Essays in Theology

Over nine years ago one of the Catholic church's finest canon lawyers, Fr. James Provost, a professor at The Catholic University of America, published an exceedingly important article in America magazine, "What If the Pope Became Disabled?" (7/30/00).

He had pointed out that the Catholic church's Code of Canon Law makes no provision for the situation in which a pope becomes completely disabled, by lapsing into a coma, for example. The concern had become progressively acute as then-Pope John Paul II began to manifest signs of severe physical frailty.

At the end of May of this year I did a column on "The crisis in Anglicanism," prompted by an important address given in Houston, Texas, by the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord George Carey.

Anyone with a newspaper subscription or an Internet connection does not lack for opinions about the legislation on health-care reform working through Congress.

Judging from the comments, some readers thought last week's column on the "Year for Priests" unduly pessimistic about the present state of the Catholic Church. To the contrary, one of latest developments inside the Vatican only underscores the point of that column.

There was a front-page story in The Boston Globe last month signaling the return of perpetual eucharistic adoration to Boston.

In the 1940s a group of cloistered nuns began the practice of eucharistic adoration at St. Clement's Shrine, a former Universalist church that had been purchased by the archdiocese of Boston to accommodate the overflow crowds from St. Cecelia's parish in the Back Bay section of the city.

While most of the attention was focused on President Barack Obama's audience with Pope Benedict XVI on July 10, there was an important bit of news in a column published the day before in Commonweal's on-line edition.

The article, written by Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne, a Catholic layman who often addresses issues related to religion and politics, was entitled, "Does Obama have a friend in the Vatican?"

The first impression one has of Pope Benedict XVI's new social encyclical, Caritas in Veritate ("Charity in Truth"), is that it is long and dense -- too much so in both categories to expect the document to be read by a significant minority of Catholics, not to mention other Christians and non-Christians.

The encyclical is very much the work of someone with many years of careful research, writing, and teaching in his background. Few would question the opinion that Benedict XVI is the most gifted theologian ever to occupy the Chair of St. Peter.

Religious communities of women have been responsible for many of the good things that the Catholic church in the United States has achieved, both before and after the Second Vatican Council.

It is all the more distressing, therefore, that two Vatican agencies -- the Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith -- have targeted these communities and their principal leadership organization for a "visitation" and "doctrinal assessment" respectively.

I did not intend to comment on the Vatican's decision late last year to conduct a visitation of religious communities of women in the United States because I expected such a study, to be done under the auspices of the Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life, to come up more or less empty-handed as did the Vatican's earlier study of U.S. seminaries and theologates.

I may, of course, hear from some seminary quarters itemizing a few of the negative results of that previous study. I would welcome such input and would want to assure the sources in advance of complete confidentiality.