From the Editor's Desk
Reading Theological Studies cover to cover affords the interrelating of theological discussions that might otherwise dwell in splendid isolation. I would like to call attention to discoveries that might come from drawing into conversation with each other topics treated in this issue of the journal that might otherwise seem unconnected. But first a confession and a note. The confession: The lineup of articles for each issue almost always is determined by which ones have exited the editorial pipeline and are queued for publication. This might seem the result of chance. I prefer to “baptize” it as the result of providence. The note: The lead article by Nicholas Denysenko represents a relatively rare event today in the world of academic theological publication: a work on Mary. Denysenko’s historical investigation illuminates the emergence in the church of devotion to Mary Theotokos, and the prominence of her role in salvation history.
The articles I want to interrelate are those by Eric Stoddart (on spirituality for citizenship and the marketplace), Jan Van Wiele (on the Catholic Church’s theology of religions), Bernard Laurent (on the Church’s relationship to Liberalism), and David DeCosse (on the Church’s social teaching on freedom of the press). Exclusion of the other articles from this exercise reflects merely the limitation of space.
Stoddart argues that, while citizenship and spirituality are “two very different discourses,” a bridge exists between them in the socioeconomic concept of Social Quality (achieving a balance between collective and individual responsibilities within a nation/state). All social/civic groups—including religious groups—must negotiate for recognition. The recent upsurge of violence over such “negotiations” need not happen. Stoddart contends that spirituality transcends both citizenship and religious identity and therefore religious differences. Thus the latter need not prove neuralgic and throw the project of social unity into turmoil. Working also from the other direction, he suggests that within the conceptual field of citizenship are resources that can enable denizens to cooperate in embracing a common social identity and peaceable community despite differences. In the struggle to create the European Union, policy makers discovered that imbalance between collective and individual responsibilities resulted from prioritizing monetary considerations to the detriment of human sociality. Spirituality can bridge differences and, in so doing, offer a language to interpret what can happen in the enactment of Social Quality as bearing “the hallmarks of the Spirit’s action toward the horizon of creation being brought to completion to the glory of God.” This, then, is “a standpoint that recognizes a transcendental theology of the person and a sacramental theology of history.”
Van Wiele’s exhaustive study of apologetic manuals shows that the Church has always maintained a posture, from at least Aquinas to the present, of “inclusivism” rather than “exclusivism” relative to other religions on the question of who is saved and how. As Aquinas argued, “The gentiles had neither explicit nor implicit faith in Christ, since they received no revelation. Therefore it seems that it was not necessary for the salvation of all to believe explicitly in the mystery of Christ” (ST 2–2, q. 2, a. 7). This attitude of inclusivism, therefore, supports Stoddart’s argument that spirituality transcends religious differences. Does such an argument relativize Christianity and Jesus Christ as the mediator of salvation? No, apologists say, because those who show their love of God by their love of neighbor implicitly belong to the Church (or to “the soul of the Church”), and this makes them beneficiaries of the one mediation of salvation by Jesus Christ.
Economist Bernard Laurent shows that, contrary to some common depictions of the Church’s criticism of Enlightenment thinking, the Church did not reject the majority of Enlightenment values but reserved its implacable opposition to what John Paul II called “economism,” that is, the subordination of the moral to the political sphere, more specifically to economic considerations. The popes from the early 19th century on have consistently condemned the individualistic, utilitarian, and materialistic anthropological foundations of economism. They have never bought the “trickle down” theory. The Church’s social doctrine has always advocated on behalf of the marginalized, but its style shifted with Leo XIII from negative moral invective to a political argument and a theory of power that advocates the establishment of a polis based on a Christian anthropology and on Thomas’s view that the church has a right to influence political power while leaving to the state direct responsibility for maintaining social order.
DeCosse’s article read side by side with those by Laurent and Stoddart is instructive. The three authors write broadly about church and state—Stoddart on the spirituality involved, Laurent on both the church and the state as political realities, and DeCosse on the margin between a political entity (in this case, the free press) and the church (in this case, the Catholic Church). He argues that the Church’s social teaching on freedom of the press “has an undeveloped political character.” He exposes church teaching from its extremely hostile attitude during the early 19th century, to Leo XIII’s accommodating but critically wary view, to Vatican II’s positive, if still cautious, agreement with certain Enlightenment thinkers that freedom of the press cannot be separated from freedom of thought and speech, and that such freedoms arise from the dignity of the human person and the common good. Post-Vatican II documents go on to support the media as “important instruments of accountability, turning the spotlight on incompetence, corruption, and abuses of trust” (Ethics in Communications no. 8). From such a side-by-side reading, a possible conclusion might be that, as Christianity is essentially incarnational, an authentic ecclesial spirituality requires church members to live the gospel in the marketplace and the polis, recognizing that the church overlays and penetrates political reality. Its members (who are also citizens), therefore, need not fear political entities such as freedom of the press but should fearlessly “baptize” them on behalf of the Church and call them to gospel freedom.
David G. Schultenover, S.J.
Editor in Chief