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  • When the Magisterium Intervenes: The Magisterium and Theologians in Today's Church ed. by Richard R. Gaillardetz
  • Massimo Faggioli
When the Magisterium Intervenes: The Magisterium and Theologians in Today's Church. Edited by Richard R. Gaillardetz. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2012. 295 pp. $29.95.

This book edited by Richard Gaillardetz has its origin in a three-year research project and it is the fruit of a remarkable "interest group" that gathered at the 2009, 2010, and 2011 conventions of the Catholic Theological Society of America. The book is divided into three parts. In the first part, "Magisterial Interventions," Bradford Hinze's essay shares a short but very informative history of "disciplining theologians," James Coriden demonstrates how confused and murky (or simply unknown) the rules and procedures are for this kind of intervention on theologians and Colleen Mallon explores the issue of religious women, a very important recent example of tension between magisterium and the church in the United States. In the second part of the book, "Theological and Contextual Reflections," Ormond Rush offers a case for a more pneumatological and less clerical-centered exercise of teaching authority in the church, while Gerard Mannion compares the role of teaching in today's church with the concept of "social imaginary." The new cultural and media environment in which the teaching authority of the church operates is illustrated in the essays by Anthony Godzieba and Vincent Miller. The third part of the book, "Recent Developments," consists of an "Elizabeth Johnson dossier" with documents dated between March and October 2011, dealing with the criticisms leveled by the Committee on Doctrine of the USCCB against her book, Quest for the Living God. The dossier is introduced by Gaillardetz and lists the statement of the USCCB committee, a response by Cardinal Donald Wuerl, observations by Elizabeth Johnson, and a response of the USCCB committee. Gaillardetz offers a concluding reflection on the Johnson case in terms of "key ecclesiological issues."

When the Magisterium Intervenes is both timely and important. The collected essays here present a strong case for a teaching [End Page 77] authority in the church that is expressed not only through the magisterium of the bishops, but also through "the living teaching office of the Church" - in the words of the Constitution on revelation of Vatican II, Dei Verbum paragraph ten, an understanding of the teaching of the church that does not exclude theologians. A book title featuring "magisterium" and "theologians" as different parts of the same church is somehow representative of one of the greatest challenges in Catholicism today, namely, the need to scale back the "pronounced magisterial activism" (in Gaillardetz's words) in the church, and to restore confidence and mutual trust between the magisterium and theologians. In a Catholic Church that teaches more, on more issues, and more often than in previous centuries, the relationship between bishops and theologians is particularly enlightening: the ecclesial landscape of the United States is a unique and particularly important battleground for the future of global Catholicism, and this is one more reason this book is important for all the Catholic Churches in the world.

Massimo Faggioli
University of St. Thomas (St. Paul, Minnesota)
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