From System to Fragment and Back Again? Mapping

Kathleen Cahalan and Bryan Froehle, “A Developing Discipline: Protestant and Catholic Movements in Practical Theologies” in Claire E. Wolfteich, Editor, Invitation to Practical Theology: Catholic Voices and Visions (Mahwah: Paulist Press, 2014). As the formal discipline of practical theology developed largely in Protestant contexts, this chapter provides an overview of that history interwoven with attention to related developments in Catholic theology and ecclesial life. We will explore the prominence of moral theology as the framework for the training of clergy up to Vatican II; lay movements and the “see-judge-act” model of practical theological reflection; Catholic social teaching as an example of practical theology; the development of pastoral and liturgical theologies; liberation theologies; the rise of lay ecclesial ministry; and the lasting significance of Vatican II for Catholic theological reflection on practice. The chapter shows the need for more explicit attention to practical theology, a potentially vital resource, within the Catholic community and in the formation of its leaders. We also will highlight the growing importance of Catholic theological leaders in the current field.

From System to Fragment and Back Again? Mapping Catholic (Re)Sources for Practical Theology1 Catholicism offers many distinctive sources for the practical theological conversation. This paper discusses three particularly critical, interrelated ones. The first is the distinctive way in which Catholic theological thinking navigated a turn toward praxis and away from speculative systems around the time of the Second Vatican Council. The second is from Hispanic/Latino theology in the United States, particularly its long loving gaze toward fragments of popular religiosity. Together they point toward a third issue: the problematic medieval-era divorce between spirituality and theology. In this, practical theology offers fresh system-thinking – open rather than closed, able to work with fragments and embrace paradox. Overall, this practical theological archaeology offers outlines of a practical theology of tradition and “critical texts” in general, suggesting that such an approach be event-oriented and broadly correlational, dialogically linking theological and ecclesial discourse with a robust sense of praxis and power, narratives and networks. RECONNECTING TEORIA AND PRAXIS: THE COUNCIL AND THE THEOLOGICAL “SYSTEM” The Catholic tradition offers something distinctive to the practical theological conversation in part because it brings a different experience of the exercise of power and understanding of authority. Consider just one snapshot in time. From the nineteenth century through at least the Second Vatican Council, authority structures were engaged in a counter-modern restorationist project. This legitimized a highly reified form of speculative theology, neoscholasticism,2 really a kind of anti-practical theology, perfect to float above the fray and lend a theological timelessness. Yet even so, there were and remained thriving practice-andpresence based approaches stemming from the sacramental and incarnational heart of the tradition. Such insights have been expressed over the centuries in monastic practices and spiritual life, movements like the Franciscans and Beguines, popular religiosity, art and culture, and so on. In the era immediately preceding the Second Vatican Council, the ancient tension between the horizontality of religious life and the verticality of hierarchical

1 2

Perhaps the word should be “digging” instead of “mapping” in keeping with the archeology metaphor. And all the manuals typical of neo-scholasticism.

1

controls certainly helped fuel a dynamic quality to Catholic life that would not otherwise have been present. These distinctive sources of tension nourished and strengthened strong roots for what I will call a “practical theological” flowering in the early post-Vatican II period.3 This did not happen out of thin air or from simple absorption within a larger ecumenical framework, but rather had deep roots in the Catholic tradition and all its contradictions, enhanced through engagement with fresh new conversation partners encountered as things broadened and opened. What John XXIII had convened as a distinctively “pastoral” Council4 naturally turned to means of addressing the relationship of “theory” and “practice.” By the end of the Council, the neo-scholastic movement had effectively fallen like a house of cards, and Catholic theology had turned–though the centralizing power of the Roman Curia in no way disappeared and descendents of neo-scholasticism most certainly live on.5 The energy of the postwar decades before the Second Vatican Council was real, as was its counter-modern mentality. It marked the crest of the revitalization project for the religious orders6 – the Jesuits were re-started in 1814 after having been suppressed; the Dominicans re-born from the ashes of the French Revolution under Lacordaire;7 and countless apostolic communities of women religious were established.8 The forward dynamic of Church life, aimed toward recovery and re-adjustment in a time of bourgeois nationalism, inevitably aimed at lifting up the prestige and role of the papacy as an alternate ground on which a renewed ecclesial life could be built.9 The papacy repaid the favor by endorsing the I am thinking here of Heinz Schuster’s practical theological work and his teacher, Karl Rahner’s turn toward practical ecclesiological concerns, as well as the flowering of so-called “pastoral theology” in general, something that quickly moved beyond a clerical paradigm under the influence of “People of God” theologies. Rahner’s student Metz’s work in the 1960s, culminating in Fundamental Practical Theology is another example of this energy, as is Bernard Lonergan’s student Tracy and his understandings of practical theology as shown in Blessed Rage for Order. The explosion of Catholic theological engagement in catechetics, including the work of Johannes Hofinger (See Nijmegen Papers: Liturgy and Missions, 1965; Pastoral Life in the Power of the Spirit, 1982) and Tom Groome (Sharing Faith: A Comprehensive Approach to Religious Education and Pastoral Ministry: The Way of Shared Praxis, 1991 but the work has roots that go back to the 1970s, see Christian Religious Education: Sharing Our Story and Vision, 1980) and other pioneers is another example of the general Catholic practical theological effervescence of this period. This does not mean that the word “practical theology” was widely used, though Heinz Schuster certainly introduces it in the Concilium 1965 text. Regards of the work’s use, this sort of conversation was at the heart of the “theological updating” of the era. 4 John XXIII issued the apostolic constitution Humanae Salutis, calling for the council, on December 25, 1961. 5 I am thinking here of the Balthasarian move toward aesthetics – insofar as it can imply a kind of “frozen” essentialism, it contains an arguably similar dynamic. On the other hand, certain forms of Thomism that emerged from the neoscholastic engagement has led to the turn toward “virtue ethics” as well as McIntyrean anthropological approaches, both of which are eminently practice-sensitive. See James Keenan, Goodness and Rightness in Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae, 1992; Stephen Pope, The Ethics of Aquinas, 2002; Alisdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, 1981; Whose Justice? Which Rationality, 1988. 6 This has a certain irony, or rather points further to a certain staggeringly layered complexity. Within the Catholic Church, over-exercise of vertical sacred power is nothing new and has arguably itself created and reinforced a countervailing need for a balance, sometime elegantly, sometimes much less so, through horizontally oriented networks, which since antiquity has largely been through religious life, whether monks, mendicants, or whatever. Such spaces have throughout the history of the Catholic Church seemingly helped save it from itself. 7 Born in 1802, died in1861. 8 For insight into the cycle of religious orders, see Raymond Hostie, SJ, The Life and Death of Religious Orders, 1983. 9 The Jesuits, founded many centuries after Thomas, were closely tied to the centralizing project of the papacy, of which the nineteenth century Thomistic revival was a central piece. Consider the culminating fourth week of the Exercises. See Matthew Ashley, 3, 178, 185b, 191, which notes that the exercitant, classically the member of the Society of Jesus in training, is called to “see God in all things.” The vision is of a world one has already left (that is, moved to teoria) but in which one may engage in any aspect and encounter God’s goodness (thus one of second-hand practice, though practice nonetheless).9 This is a classic rendition of the spiritual-theological divide in its ambiguity: taken in one direction, a person could be comfortable with a highly speculative theology. Taken in another, this could be a profoundly practical approach. The seeds of this can be seen in post-conciliar approach to systematics, notably Rahner’s Foundations of Christian Faith (1978). See Karl Rahner, SJ, Foundations of Christian Faith: An Introduction to the Idea of Christianity, translated William V. Dych, New York: Seabury/Crossroad, 1978, page XV; Grundkurs des Glaubens, page 9. Cited in Fischer, The Foundations of Karl 3

2

intellectual program of neo-scholasticism, with its similarly centralizing, context-free dynamics.10 I am not trying to make a philosophical argument here, and the actual genealogy is much more complicated that all this. I simply want to contextualize the turn toward practice at the time of the Council. This involved both theological concepts and major shifts in power relations as well as ecclesial narratives.11 But there is more: up to the Second Vatican Council, Catholic backwardness – that is, its counter-modern “looking back”-ness – meant that it preserved a largely pre-modern communal instinct.12 This contrasts with the emerging U.S. practical theological conversation of the 1950s through 1980s, which was arguably a modernist and individualist engagement between pastoral care and psychology, as represented by the work of Boisen, Hiltner, and Gerkin.13 Even the term “living human document” suggests something natural for mid-twentieth century Protestant Christianity – a text-oriented, individualist approach.14 My point is not to critique the remarkable and central contributions made by those I named, and much of what I am saying actually dovetails with their work, but rather simply to observe that Catholic resources for the practical theological conversation came from different sources and dynamics, arguably one more pretext and less individualist, if at times quite absolutist.15 The Vatican II era was also nourished by the insights of the nouvelle theologie, such as the Dominicans Congar and Chenu and Jesuits de Lubac and Danielou, themselves also exploring this relationship between theory and practice.16 Unlike the neo-scholastics, they and others in the ressourcement movement moved from Aquinas to engage the first centuries and the Gospels – less systematizing, more focused on grace, and deeply engaged with context and the ordinary challenges of human existence.17

Rahner: A Paraphrase of the Foundations of Christian Faith, with Introduction and Indices, page ix. Rahner devotes the first portion of his work to grace (the action of the Holy Spirit) in the context of a theological anthropology, culminating in the fourth chapter: “The Human Person as the Event of God’s Free and Forgiving Self-Communication.” Human centered yet tied to the action of grace – pneumatological – it nonetheless starts from, and within, theoretical premises. The encyclical of John XXIII, Mater et Magistra, as well as critical texts of the Second Vatican Council, including both Lumen Gentium and Gaudium et Spes, radiate a kind of theological theory of God’s grace together with a specific focus on context or situation in which one should discern one’s proper action. See Flannery; see also http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_const_19641121_lumen-gentium_en.html and http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_cons_19651207_gaudium-et-spes_en.html. 10 Formalized in the wake of earlier, local developments, by Leo XIII’s 1879 encyclical, Aeterni Patris. 11 Ultimately religious life is about distinctive forms of practice – not so much different forms of “be-lieving” but certainly different ways of “be-loving.” See Diana Butler Bass. 2012. Christianity After Religion: The End of Church and the Birth of a New Spiritual Awakening. (New York: Harper Collins, 2012), page 117.The commitments of those in religious orders stem from formation in particular practices of community life and resulting understandings and spiritualities – charisms, in short. Thus, religious orders may be seen as practical theological conversations in themselves. The point is that religious, growing in presence in Church life in particular in this period, were instinctively about practice in the context of a brittle, inadequate theological theory. 12 Arguably the Second Vatican Council was a brief moment in which the Church engaged modernity and concluded with a post-modern framework. Joe Holland argues that Mater et Magistra and certainly the Council are best understood as engaging post-modern society more than anything else. 13 See Anton Boisen, Religion in Crisis and Custom: A Sociological and Psychological Study; Charles Gerkin, An Introduction to Pastoral Care (Nashville, Tennessee: Abingdon, 1997); and Seward Hiltner, Preface to Pastoral Theology (Nashville, Tennessee: Abingdon, 1979). Practical theology in this area was thus relatively deeply tied to bourgeois individualism and focused on psychology. 14 It is far richer than that, of course: there is also a tie, particularly in this era, with existentialism and works such as Tillich’s that focus on discipleship and the individual. The clearest analogue between such an existentialist move and Catholicism in this era might be with the turn toward personalism and personalist philosophy. 15 By “pretext,” I mean more oral or aural than purely word-based, more about the event and thus tradition (or entry into event or tradition, as a continuous or on-going series of events). The pre-text is about a community of practice, far less propositional than experiential or performative, much more a “both/and” than “either/or.” 16 Rooted in such sources as Maurice Blondel’s “philosophy of action” as described in his these (Action: A Critical Essay of Life and the Science of Practice, 1893). 17 See Hans Boersma, Nouvelle Theologie and Sacramental Ontology: A Return to Mystery, 2009.

3

In the mid-twentieth century, the Catholic intellectual world was very much alive, but its most dynamic bits tended to be outside of theology – not surprisingly, since theology was for the most part restricted to the neo-scholastic theological manuals and to the seminaries. In the more than 250 U.S. Catholic colleges and universities in 1960,18 students got a strong dose of Catholic intellectual life and often the equivalent of a second major in philosophy. Yet few had any courses in theology and precious little beyond a basic level. Instead, Catholic intellectuals in the universities, Catholic writers, Catholic activists, tended to turn to other, very practical yet philosophically rooted conversations. In the midtwentieth century, the Catholic intellectual world was very much alive, but its most dynamic bits tended to be outside of theology, such as Catholic Action. Though controlled by the hierarchy and a project of the popes, particularly in its Italian form, Catholic Action also fostered a flowering of Catholic thinking around – as the name might imply – action. In the northern European incarnation of Catholic Action – and both forms could be found in the United States – its praxis-oriented method of See-Judge-Act was enshrined as central from virtually the start.19 As a result, praxis was imported into Catholic theological thinking and ministerial formation, especially the lay ministry pastoral training that flourished within U.S. Catholic colleges and universities immediately after the Council.20 In the Catholic world, it was in such settings21 that the connection between practice and theory became discussed as “practical theology” in Catholic circles. Oftentimes, this was much closer to theologies of application, privileging experience in a fresh but naïve sort of way,22 building on a seejudge-act approach from Catholic social engagement yet bringing in little by way of deeper conversations in theology, in part due to separate institutional housing and power dynamics around academic theology. In any case, the link between theory and practice has a distinctive genealogy in a Catholic context. At the same time, there were rich theological links and transformations. From the start, they were deeply informed by Rahnerian23 theology, inspired too by the turn he made toward practical theology in the 1960s.24 But further developments happened quickly. Rahner’s student Metz argued for a starting point other than a theoretical reflection on grace, beginning instead with experience: the fact of suffering. This led in a direct line to Today there are about 228 Catholic colleges and universities on an undergraduate and graduate level. Almost all have roots in communities of men or women religious, rather than diocesan structures. Only 10 Catholic colleges and universities in the USA are sponsored by dioceses: Carroll College, Helena, Montana; University of St. Thomas, St. Paul, Minnesota; Loras College, Dubuque, Iowa; St. Ambrose, Davenport, Iowa; University of Dallas, Dallas, Texas; Gannon University, Erie, Pennsylvania; Sacred Heart University, Fairfield, Connecticut; Seton Hall, Newark, New Jersey; Thomas More, Crestview Hills, Kentucky; St. Thomas University, Miami, Florida. The University of San Diego and Mt. St. Mary’s, Emmitsburg, Maryland also have diocesan ties, but their story is more convoluted and relationship to their diocese less direct. 19 Often credited to Joseph Cardijn and called the Cardijn Method (see http://www.josephcardijn.com/cardijn---the-teacher), it can be traced to Aristotle and so is not surprising that it would originate in Catholic circles. It fed later developments in Liberation Theology and allied hermeneutical approaches. See Joe Holland and Peter Henriot, Social Analysis: Linking Faith and Justice, 1983. John XXIII’s 1961 encyclical, Mater et Magistra, enshrined the see-judge-act model at the heart of Catholic social teaching. 20 This was the founding era for programs such as Fordham’s Graduate School of Religion and Religious Education (1968). St. Thomas University in Miami traces its program to 1981, a time after the initial flowering of these programs. 21 Especially those that were part of AGPIM (Association of Graduate Programs in Ministry), where the notion of “practical theology” became central to self-understanding and collective definition. 22 The Whiteheads’ Method in Ministry is one such attempt – fresh and engaging, but also reflective of the times and limitations. 23 Rahner was within the school of Transcendental Thomism, in which his fellow Jesuit Bernard Lonergan could also be located. Lonergan brought a specifically Catholic voice to critical realism, an emerging approach to epistemology for those for whom neither naive realism not hyper-relativity makes sense. In the understanding of critical realism, structures outside oneself are not literal but neither are they fictions. In other words, statements of reality are reliable but of a provisional nature. 24 This is also that case because so many of the largest programs were at Jesuit schools like Fordham. 18

4

liberation theology.25 Such an approach is also deeply rooted in the hermeneutic circle and pastoral engagement. It in turn has informed much of Hispanic/Latino theology in the United States today, and it is to this that we now turn. THEOLOGIZING FRAGMENTS OF POPULAR RELIGION: LATINO/A THEOLOGY AS A CATHOLIC RESOURCE This turn to action and identity with God in history led to a turn toward the valuing of the lived religiosity of ordinary people, drinking from their own cultural wells.26 This changed the purpose of theology, as Gutierrez famously put it, from a concern with engaging the non-believer and instead toward addressing the non-person.27 Or as Sobrino later and problematically put it, “there is no salvation outside the poor.” These insights came to deeply influence the work of Latino/a theologians in the United States, theologians who often had connections to developments in Latin America as well as the European scene, and who in any case worked to theologically engage the reality of a people experiencing poverty, migration, and profound questions of identity.28 This fed an immense development of work engaging questions of popular religious practice as legitimate areas of theological inquiry, starting with Virgilio Elizondo,29 but also Orlando Espin,30 Ada Maria Isasi Diaz and many others.31 This marked a turn toward a renewed focus on the sensus fidei, the sense the individual believer has of the faith, and sensus fidelium, the community’s sense of the faith.32 Such a turn naturally feeds into “ordinary theology,” as developed by Jeff Astley and others in the British scene,33 or the work of Francesco Zaccaria, a student of Van der Ven’s, who explores popular religiosity within the Italian context.34 Van der Ven’s work as a whole may be understood as an extended meditation on such questions. As we have seen, these concerns are at the heart of Hispanic/Latino theology in the United States, though most who work in this area are allegedly systematic theologians – thus reflecting the identity in which most were formed as well as power relations in Catholic life.35

Ashley, page 189, “Metz himself has said that he find in liberation theology the most forceful and thoroughly going application of the insights and intentions of his own “post-idealist” paradigm. See Passion for God, Metz, “On the Way to a Post-Idealist Theology” pages 32, 34, 35 26 Gutierrez, Beber en su proprio pozo: En el itinerario espiritual de un pueblo, 1983. Published in English as We Drink From Our Own Wells: The Spiritual Journey of a People. 27 1986 during lectures at the University of Michigan. 28 This represents the turn to lo cotidiano, the everyday. For the importance of this insight from Latino theology for practical theology, I am grateful to the work of Claudia Herrera, a doctoral student in the Ph.D. program in practical theology at St. Thomas University, Miami. 29 For example, see his Galilean Journey: The Mexican-American Promise (Orbis, 2000). 30 The Faith of the People: Theological Reflections on Popular Catholicism (1997); Grace and Humanness: Theological Reflections Because of Culture (2007). 31 Miguel A. De La Torre and Edwin David Aponte. Introducing Latino/a Theologies (Maryknoll: Orbis, 2001), page 118. 32 See Ormond Rush, “Sensus Fidei: Faith ‘Making Sense’ of Revelation,” Theological Studies 62 (2001): 232. http://www.ts.mu.edu/content/62/62.2/62.2.1.pdf 33 Jeff Astley, Ordinary Theology: Looking, Listening, and Learning in Theology (Ashgate, 2003) 34 Francesco Zaccaria, Participation and Beliefs in Popular Religiosity (Leiden: Brill, 2009). 35 Arguably works like Terrence Tilley’s The Disciples’ Jesus: Christology as Reconciling Practice (2008) or Brad Hinze’s Practices of Dialogue in the Roman Catholic Church: Aims and Obstacles, Lessons and Laments (2006) can be seen as practical theological, even while their authors do not identify their work as such. Similarly, Daniel Groody, CSC, and his work on immigrant theology, or spirituality and justice, can be seen in a similar light. See Border of Death Valley of Life: An Immigrant Journey of Heart and Spirit, 2002 and Globalization, Spirituality, and Justice: Navigating the Path to Peace, 2007. 25

5

Engaging these various forms of embodied and emplaced theologies, seeing material religion as theological expression,36 leads to a challenge, something that takes us further into a critical opportunity for practical theology today. It also suggests another Catholic resource on offer. This draws from a focus on engaging lived spirituality in dialogue with theological theory. The theological theory can be ecclesiological, pneumatological, Christological, sacramental, and so on, usually some fruitful mix engaged correlationally, in the context of the ordinary, messy, everyday lived spirituality of people, globally.37 This suggests a fruitful, new sort of systems-seeing that might offer a means of getting past the centuries-old break between spirituality and theology, and it is to this that I now turn. TOWARDS AN OPEN SYSTEM RELINKING SPIRITUALITY AND THEOLOGY Practical theology engages practice, and spiritual practice is an obvious area of focus. But spiritual practice has been separated from theological study for all intents and purposes since the High Middle Ages. When theologians engage spirituality, the results can sometimes be quite impoverished. Blind spots seem to emerge. This may be traced to developments within scholasticism and its interpreters and successors through the Reformation, and even in part tensions between the controlled and often-times “male” domain of theological theory and seemingly uncontrollable -- and often problematized as “feminine” – forms of spiritual in-breaking.38 This harkens back to a divide in medieval scholasticism and the struggle between two equally orthodox but very different approaches to theology. I am thinking here of the medieval struggle between the Franciscans and Dominicans.39 One could perhaps make a case that had this debate gone the other way, resulting in predominance of a Franciscan view, the need for a practical theological conversation would never exist. But that of course did not happen, and a counterfactual argument ultimately cannot get very far. Franciscan theological understanding starts from participating in the cross, engaging the poor, and connecting with creation. It is instinctively spiritual and practical theological – those are the starting points. Alternative approaches tended to build a whole intellectual apparatus on philosophical systems and categories, ultimately often leaving the practical and the spiritual as secondary, on an entirely different plane.40 Yet throughout history and certainly over the past half century,41 the lived spiritual tradition has been strong in Catholicism. The experience of spiritual direction and spiritual See Manuel A. Vasquez, More Than Belief: A Materialist Theory of Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). Tom Bamat and Jean Paul Wiest, Popular Catholicism in a World Church: Seven Case Studies Inculturation, 1999, Orbis. Such a correlational approach almost implies some form of an analogical imagination. Note however, following Osmer and Wentzel van Huysteen, other related methods would be tranversal or transformational. 38 This also includes the experience of “life in the Spirit.” These movements have often threatened those called to guard orthodoxy, for obvious reasons. Consider also the approach Aquinas takes to the theological encyclopedia. See Robert Webber, The Divine Embrace: The Recovering of the Passionate Spiritual Life (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2006), 53 39 As Ingham notes: Both Bonaventure and Scotus emphasize the Incarnational and Christocentric nature of the Franciscan tradition. As Christian thinkers, their emphasis on the Incarnation balances the immanent perspective with the transcendent dimension of the divine will, expressed not primarily in moral commands, but in gracious generosity and initiative within salvation history. (Ingham, Rejoicing in the Lord, page 71) 40 In this sense, the Franciscan approach is the more embodied, the more Hebraic – and the more contemporary. It is certainly a better fit for the reality of our postmodern, globalized world. 41 During the Second Vatican Council, the debate between Augustinian and Thomist viewpoints were most salient. See Massimo Faggioli, Vatican II: The Battle for Meaning (Mahwah: Paulist, 2012), page 76. For the most part, these debates are more about how one builds the 36 37

6

retreats are as distinctively Catholic as having religious orders, and the two are related. Nonetheless, spirituality and theology continue to be on two different tracks, still passing in the night, paralleling and intersecting but not together in full relationship, certainly not integrated. The turn to practice around the time of the Council as well as profound developments in Latino/a theology – together representing a turn to the “mystical-political dimension of the Christian faith” – offers helpful resources for a conversation that might ultimately re-integrate spirituality as theology.42 This could be a step in a move toward a new sort of system – not a closed one, but an open one. 43 Such a system would be horizontal as well as vertical, contingent and contextual, network based. Important to say in a Catholic context, it would not reject magisterial teaching, so much as engage all sources of magisterial teaching, including both the sensus fidei and sensus fidelium.44 But what makes this sort of potential system open rather than closed, able to engage fragment and paradox, is its move from text to event.45 Such an approach would claim that revelation and thus scripture itself fundamentally transcend the text and point toward an event, rather than a parsed relationship between encoded theory and unencoded act. It would rather emphasize “interruption,” best interpreted in the light of a hermeneutic of space-time engagement rather than a spiraling or circular set of purely analytical reasoning.46 Perhaps this is why missiological language is and has been so helpful in this – it is about a “sending,” an “encountering” in time-space – not to mention context and culture, interculturality and interconfessionality. 47 Rather than a linguistic turn or philosophical theology, the most helpful approach might be a hermeneutic of narrative or meme,48 understood as action, as event. Missiological concerns, including interest in theologizing

apparatus, though there are certainly plenty of glimmers of other sorts of concerns. The starting point, as always, is the critical question. Does one start with philosophical, speculative abstractions or does one engage with the empirical practices of lived spiritual experience? Sometimes the starting point requires a full archeological or genealogical unearthing to truly understand. 42 Claude Geffre and Gustavo Gutierrez, The Mystical and Political Dimension of the Christian Faith. (New York: Herder and Herder, 1974), pages 15-16. Earlier, Geffre notes: “Because there can be no hiatus between faith and social practice, it is practice which will judge the truth of a theology” (page 11). 43 See Nicklaus Lehmann, Humberto Maturana for biological/loving connections, but also Pierre Bourdieu and Michel de Certeau. Less of a link here is the work of Juergen Habermas, which is ultimately more a closed than an open system. See Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of a Practice, Cambridge University Press, 72-9, Niklas Luhmann, Social Systems (California: Stanford University Press, 1995), 350; Walter Benjamin, Thesis on the Philosophy of History; “History is the object of a construction whose place is formed not in homogenous and empty time, but in that which is fulfilled by the here-and-now [Jetztzeit]. Maturana’s autopoiesis suggest that things should not be seen in terms of their functionality or physical properties but rather the relationship, circularity, or networks serve as a general criteria for the knowledge. This thus goes beyond Hegel, Descartes, Sassaure, and Habermas. The system is not of a text but of an event, not about communication but an action in itself. For the critical importance of the event for practical theology, I am grateful to the work of Jonathan Best, a doctoral student in the Ph.D. program in practical theology at St. Thomas University, Miami. 44 Ecclesiolatry turns church authority – magisterial teaching – into an idol, moving beyond the rightful privileging of the tradition that magisterial authority is to re-present. Consider, for example, the Code of Canon Law. Even in this case, there are always pastoral exceptions and the law is in service of the Gospel – of God – not the other way around. Further, the rightful subjection of the Code in its legislation and interpretation is ultimately to church authority, which in turn is back to the priority of shepherding, which is fundamental, not secondary. 45 By this I mean a turn from the merely verbal to the experiential that is deeply grounded in consciousness and pneumatological understanding. I do not mean a vulgar understanding of experience, but have in mind the claims developed in Bhaksar’s Philosophy of MetaReality: Creativity, Love and Freedom (2012). 46 I have in mind here a sense of communication. The missional is communicative. For notion of interruption, see Matthew Ashley, Interruption. 47 See the fresh work of Colleen Mallon, as well as the critical work of Bevans and Schreiter. 48 I have in mind the way memes are discussed in Jack Balkin, Cultural Software: A Theory of Ideology, 1998. See Also Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained, 1991.

7

the world church, is very much part of Catholic self-understanding, in part simply because its share is so global.49 Today, however beautiful speculative theological notions and their related ontologies and metaphysics may be, they nonetheless fail to connect with the persons and cultures of late modernity or post-modernity. Perhaps these Catholic sources can offer a means to reintegrate, resourcing a new focus on an ever-present, spiritually understood NOW, in a mystical sense of encounter with the Word beyond the text.50 Moving beyond the text, the perichoresis of the Trinity, the sacramentally, world-upending, unfolding action offers a way of re-linking the living-spiritual and the formal-theological, thus extending the practical theological conversation.51 CONCLUSION This bit of archeology, by no means complete, has drawn on the theological turn to practice around the Second Vatican Council, U.S. Latino/a theology’s turn toward popular religiosity, and the call to re-integrate theology with spirituality. Future work could re-read and thus re-appropriate critical theological texts related to these areas. Or it could also apply a systems-type approach to a specific topic or issue, re-reading such an issue as a kind of “text,” seeking new insights. Both possibilities offer an opportunity to engage from the standpoint of event – the self-disclosure of Godself in communities of practice. To paraphrase Anselm, theology would then become caritas quaerens intellectum, love seeking knowing.52 The Catholic contribution to practical theology challenges us to engage the text in ways that embrace the multiple layers of real struggles within a living tradition, including all the messiness entailed by power relations, identity formation, and community relating. Rather than proceeding one “living human document” at a time, the Catholic contribution might instead suggest the importance of entering into the event. In this sense, lectio divina teaches that it is ultimately not about the text but rather the act, the doing, in which we encounter God’s life and ours intertwined. This brings us to critical questions for our time, ones very appropriate for the contemporary practical theological conversation.53 Such an approach must move beyond any sort of closed system toward an open one, adequate for new realities. Practical theology is not simply about examining practices but is rather an approach to the entire theological enterprise, whether the words “practical theology” are used or not. Further, practical theology done well, in such a robust way, promises to in turn transform social science and other interpretive fields themselves. Such an integrated intellectualWithin mainline Protestant groups today such language is arguably more a specialist, bureaucratic language, a feature of the World Council of Churches and its work than of a specific denominational, theological-communal engagement. I have in mind here the kind of work around Edinburgh 2010 and contemporary conversations on World Christianity. The missiological conversation, tied to cultural analysis and social situational reflection, is a great strength for practical theology, as is it natural dialogue partner, ecclesiology. 50 Which is Christological, in the sense implied by the start of John’s Gospel. 51 See La Cugna, Cahalan. Also Ashley, Also Fischer/Rahner 52 Ashley, page 177 – give full quote! Also believe as be-love in Diana Butler Bass. 53 In my mind, this includes questions of pneumatology, ecclesiology, and sacramentality, offering a means for renewed exploration in these and so many other areas. We need a more adequate account of God’s action in the world, today. Rather than seeing God’s action as something in the past, or understood in past actions of God, the ongoing lessons of the resurrection/incarnation demand new practical theological work along these lines. 49

8

spiritual practice is itself a sacrament – and at any rate something for which Catholic sources certainly have something special54 to offer. Bibliography James Matthew Ashley, Interruptions: Mysticism, Politics, and Theology in the Work of Johann Baptist Metz (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1998). Jeff Astley, Ordinary Theology: Looking, Listening, and Learning in Theology. Explorations in Pastoral, Practical, and Empirical Theology (Aldergate: Ashgate, 2003). Tom Bamat and Jean Paul Wiest, Popular Catholicism in a World Church: Seven Case Studies in Inculturation (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1999). Diana Butler Bass. 2012. Christianity After Religion: The End of Church and the Birth of a New Spiritual Awakening. (New York: Harper Collins, 2012). Stephen B. Bevans, SVD, An Introduction to Theology in Global Perspective (Maryknoll: Orbis, 2009). Anton Boisen, Religion in Crisis and Custom: A Sociological and Psychological Study. Lynn Bridgers, “Roman Catholicism,” pages 567-586 in Bonnie Miller-McLemore, The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Practical Theology (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012). Kathleen A. Cahalan. “Locating Practical Theology in Catholic Theological Discourse and Practice.” International Journal of Practical Theology, 15(1), 1-21. Kathleen A. Cahalan, Introducing the Practice of Ministry (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2010). Miguel A. De La Torre and Edwin David Aponte. Introducing Latino/a Theologies (Maryknoll: Orbis, 2001). Massimo Faggioli, Vatican II: The Battle for Meaning (Mahwah: Paulist, 2012). Mark F. Fischer, The Foundations of Karl Rahner: A Paraphrase of the Foundations of Christian Faith, with Introduction and Indices (New York: Crossroad, 2005). Claude Geffre and Gustavo Gutierrez, The Mystical and Political Dimension of the Christian Faith. (New York: Herder and Herder, 1974) Charles Gerkin, An Introduction to Pastoral Care (Nashville, Tennessee: Abingdon, 1997). Seward Hiltner, Preface to Pastoral Theology (Nashville, Tennessee: Abingdon, 1979).

54

By “special,” I really mean “strangeness,” in the sense of Levinas. See Beaudoin, http://www.rockandtheology.com/?p=3878

9

Mary Beth Ingham, CSJ, Scotus for Dunces: An Introduction to the Subtle Doctor (Saint Bonaventure, New York: Franciscan Institute Publications, 2003). Mary Beth Ingham, CSJ, Rejoicing in the Works of the Lord: Beauty in the Franciscan Tradition (Saint Bonaventure, New York: Franciscan University Press, 2009). Catherine Mowry LaCugna, God For Us: The Trinity and Christian Life (New York: HarperOne, 1993). Colleen Mary Mallon, OP, Traditioning Disciples: The Contributions of Cultural Anthropology to Ecclesial Identity (Eugene, Oregon: Pickwick, 2010). Karl Rahner, SJ and Heinz Schuster, eds., The Pastoral Mission of the Church. Concilium: Theology in the Age of Renewal, Volume 3 (Glen Rock, New Jersey: Paulist Press, 1965). Karl Rahner, SJ. Theological Investigations, IX, 1965-1967 (New York: Herder and Herder). Thomas P. Rausch, SJ, Pope Benedict XVI: An Introduction to His Theological Vision (Mahwah, New Jersey: Paulist Press, 2009). Elise Saggau, OSF, ed. The Franciscan Intellectual Tradition (St. Bonaventure: Franciscan Institute Publications, 2001). Robert J. Schreiter, CPPS, Constructing Local Theologies (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1985). Heinz Streib, Religion Institute and Outside Traditional Institutions (Leiden: Brill, 2007). BT83.53 .I58 2004 David Tracy, Blessed Rage for Order (New York: Seabury Press, 1975). Manuel A. Vesquez, More Than Belief: A Materialist Theory of Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). Robert Webber, The Divine Embrace: The Recovering of the Passionate Spiritual Life (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2006). Frank Whaling, ed., John and Charles Wesley: Selected Prayers, Hymns, Notes, Sermons, Letters and Treatises (Mahwah, New Jersey: Paulist Press, 1981).

10