documents Incorporated: Incorporating Documents

13. Abstracting and Summary Records

14. Collecting and Appending Signatures

15. The Structure and Elements of the 'Ideal' Session-record and the Role of 'Editing'

Part V: Files, Collections, Editions: Dossierization and Dissemination

16. Council Acts Gathered and Organised: Minutes, Case Files and Collected Records

17. Ancillary Documentation and the Beginnings of Dossierization

18. The Preparation of 'Editions' and the Dissemination of Documentation

Conclusion

Bibliography

Plus ça change....Congar on the "Crisis" of "Heresy" Today

I had occasion, while working on something else, recently to pick up a short book published in 1976, Challenge to the Church: The Case of Archbishop Lefebvre, written by the man who is arguably the greatest historian and theologian of the postwar period, Yves Congar.

Congar's book contains striking parallels to today. He wrote to respond to a remarkably similar hostile exchange of views and letters between Lefebvre and the pope—with some others being drawn in as well. The gist of those letters was that the pope was presiding over the destruction of the Church, and the only answer to this was some imagined return to “tradition.” Congar noted that “Mgr Lefebvre never stops invoking tradition,” but doing so in a way that argues tradition ceased “in 1962.”

Congar patiently but cogently dispatched the claims of the letters by showing, time and time again, that they did not, as today, have coherent and cogent arguments to offer but only their own “obstinate self-righteousness in the face of all the facts.” The answer to such nonsense, then as today, Congar continues, is for the writers and signatories to give up their “cantankerous, aggressive, or unintelligently intransigent spirit.”

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.....

Lunatics, Heretics, and Mystics: Is There a Difference?

Sandro Magister, always worth reading about matters ecclesial and Catholic, has a round-up of some things lunatics are saying about the resignation of Pope Benedict XVI. (One can only imagine what Yves Congar would say about these types! He had scathing comments about them in his own day as recorded in his diaries.)

The prize has to belong to Enrico Maria Radaelli who attempts to claim with a straight face that papal resignation “is not permitted metaphysically and mystically, because in metaphysics it is bound up with the kernel of being...and in mysticism is bound up with the kernel of the mystical Body which is the Church, through which the office of vicar...places the being of the elect on an ontological plane substantially different...: on the metaphysically and spiritually highest plane of Vicar of Christ.” That has to be about as neat a definition of contemporary papolatry as we are likely to find, though I'm keeping the contest open for a while yet because doubtless there are bound to be other contenders. It is also, I maintain, a thinly veiled heresy of the old school: a species of ecclesiological monophysitism. Ecclesiology, as has often been remarked, tends to ricochet between Arianism on the one hand (i.e., an overemphasis on the exclusively human nature of the Church) and monophysitism (i.e., an overemphasis on the exclusively divine nature of the Church).

When discussing the pope, we have, as two recent and splendid histories make clear--Eamon Duffy's Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes (Yale Nota Bene) and John O'Malley's A History of the Popes: From Peter to the Present (both of which are, one may say, perfectly "Chalcedonian" in maintaining a sober "dyophysite" view of the papacy and Church as both divine and human), suffered for a little over a century now under an increasingly "sacralized" notion of the popes and their office which tends towards precisely this monophysite notion: the humanity of the pope is severely downplayed, and his status as some kind of demiurge is exalted. This began at Vatican I, whose absurdly misunderstood doctrine of infallibility can and should be "re-received" (as Walter Kasper argued in That They May All Be One: The Call to Unity Today and other places), though in a very different form today--something I suggest at the end of my Orthodoxy and the Roman Papacy: Ut Unum Sint and the Prospects of East-West Unity.

Thankfully since Pope Paul VI (1963-78), and certainly under John Paul II in some ways--though in others, perhaps unwittingly, he certainly reinforced it--this sacralized notion of the pope (replete with tiarra, sedia gestatoria, use of the royal "we," and other nonsense) was increasingly set aside, and it has now definitely changed with Benedict's resignation, a gesture that, perhaps more than anything else he has done, will deal this notion the death-blow it deserves. As I have asked many Catholics over the last week: if all other bishops in the world are required to retire at 75, why should the bishop of Rome be any different? There is no coherent theological case to be made for treating him differently, and so we are treated, as above, to "metaphysical" and "mystical" emoting that is both dangerous and risible. Radaelli and too many Catholics have spent the last 10 days reacting to the papal retirement with mawkish mewling as though they were helpless kittens whose mother had just been flattened by a truck on the highway. This de trop devastation seems to be one of the lamentable features of our time--as witnessed, e.g., with the faux hysterics of millions in the streets in 1997 at the death of that erstwhile princess of Wales (what was her name?). To all such ululaters, I reply, as the famously taciturn Clement Attlee did in a one-line letter to the endlessly agitated Harold Lasky: "a period of silence from you would be most welcome."

John O'Malley on Councils and Popes

Those of you in northern Indiana, western Ohio, southern Michigan, or anywhere beyond who want to come to the University of Saint Francis in Ft. Wayne on Friday night will be able to hear a man whom many consider the premiere historian of the Catholic Church in our time:  the Jesuit historian John O'Malley of Georgetown University. The lecture begins at 7pm, and promises to be the highlight of our series of lectures commemorating the anniversary of Vatican II. (Further details of his lecture are in this PDF.)

From his Georgetown faculty page, we learn that he is a prolific and award-winning author recognized as such all over the globe:

John O’Malley’s specialty is the religious culture of early modern Europe, especially Italy. He has received best-book prizes from the American Historical Association, the American Philosophical Society, the Sixteenth Century Studies Conference, and from the Alpha Sigma Nu franternity. His best known books are The First Jesuits (Harvard University Press, 1993), which has been translated into ten languages, and What Happened at Vatican II (Harvard, 2008). He has edited or co-edited a number of volumes....

John O’Malley has lectured widely in North America and Europe to both professional and general audiences. He has held a number of fellowships, from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and other academic organizations. He is past president of the Renaissance Society of America and of the American Catholic Historical Association. In 1995 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, in 1997 to the American Philosophical Society, and in 2001 to the Accademia di san Carlo, Ambrosian Library, Milan, Italy. He holds the Johannes Quasten Medal from The Catholic University of America for distinguished achievement in Religious Studies, and he holds a number of honorary degrees. In 2002 he received the lifetime achievement award from the Society for Italian Historical Studies and in 2005 the corresponding award from the Renaissance Society of America. He is a Roman Catholic priest and a member of the Society of Jesus.

O'Malley is the author of several books, but will be in town in part to talk about his two most recent, both devoted to landmark councils of the Western Church, both of which have anniversaries this year: Trent: What Happened at the Council, which concluded 450 years ago this year; and of course What Happened at Vatican II, from 1962-65. Both of those councils had, of course, huge and dramatic consequences not only for the Catholic Church, but especially her relations with the Christian East. In the aftermath of Trent, and the creation of O'Malley's own Jesuit order, the Catholic Church rebounded in Eastern Europe and began, through a long, complicated process--best recounted in Boris Gudziak's splendid book, discussed here--what some Orthodox Christians see as improper incursions into what we today call Ukraine and Russia--and further East, also, creating problems for Orthodox Christians in places such as India and Ethiopia. If Trent seems--in the eyes of some--to have begun the dolorous process and period of "uniatism," creating such problems between East and West, particularly in areas under Hapsburg domination such as Galicia, then Vatican II undeniably and dramatically began to repair those relations and to allow East and West to begin the "dialogue of love" that has drawn both closer together.

Equally one can see a similar progression in Jesuit history and historiography, as O'Malley's celebrated confrere, Robert Taft, has noted: early Jesuits writing on and about Eastern Christianity tended to do so tendentiously with the prejudices of a high Tridentine triumphalism and aggressive apologetics (and often aggressive politics--which everyone in that period undertook: Lutheran, Anglican, Catholic, and Orthodox powers all over Europe); but later Jesuits, including those like Taft, O'Malley, Juan Mateos, Michael Fahey, Samir Khalil Samir, and others in our time (especially those associated with the Pontifical Oriental Institute) have been utterly invaluable in narrating objectively and fairly Eastern Christian history, Catholic-Orthodox history and relations, Orthodox-Muslim relations, and much else besides. Some might chafe at having Orthodox history told by Catholics, but show me where the comparable Orthodox scholars are. In point of fact, if it is genuine history and not what Taft calls "confessional propaganda," then the ecclesial affiliation of the historian should matter very little if at all. And that is what these Jesuits--and others--are especially good at: telling history without regard for whose ox gets gored, or whose cause promoted. (For this reason, someone like Robert Taft was given the rare distinction of double-pectoral insignia by no less a figure than the Ecumenical Patriarch himself, who recognized that Taft had done work of signal service to liturgiology and Orthodoxy more widely. Many Orthodox themselves, when Taft was still teaching in Rome, went to him to do their doctorates because they knew he was the world's specialist on Byzantine liturgical history.)

For this reason also, however, some have cast suspicions on O'Malley for not promoting robustly enough the currently favored interpretations about Vatican II (Trent seems sufficiently distant and obscure that nobody cares much about it anymore). Though it makes me nearly comatose whenever I hear this debate starting up again, Catholics have for years been banging on about a "hermeneutics of continuity" vs. a "hermeneutics of rupture" in understanding Vatican II. As I noted here, in discussing Congar's history of ecclesiology and his diaries of Vatican II, it seems to me highly problematic that apologists for Vatican II want to insist that everything done by the council and in its aftermath was good and in impeccable continuity with previous practice and teaching, and no suspicion about the council can ever be raised. What a lot of nonsense that is. Though one needn't subscribe to the views of such as the Society of St. Pius X (SSPX), a group I find risible and repellent on most matters, one can nonetheless sympathize with their difficulty in reconciling what the council taught with what previous popes, for example, taught on certain questions not least because earlier papal (and even conciliar) teaching and practice was, in some instances, explicitly abandoned at Vatican II or otherwise greatly changed. 

One can, moreover, join with them in recognizing that not everything to come out of Vatican II succeeded. This is not and need not be a "controversial" position but an entirely human recognition of the vicissitudes of history and the complexities of any human gathering. Anybody who knows anything about any council of the Church--local, regional, or ecumenical; Eastern or Western--knows that some councils succeed, some fail (e.g., Ferrara-Florence), and most only succeed partially (Nicaea I was partially successful in dealing with Arianism, but Constantinople I was also required to deal with the heresy). Even the current pope has admitted that not all councils are successful, and that parts of Vatican II could not be counted an unmitigated success. Why can we not be honest about this? Why do apologists continue with their ham-fisted insistence that Vatican II really changed nothing that went before when it's manifestly obvious that it did? While major dogma (a category many people are likely unable to differentiate sufficiently from lesser matters, thus leading to the impression on the part of some Catholics that Vatican II basically created an entirely new Church--new Mass, new married diaconate, new liturgical rites and languages, etc.) may have been untouched, many other important matters did in fact change, and for the better--the Catholic Church's relationship with Israel, Islam, and the Christian East being the three greatest of those highly welcome changes, alongside new understandings of human rights, including religious freedom and Church-state relations.

Part of the answer to this question about why we cannot honestly admit to certain changes lies, I think, in what John Allen discusses so insightfully in his book All the Pope's Men: The Inside Story of How the Vatican Really Thinks. There Allen notes how much of Vatican thinking is governed by Italian cultural codes in which la bella figura must be maintained at all times in the face of any change, good or bad. The important thing is to look lovely and undisturbed. One mustn't startle the horses. (As the fictional Prime Minister Jim Hacker puts it in the hilarious British comedy Yes, Prime Minister, when he's asked to appoint a bishop in the Church of England, the Church "mustn't look political" even when it is.)

O'Malley has himself told the history of the popes in another recent book, which I reviewed elsewhere: A History of the Popes: From Peter to the Present. This is a very solid, reliable, even-handed telling of the history of the longest continual office of governance in the Western world and its colorful incumbents. It is difficult to compress 2000 years of history into one book, but O'Malley has managed that in a way that is both erudite and accessible. About this book the publisher tells us: 

A History of the Popes tells the story of the oldest living institution in the Western world—the papacy. From its origins in Saint Peter, Jesus' chief disciple, through Pope Benedict XVI today, the popes have been key players in virtually all of the great dramas of the western world in the last two thousand years. Acclaimed church historian John W. O'Malley's engaging narrative examines the 265 individuals who have claimed to be Peter's successors. Rather than describe each pope one by one, the book focuses on the popes that shaped pivotal moments in both church and world history. The author does not shy away from controversies in the church, and includes legends like Pope Joan and a comprehensive list of popes and antipopes to help readers get a full picture of the papacy. This simultaneously reverent yet critical book will appeal to readers interested in both religion and history as it chronicles the saints and sinners who have led the Roman Catholic Church over the past 2000 years.

The So-Called Synod of Bishops

One of the surprise moves made by Pope Paul VI during the Second Vatican Council was his (ironic) motu proprio that created the so-called synod of bishops. If you read my book Orthodoxy and the Roman Papacy: Ut Unum Sint and the Prospects of East-West Unity you will see that it's not a real synod at all insofar as it is a purely advisory body with no legislative authority, which is the defining hallmark of a synod properly so called. As a result, some figures such as Maxim Hermaniuk rather archly dismissed the synod as nothing more than "international study days for the Catholic bishops."

These gatherings tend to be highly regulated, very tightly scripted affairs with little room for freewheeling debate and discussion, let alone actual decision-making. The pope can ignore them entirely, though he usually pays them some selective attention. Still, they are but the palest imitations of real synods, which is a great, and wholly unnecessary, pity--not least because there is no reason, theological or historical, to prevent real synods from functioning in the Church of Rome as happened until at least the twelfth century (a history I recount in detail in my book). Nothing in synodal practice threatens 'papal primacy' but only strengthens it.

The problem with the synod, apart from its unilateral if well-intentioned creation, was aptly described by Yves Congar. His wonderful diaries record in several places his thought that the problem with Pope Paul VI was that Paul's gestures, often dramatic and incredibly gracious and humble though they could be, were totally mismatched to any coherent ecclesiological vision, and as a result the gestures fulgurated strikingly and then faded to nothing as the conservative, stultified, unhistoric, Rome-centric ecclesiological status quo reasserted itself. 

Set for release late this year is a new book that proposes to examine the whole history and functioning of the "synod": Ignatius Aniekanabasi Edet, Ideal and Reality of the Synod of Bishops (T&T Clark, 2013), 272pp.

About this book we are told:

The Second Vatican Council envisaged a more prominent role of the synod of bishops in the Catholic church. However, the idea of the fathers of the council never came to full fruition. In this survey, Edet discusses why the reality does not meet the expectations of many of the fathers at Vatican II in terms of collegiality, communion and trinitarian theology. Edet emphasizes that this failure has implications for the church's life and mission. The concentration of decisive authority in the pope and his curia largely undermines the significance of the conciliar teaching on collegiality-dialogue and participation in the exercise of authority in the church. Edet offers an explanatory comparative investigation and evaluation of the Roman Catholic synod of bishops in relation to similar institutions in the Eastern Catholic and Anglican churches, as well as to the reflections on collegiality and synodality in some of the ecumenical dialogues.

The Problem of History in Ecclesiology: Further Thoughts on Congar

In my initial discussion of Yves Congar's wonderful My Journal of the Council, I noted that anyone with an interest in so many events and personages in twentieth-century Catholicism, and Christianity writ large, would find these diaries fascinating. I am pleased that an historian of the stature of John O'Malley has recently come out calling Congar "the council’s single most important theologian." Congar's journal (also available in a Kindle edition), which I continue to savor, records several themes, but perhaps none is so clear in this book, as in Congar's larger oeuvre, of the problem of history in ecclesiology and the lack of real, wide-spread awareness of what actually happened in Christian history in general, and in East-West relations in particular. The Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart is absolutely right when he says that too much of Christian division, East-West division above all, is the result of bad history. 

Much of what gives an Eastern Christian pause in reading Congar has to do with the attitude he records on the part of many Latins who seemed to regard their own tradition as the only valid one. This "soteriological exclusivism," as it has been called, was, of course, by no means limited to the Latin Church: some Orthodox apologists also adopted it, as did not a few Protestants. But none seemed so convinced of it as certain Roman Catholics, often viewed as the "minority" at Vatican II: people who argued for an "ecumenism of return," who exalted the pope in absurdly ultramontane terms, and who, in general, wanted the council to do nothing so much as flatly restate, in baldly propositional terms, dogmatic claims to which all the world would be summoned, under pain of eternal damnation, to make their simple and unquestioning submission. 

I am not running down this minority. In some respects, I side very closely with them, especially in the views of some of them on what happened to the Latin liturgy in the aftermath of the council. I also think they are correct in recognizing--in a way that few others want to do--the uncomfortable and disconcerting hermeneutical and historical problems raised by a council that accepted and praised (often, we now realize, with undue enthusiasm) what popes, scarcely a century before, had condemned in the most hair-raising terms: relations between Church and state (including the question of "religious freedom"), relations with non-Catholics, and the vexed questions of relations with Jews and Muslims, inter alia. Anyone who wants to be taken seriously today simply must admit that there are very serious, real, and obvious hermeneutical problems in reconciling past Catholic teaching with what the council condoned: the famous problem of a "hermeneutic of continuity" vs. a "hermeneutic of rupture." Apologists for the council insist on the former, but have, in my estimation, done an extremely poor job of demonstrating that continuity in ways that do not do violence to history. I also think that such apologists paint themselves unnecessarily into a corner by trying to demonstrate continuity when, on its face, none exists. Why not adopt the vastly simpler and certainly more honest course of frankly admitting that on certain questions, the Church (or at least the papacy, which is not the same thing) has simply changed her mind? This is not suggesting a change in major dogma, but instead a recognition that on more practical and political questions (e.g., democracy, human rights, relations with Jews and Muslims), views have changed, and there is nothing wrong with that. The skandalon consists not in doing this, but precisely in refusing to do so.

Congar had no problem in admitting when his confreres got it wrong, or adopted positions demonstrably unsupported by the facts of history. Time and again he skewers those guilty of what another great historian, Robert Taft, would call the substitution of "confessional propaganda" for real history. Congar knew too much to let a lot of this nonsense pass by without comment. But it seems to me, fifty years after the beginning of the council, the problem remains with us, and we have work ahead of us. Still today history is used and abused for present felt purposes--as Congar and Taft, and more recently Bernard Lewis and Margaret MacMillan, have shown. We are, then, once more indebted to Congar for raising these difficult questions, and for refusing to allow us to get away with facile sloganeering in the place of deep understanding not only of the bare "facts" of history, but also of the difficult relationship between changing and contingent historical forms, and the eternal and changeless truths they are supposed to convey. 

Michael Plekon on Saints in Our Time

Earlier this month, in New England, I sat down one late afternoon and didn't move for the rest of the day until I had finished reading Michael Plekon's most recent book Saints As They Really Are: Voices of Holiness in Our Time (UND Press, 2012), 288pp. In reading it, I was put in mind of a reflection of John Henry Newman's which was greatly consoling many years ago when I first discovered it: in his 1856 discourse "A Short Road to Perfection," the silver-tongued genius of nineteenth-century letters wrote that 

it is the saying of holy men that, if we wish to be perfect, we have nothing more to do than to perform the ordinary duties of the day well.....We must bear in mind what is meant by perfection. It does not mean any extraordinary service, anything out of the way, or especially heroic—not all have the opportunity of heroic acts, of sufferings.... By perfect we mean that which has no flaw in it, that which is complete, that which is consistent, that which is sound....He, then, is perfect who does the work of the day perfectly, and we need not go beyond this to seek for perfection. You need not go out of the round of the day.

Plekon's is a splendid book of insights into what Newman would perhaps call "ordinary holiness." His work is jam-packed with so many great insights into, and reflections on, history, biography (and, in one chapter, some autobiography), psychology, spirituality, North American culture, and of course "hagiography." I very warmly recommend it to anyone interested in the above topics, which are here explored with great cogency, sensitivity to the sociological data, and a wonderfully "ecumenical" approach that does not close Orthodoxy off but appreciates the wisdom of other Christian scholars as well. I've had a chance to interview the author (having done so previously here), a professor at Baruch College in the City University of New York, and here are his thoughts.

AD: Tell us why much of your recent writing has focused, broadly speaking, on "hagiography"

MP: First of all, thanks so much for having me talk to you again! Yes, I have now spent over 800 pages in three books and other articles on saints—who they are, what they think, feel, what they say, and what sense we make out of them. Holy women and men are where God meets humanity, where the divine and social worlds intersect. The God part is, well, up to God, but the human dimension of this is all about us, all about who were are and how we live. Since, like most, I am a voyeur about things human, I am immensely intrigued and fascinated at the same time. I want to know what makes saints laugh, cry and get excited—not just the canonized ones of the past, but also those around me,“saints-in-the-making.”

AD: You give clear emphasis on saints "in our time." Have you discerned ways in which holy people today are significantly different from those of past ages? Or are there aspects of holiness that transcend time and culture?

It’s interesting that when a guest lecturer at a theological school class, I found myself and the theologian Paul Evdokimov attacked for allegedly belittling or discarding the saints of the past for holy people of today. What was good for the 3^rd or 12^th or 18^th century should be good enough for us—the categories of martyr, teacher, confessor, ascetic and so on as well as the ways those in the past thought, acted, even wrote. It made me, a historian and social scientist as well as theologian wonder where the critics’ sense of time and place had gone? Was I really the same as someone in the time of Benedict or Pachomius or Seraphim of Sarov, Teresa of Avila or Julian of Norwich, or even Theres of Lisieux? Surely our being created by God, made part of the kingdom by our baptism, wanting to live the Gospel and follow Christ transcends historical periods and different cultures. But exactly how we are and do all that varies a great deal. The challenges we live with and must face are not the same as in the waning days of the Roman or Byzantine empires. The technologies and other advances give us much but also demand much of us. Actually, the ancient monastic rules lay out basic elements and guidelines that then have to be made more specific in particular climates, locations, cultures and for persons in different ages and health conditions. If those authors recognized the need to adapt and change, why shouldn’t we see that in the details of searching for God and living God’s life?

AD: You begin by quoting Dorothy Day that people are "naturally...filled with repulsion at the idea of holiness." Do you think it's the idea per se, or the usual associations (stereotypes) people have with the idea? In other words is holiness itself the problem, or the way in which it seems typically to be thought of--plaster saints and treacly piety?

Dorothy had in mind precisely the overly sensational, often also romanticized and unreal accounts of saints doing weird and unusual things—these fascinate a few but are a major turnoff to most. After all if starving or being propelled through the air or drifting off into spiritual coma-like states are what it takes, maybe I don’t want that kind of existence. It’s also the case that the preponderance of canonized saints fall into just a few categories, are martyrs, celibates, monastics or members of the clergy. I mean, is there then any room for more ordinary married people with kids, people with training and professions, more ordinary folk? Evdokimov—and to be accurate many others in our time including the Second Vatican Council—recovered the scriptural tradition of the call to holiness being universal. All baptized into Christ are to be kings, prophets and priests. Here and there we are seeing mothers and fathers, teachers and other more ordinary people being recognized even in the official canonization process of the Roman Catholic, the Anglican and Lutheran churches. Dorothy Day herself is a “venerable” and in the Catholic process towards canonization. We in the Eastern Churches have a way to go yet.

AD: In reading Day's line, I contrasted it in my mind with statements like those of the current pope that Christianity has really only two moving "apologias": her iconography and her saints. These two are able, he suggests, to get past our rationalistic defenses and move us to consider the truth of the gospel. What are your thoughts? 

Benedict XVI is quite right. This is part of what the church’s tradition offers us—the faces of Christ, his mother and the saints and their lives, as visible gospel, as “living icons” of the life of the kingdom, as Mother Maria Skobtsova, herself now canonized, called them. We can look to holy men and women as models—admire their courage and strength. This has always been why local churches needed no official process of canonization. They simply continued to name members of their communities they wanted to remember—for a witness in suffering and death, but also the witness of their words and lives. The critical issue as I see it is we do not need to look to founders of religious orders or schools, to missionaries in foreign lands or those doing extraordinaty works of faith and love. Yes we look up to them, but we should be able to see also the holiness of care for families, reaching out to those suffering in our neighborhoods, those caught up in persecution, wars’ terror, the miseries of emigration and of economic crisis. We have been able to do this with respect to first responders say on 9/11 and to catastrophes like hurricane Katrina. If so, we ought to be able to discern very ordinary, thus less flashy, maybe more “hidden” holy people around us.

AD: In your discussion about how most canons of "official" saints are heavily tilted towards male clerics and the "official ideal of holiness," I thought of something Robert Taft says in his most recent book Through Their Own Eyes: Liturgy as the Byzantines Saw It: most of what we know about liturgy does not come "from below," from the experience of the proverbial person in the pew, but from official books and rubrical texts. Am I right in thinking that this is also a problem you see with those whom we consider saints--we don't have enough of them "from below" and instead have many from the upper levels of ecclesial hierarchy?

As I said already, so too have Robert Ellsberg, Kenneth Woodward, James Martin, Elizabeth Johnson among others, the recognition of holy people started very locally and included not only martyrs of suffering and death but also ascetics, teachers and others who gave witness to Christ in their lives as parents, community leaders and the like. In time, the more institutionalized the church and the process of recognizing saints became, the more it became a “top down” reality. With the recovery of the universal call to holiness, the priesthood of all and thus call of all to follow the Gospel, we are indeed being able to to see more diverse forms of holiness, many different holy women and men. Robert Ellsberg catalogued a year’s worth in All Saints. 

The “dancing saints” freso icons at St. Gregory Nyssa Church in San Franciso has also gathered a rich and diverse assembly of saints. If, in my church, a wife, mother, grandmother and healer such as the Yupik woman, Olga Arsamquaq Michael from Kwethluk, Alaska were canonized, it would be a step in the direction of recognizing more “from below.” But in the poetry of Mary Oliver, in the memoirs of Mary Karr, Patricia Hampl, Darcey Steinke, Barbar Brown Taylor and many others, I believe we have accounts from our contemporaries, from sisters ands brothers in the faith, of the effort to lead holy lives.

AD: In recent years, I've come to realize how much Christian division turns on debates about history, and how often that history, especially in Eastern Christian hands, is either romanticized or demonized. But your writing manages to avoid both temptations, especially in the fascinating chapter on your history with the Carmelites. How did you manage such a marvelous balance--to narrate the past realistically and honestly? Is there a special "askesis" that authors need to avoid the romanticizing and demonizing traps? 

There has been a line of very fine historians—George Fedotov, 

Elisabeth Behr-Sigel, Yves Congar, Edward Schillebeeckx, Eamon Duffy, Diarmaid Macculloch, to name just a few from different churches—who have tried to be honest about what the documents and other materials from other centuries actually tell us—this in contrast to either glorifying or demonizing the record. I find it telling that many of these great scholars were immediately attacked for putting forward inconvenient truth! Nicholas Afanasiev once said that ignoring what history told us turned us into Nestorians who wanted only the divine side of things. Fr. Robert Taft has marvelously reminded us of what our forbearers really said and did, liturgically and otherwise. Why should we be afraid of the real historical record? We might actually be encouraged and consoled by the failings as well as accomplishments of the past. My years in the Carmelies were ones of joy but also some frustration, difficulties, disappointment, anger and sadness. Anyone who gets close to me would know that is the same mix I live in and with today—most of us!

AD: In your chapter on your experience with the Carmelites, you note that your intent was not to "write a full memoir of my life in the church or, better, churches." Will we see more of that down the road--please??

Thanks you for the compliment and request. I had to be nudged quite a bit by my daughter Hannah to write the chapter you mention in the first place. I was also moved by Andrew Krivak’s gorgeous memoir A Long Retreat: In Search of a Religious Life and Barbara Brown Taylor’s most courageous Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith as well as several other memoirs. 

Part of the aim of both Hidden Holiness and Saints As They Really Are: Voices of Holiness in Our Time (as well as Living Icons: Persons of Faith in the Eastern Church) has been to listen to and hopefully attract readers to a wonderful group of writers sharing their spiritual searches. I hope to add some more of my own since I have been distinctly blessed to have been is several churches in my life, finding Christ in them all.

AD: In discussing Francis of Assisi, you quote Patricia Hampl that his "temperament was mystic, anarchic--individual." After reading your fifth chapter, I wonder if this perhaps functions as something of a self-description for you? 

Now you’re making me really uncomfortable, not maliciously of course. What Patricia Hampl learned about Francis on her truly hilarious pilgrimage in Assisi, along with quite a company of Franciscan friar and sister fellow pilgrims, is that the real Francis—not that of the statues, frescoes and pious biographies—was a wild man, unwilling and unable to keep with safe social or ecclesiatical boundaries. It shouldn’t be surprising that the more we know of the actual situations and personalities of the saints we venerate, the more amazingly, even disturbingly human they reveal themselves to have been. While I am not sure about the “mystic” part, those who know me are well aware that I am somewhat anarchic, rebellious, and on the outspoken side, to say just a little of what six decades of self-knowledge have taught me. Look, I have spent my adult life both in the university and the church—is it any surprise that I find there to be a great deal of nonsense and comedy therin?

AD: That description puts me in mind of something Hans Urs von Balthasar says somewhere (I think it's in his biography of Georges Bernanos) about saints: that they can be a real pain in the ass for the bishop, that is, for the official church because they do not easily or mindlessly conform but instead often upset the comfortable arrangements and expectations about "proper" or "pious" behavior": the classic tension between charismatic and institutional authority. But instead of lamenting such disruptions, should we not instead see them as the work of the Spirit who comes to "make all things new"?

I take it as Gospel that God creates each of us in God’s own image and likeness—uniquely, to be sure, no one of us the same as another. Over and over in the Hebrew and Christian scriptures we find God utilizing not so noble kinds, prostitutes, wild preachers, headstrong intellectuals, as well as both really miserable and quite ordinary people to speak God’s message and do the work. It is actually more the exception than the rule that the real servant of God fits the model of pious religiosity. Yves Congar’s remarkable journal of his years at Vatican II include his naming of “imbeciles” and “idiots” among other church officials. Yet he was able to give credit where credit was due, even to those who’s supported his being silenced, prohibited from writing, teaching and preaching. This unweildy “mix” of souls somehow did a great work of renewal and reform in the church, in his view.Yet we seem to be stuck with the dichotomy of “good” versus “bad” girls and boys when it comes to holiness. As I understand, God uses whoever God chooses and uses all kinds of people to do the word and the work, and God does choose some doozies. This would be a working definition of sainthood for me.

AD: I was greatly heartened to see your mention (p. 201) about how socioeconomic class often plays a significant role in parish life. This is something I think that has not really been acknowledged or well studied at all--or are there works out there I don't know about treating this question?

Studies like Putnam and Campbell’s American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us, Mark Chaves’ American Religion: Contemporary Trends and Diana Butler Bass’s Christianity for the Rest of Us: How the Neighborhood Church Is Transforming the Faith and Christianity After Religion all consider variables
such as socioeconomic class, race, gender, region/location, ethnicity among others in looking at contemporary religious existence and church life. Though in Christ none of these ought to be meaningful distinctions, they nevertheless have been and still are. Why is it, for example, that most of the creative efforts among the emerging church communities today not to mention the megachurch foundations back in the 80s and 90s were among well educated, professional people? Why is it that the voice of prophecy, both to condemn and heal, has come from the poor, the marginalized, the discriminated? Why is it that religious women have been the leaders of the struggle for social outreach, service and justice, both now and for the past several centuries?

AD: You quote Diana Butler Bass (p.204) about "a faith with no lines," doctrinal lines, moral lines, behavioral lines, etc. Is that really possible or even desirable? 

I think Butler Bass is not trying to do away with doctrine or for that matter, doctrinal divisions or disagreements we see and we have on ethical and other matters. Recently David Bentley Hart has rightfully exposed some of the doctrinal bickering to be intellectually dishonest. Along with Putnam and Campbell, many Pew surveys, the work of the Hartford Institute for Religious Research, she is arguing that the zeal for drawing lines and then demonizing those on the other sides has done enormous damage to religion in the general population. 

Consider the epithets hurled at those who support civil unions or marriage for same sex partners by “orthodox” Christians, likewise other “culture war” issues and the corrosive nature of proponents and opponents whether pro-life or pro-choice, for or against affordable health care, in the matter of “religious freedom” and alleged attacks on it and on particular denominations, the role and place of women in church and society—the list goes on and on. Butler Bass found intentional and spiritually healthy parishes in which the “red” and “blue” constituencies found it possible to be brothers and sisters in Christ despite political differences. Read Commonweal and America, for example, and you will find Catholic commentators anguishing over the politicization of the American church by some of its bishops. Being socially and politically engaged in the churches is one thing—Barth said to read the Bible and the newpapers together. From his joiurnals, Alexander Schmemann apparently also did this. Telling the faithful which is the party and candidates they must support, often on the basis of one or two issues, is in my mind unchurchly, and destructive. The religious right left a path of estrangement from the 70s onward.

AD: Is it possible that perhaps we misunderstand what "lines" mean in faith? I'm thinking here of both John Zizioulas and G.K. Chesterton, who, in similar ways, both insist that such dogmatic lines as the Church has had to draw (chiefly through the first seven ecumenical councils) should not be seen as restrictions or impositions, but instead as the "fence" marking out the "playground" within which we are free to roam? Lines, in other words, liberate rather than limit. What do you think?

Who was it--Fr. Sergius Bulgakov maybe--who said that there is a providential dogmatic minimalism in the tradition of the Church, and by this he was suggesting that if the historical record were carefully inspected, the documents read critically, we’d see what you propose, along with Zizioulas and Chesterton—that there is a lot of room for debate, opinion, commentary. Fundamentalist-oriented souls are freaked out by this, whether in the Eastern churches or in the West--legalists too. That there was the gospel, the eucharist and baptism before any recorded creed, before the evolution of the clerical caste, before the decisions of most ecumenical councils, before the writings of the Fathers—Gary Wills, Diarmaid Macculloch, Nicholas Afanasiev and plenty of other scholars point this out.

AD: Sergius Bulgakov says, of the Christological lines drawn by the Council of Chalcedon, that we know what the four famous "no's" are, but not the yeses: do we in the East focus on the negative lines (to exclude) rather than seeing them as helping us to say yes to God, to welcome all into His Commonwealth?

Fr. Bulgakov paid heavily for his theological creativity, faithfulness and courage. Today still he’s condemned by fellow Eastern Orthodox as a heretic, a modernist, an ecumenist, an innovationist and more. Western Christians, interestingly, from Aidan Nichols to John Milbank, among others, know better. Bulgakov and his colleagues in Paris at the St. Sergius Theological Institute, had been well trained in history, philosophy, literature, economics and knew that the Christian tradition was a “living” one, in the sense I just described above. Of course doctrine “developed,” contrary to what official teachers often claim in the Eastern church. Of course the Christological “solution” at Chalcedon was stated in the negative and needs elaboration in the positive. Like Soloviev, Bukharev, and others, Bulgakov in his studies sought to explore this, for example, what the “humanity of God” in the Incarnation meant, not only for us humans but for God! All of Bulgakov’s much maligned “sophiology” was an effort to reflect on the effects of God’s entering time and place in the Incarnation, God’s becoming part of creation. The best efforts in modern theology I think, have been along the same lines though not always employing the figure of Sophia/Divine Wisdom as Bulgakov did.

AD: Based on your research, and that of Diana Butler Bass, give us some idea of parish communities that "work," that are healthy and not toxic. What are some of their common characteristics?

It is no surprise that Butler Bass found that work, that are healthy and not toxic are one is which there is good liturgy, fellowship, study and outreach to those in need. You cannot turn these into programs because they are in fact like organs in our bodies that feed, cleanse, grow, and sustain—i.e. this is the breathing and work of the Spirit. The New Testament, often obliquely but nonetheless certainly tells us this was the life of the earliest Christian communities. Nicholas Afanasiev brilliantly depicts this in The Church of the Holy Spirit as well as in The Lord’s Supper that we are still working to publish in translation.) Kenneth Stevenson, Aidan Kavanagh, John Baldovin and Gordon Lathrop and Frank Senn are among others who also have done so. 

The organic analogy stands up, I think. You have a cohesive community when people want to be there, and they want to be together not just for the furth “sacrament of the coffee hour and for suppers and social gatherings but also for prayer, communion, singing, discussion, and for ministering to each other, to their neighbors and others around them in need. Most of my pastoral experience has been in suburban or ex-urban “regional parishes,” in which no one lives near the church building, everyone commutes, where members come from several counties and communities, ethnic and other church backgrounds. Liturgy is the primary reason for gathering but from this flow fellowship and all the rest including service to those in need. Take any one of these aspects of community life in isolation and you get some kind of mutation. But all of them together make for real community, the desire to learn and pray and serve.

AD: "The Church has left the building": tell us more about where you are going with this research into the demographic, geographic, and social changes in Christianity in North America now and in the years ahead. If you had a crystal ball and could describe the church here 50 years or 100 years hence, what do you think will be gone? What will be different? What will remain?

This has been quite a chat already but simply, while the church will remain among us, the buildings and other arrangements of parish life are centuries old, based on small villages, factory or mining towns, as well as homogenous ethnic groups and various social class locations. These and other demographic realities are vastly changed from what they were even as recently as the end of WWII. Simply, who we are, whom we marry, where we live because of where we work, and how we’ve been educated—all these have changed enormously—but our church buildings and attendant structures, our ability to completely sustain a pastor—we continue to act as though we can keep operating as we have for centuries. 

Because of our “Rust Bowl” location and history of Eastern European immigrant foundation and location near factories and mills, of the 60 or so parishes in my diocese of the OCA, a quarter, 15 have 100 members or more, 12 have 50-100 and 23 parishes have less than 50 members. We’ve always been a small church body, but data from other, much larger mainline denominations reflect the same trends—shrinking parishes, aging members, parishes becomes redundant or unsustainable. By “redundant.” I mean there are too many parishes of the same church body in now close traveling proximity—formerly each hamlet needed its own Episcopal, Presbyterian, Methodist or Catholic parish. Add to this the duplication of parishes for ethnic belonging, especially true for Catholics and Lutherans. 

The basic elements of parish life will remain in the future, but we may need pastors who have fulltime occupations alongside their pastoral roles. We may need smaller, simpler buildings. We likely will have small congregations with people from different places of residence, different ethnic and church backgrounds, bound together by their desire to pray, be with each other, study and work. Church membership as a “social” requirement or a familial obligation seems to be fading. There is a slow but steady rise in those with no belonging to a religious body, and in patterns of attendance at services we see that contributions have declined. Less than 20% of American worship each Sunday. Here and there you see where necessity has led a parish community into a different way of existing—with a part-time pastor or one with a fulltime job, with simplified council and activity schedules. Churches have adapted in the past, and were in homes long before basilicas. We need to trust the Spirit and not fear change.

Many thanks for your excellent questions and mostly for your patience in listening to my answers!

Diaries and More Diaries

As I noted before, diaries are a fascinating and fun thing to read. This year seems set to be a banner year for those diaries--and many other books besides--commemorating the 50th anniversary of the opening of the Second Vatican Council. First we had, of course, the sprawling, wonderful diaries of Yves Congar. I have not finished them by any means. I read portions as time allows, saving more for another time, much as one does not quaff but sips a Lagavulin or Talisker or Highland Park, any of which you would be welcome to send me at any time for any reason.

Now I have recently received from the publisher the following: Jaroslav Skira, trans., The Second Vatican Council Diaries of Met. Maxim Hermaniuk, C.Ss.R. (1960-1965) (Peeters-Leuven, 2012), 333pp. About this book the publisher tells us:

The Second Vatican Council diaries of the late Met. Maxim Hermaniuk, C.Ss.R., provide a captivating glimpse into the public and behind-the-scenes work of this Council Father. Hermaniuk was a graduate of the Catholic University of Louvain, and taught for a number of years in Belgium in the study houses of the Redemptorist order before being named the first Metropolitan of the Ukrainian (Eastern) Catholics in Canada. Hermaniuk was by far the most active of all the Ukrainian Catholic bishops at the Council. Much of his work was carried out through his membership in the Preconciliar Theological Commission and in the influential Secretariat for Christian Unity. Hermaniuk’s activities centred on his proposal to establish an Apostolic College, as well as his call to nullify the anathemas of 1054 between East and West. He was a strong advocate of ecumenical dialogue with other Christians, particularly with the Eastern Orthodox churches. His work also included the promotion of dialogue with other faiths. In reference to the Ukrainian Catholic Church, which was at the time severely persecuted in the Soviet Union, one sees his affirmations of the particularity and dignity of his Church, his promotion of religious liberty, and his condemnations of religious and political oppression. These diaries also reveal how the Ukrainian Catholic bishops responded to the pastoral needs of their faithful — in liturgy, catechesis, education, mission and ecclesial governance — and the call to renewal made by the Council. Finally, the diaries are unique since they are one of the very few accounts of the Council by an Eastern Catholic Council Father.

As with the Congar diaries, these are a wonderful read, best savored over days and weeks to enjoy so many fascinating insights into the council, the Catholic Church at mid-century, Catholic-Orthodox relations, and the politics of the Cold War (inter alia). Skira has written a helpful introduction to the diaries and brief biography of Hermaniuk, who was not as well known as Congar, but was a very substantial personality in his own right. Born in Ukraine, and educated in Belgium, Hermaniuk became an accomplished biblical scholar whose early works are still cited in the literature. He was also a driving figure behind the council's decree on ecumenism and the Eastern Churches, as well as the recovery of the notion of collegiality; some have dubbed Hermaniuk the "father of collegiality." He was, as I noted in my Orthodoxy and the Roman Papacy: Ut Unum Sint and the Prospects of East-West Unity, rather critical of post-conciliar developments that did not allow for the full flourishing of synodality in the Catholic Church and a dampening of collegial efforts. Late in life, in the 1990s, he became editor-in-chief of Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies, of which I am now editor.

Reading these diaries takes us back into an age that still seems almost surreal: when the Soviet Union existed. How long ago that now seems, but what a time of darkness and endless suffering it was for so many Christians, Ukrainian Catholics especially, whose entire church was officially banned by Stalin and driven underground, all her bishops imprisoned or killed, and many others besides. The head of the church, Metropolitan Joseph Slipyj was sent with the other bishops to the Gulag, but was released in 1963 thanks in part to Norman Cousins, John F. Kennedy, and Pope John XXIII. 

It seems clear, especially from Hermaniuk's tone, that he and much of the rest of the Ukrainian hierarchy were out of sorts and did not know how to relate to Slipyj. This is not news to those who know the history, but it is somewhat startling to see that again and again there is a stiffness and awkwardness to Hermaniuk's tone when Slipyj is mentioned. For those who know the history, the Ukrainian Catholic Church from the 1960s until 1991 was suppressed in Ukraine, but flourished in North America, Canada especially. Bishops in these latter territories often had no connection to bishops in the underground, and ended up de facto leading the whole church, which was often said to be in some ways a surrogate for a free state of Ukraine. I'll have more to say about these fascinating diaries as I continue to explore them. They are at once a reminder of a world that is now gone--thank God--and yet of a Church in many ways still with us. 

Mater Si, Magistra No?

One of Stanley Hauerwas's great questions, which I like sometimes to use with students, is: "Who taught you that you're supposed to 'think for yourself '?" The irony, of course, is that accepting and learning that idea required you to be under the tutelage of another, to be thinking not by your own lights but only in obeisance to that which another told you to do. As Hauerwas continues, there is no idea more mindlessly conformist to the lazy liberalism of late modernity than this notion that you should think for yourself. Most students, he says, do not have minds worth making up, which is why they need to be trained. And that is why he says his first task in the classroom is to help students "think just like me"! 

Hauerwas's point, in his characteristic swashbuckling style, is simply one that the great moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre made in more  detail in his 1990 Gifford Lectures, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopaedia, Genealogy, and Tradition, particularly the chapter on Augustine's emphasis on the teacher-student relationship as that of an apprentice of one under authority: the student must surrender to and trust the teacher's intent and ability to lead him to the truth, and only after the teacher has done so, shaping the student's capacity for reason and truth through virtue, will the student develop the ability to be an "independent reasoner."

For Christians, this job of learning how to think rightly about God has always been a central part of the task of the Church--whether through larger formal bodies like councils or through individual tutelage at the hands of a "theologian." In this latter regard, the wonderful story in Acts (8:26-40) about Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch illustrates this rather nicely. The eunuch, reading Isaiah, is confronted by Philip: "Do you understand what you are reading? And he said: 'Well, how could I, unless someone guides me?' And he invited Philip to come up and sit with him." 

The Church has taught in different ways, but most obviously and authoritatively in ecumenical councils, two of which, of course, gave us their eponymous creed. For the Christian East, such a council remains the place for doctrinal statements, and any statements outside such a council have usually been rejected on those grounds alone. This, of course, is the major objection some in the East have to the filioque and to modern Marian doctrines taught by the Latin Church. (On more strictly theological, rather than methodological, grounds, the filioque today is seen by all responsible theologians, East and West, as no longer church-dividing. As for the Theotokos, as I have argued elsewhere, Orthodox theology--at least in Bulgakov's hands--can and does accept the notion of an immaculate conception; the Assumption likewise poses no serious problems--apart, that is, from it being defined by one man, the pope of Rome, on his own initiative outside an ecumenical council.)

More recently, in the modern Catholic Church, the notion of "magisterium" has developed in the last two centuries, an idea whose history Yves Congar so helpfully traced out in a number of articles and discusses also at point in his wonderful diaries. This Magisterium has an unenviable task to play, especially if you consider the ecumenical implications. On the one hand, many in the Christian East regard the heterodoxy taught in too many Catholic institutions to be an enormous scandal; but on the other hand, they also regard a strongly centralized papacy, capable of intervening anywhere in the world, as a great scandal, too ("scandal" in the original Pauline sense of σκάνδαλον: cf. I Cor. 1:23, inter alia.). Still, for all that, most recent Orthodox commentators whom I have read have said that the worst scandal, for them, is indeed the lack of coherent orthodoxy in Catholic theology: the widespread confusion caused in part by shoddy catechesis, the willful dissension and open heresy, and the failure to hold people to account. 

Prior to the recent declaration from Rome about Margaret Farley's book, the most recent and high-profile case of a magisterial intervention was here in the United States involving Elizabeth Johnson of Fordham University. That case, which garnered wide media publicity at the time (as all such cases do: cf. those of Charles Curran, Hans Kung and others), has now come in for some analysis in a collection of articles edited by Richard Gaillardetz of Boston College: When the Magisterium Intervenes: The Magisterium and Theologians in Today's Church (Liturgical Press, 2012).

About this book the publisher tells us:

Catholicism has always recognized the need for a normative doctrinal teaching authority. Yet the character, scope, and exercise of that authority, what has come to be called the magisterium, has changed significantly over two millennia. This book gathers contributions from leading Catholic scholars in considering new factors that must be taken into account as we consider the church's official teaching authority in today’s postmodern context.

Noted experts in their fields cover many intriguing topics here, including the investigation of theologians that has occurred in recent years, canonical perspectives on such investigations, the role that women religious have played in these issues, the place of the media when problems arise, and possible future ways forward.

The book concludes with “The Elizabeth Johnson Dossier,” a selection of documents essential to understanding the case of Elizabeth Johnson, CSJ, whose work was recently the subject of severe criticism by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.

Contributors include Bradford Hinze, James Coriden, Colleen Mallon, Ormond Rush, Gerard Mannion, Anthony Godzieba, Vincent Miller, Richard Gaillardetz, and Elizabeth Johnson.