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Renewing Christianity: A History of Church Reform from Day One to Vatican II by Christopher M. Bellitto (review)
- The Thomist: A Speculative Quarterly Review
- The Catholic University of America Press
- Volume 66, Number 4, October 2002
- pp. 654-656
- 10.1353/tho.2002.0047
- Review
- Additional Information
654 BOOK REVIEWS neglect the more focused enquiries that the word used to stand for. For example, metaphysics in Gracia's broad sense is alive and well in analytic philosophy, but the study of being qua being is much less widely practiced. Acting as if it is just a reductionistic mistake to think that metaphysics is the study ofbeingqua being increases the chances that that inquiry will be forgotten. Ifthat were to happen, we would have fallen prey to another kind of reductionism. There is much more that could be said about this book. Its wealth of detail and breadth of learning, as well as the model of clarity and organization that it provides, make it a valuable contribution. Practitioners of current styles of metaphysics will find it widening, and practitioners of traditional metaphysics will find it helpful in seeing what current discussions have to do with traditional ones. It would also make useful reading for graduate students or advanced undergraduates. The Catholic University ofAmerica Washington, D.C. MICHAEL GoRMAN Renewing Christianity: A History ofChurch Reform from Day One to Vatican II. By CHRISTOPHER M. BELLITTO. Mahwah, N.J.: Paulist Press, 2001. Pp. 256. $18.95 (paper). ISBN 0-8091-4028-4. "Reform" is a loaded word. It implies "improvement," and not merely "change." C. S. Lewis warned that one cannot have progress without a fixed point toward which one is heading. He might have added that one cannot have reform without a fixed point to which one is returning. G. K. Chesterton ridiculed the "Reformation" in hisAutobiography: "I remember when rJohnston Stephen] was asked whether the Church was not corrupt and crying out for the Reformation, he answered with disconcerting warmth, 'Who can doubt it? How horrible must have been the corruption which could have tolerated for so long three Catholic priests like John Knox and John Calvin and Martin Luther.'" Christopher Bellino wades into these dangerous waters by trying to describe the reforms of the Christian Church in one readable volume. He has attempted to show that the reforms of Vatican II come in a long line of Church reforms, generated through the centuries both from above (through the hierarchy) and from below (through the Church's rank and file). The result is, I believe, commendable but unsatisfactory. The book is divided into five main chapters: the Patristic Period and the Carolingian Renaissance, the High Middle Ages, the period from Avignon to Trent, the modern age, and Vatican II. Such a division betrays the author's obvious enthusiasm for Vatican II, but he does not let this enthusiasm get the best ofhim. The book is also a reflection of the author's debt to his mentor (once BOOK REVIEWS 655 removed), Gerhart Ladner, whose definition ofreformguidesthe authorthrough the ages. Ladner held that reform was "the idea of free, intentional and ever perfectible, multiple, prolonged and ever repeated efforts by man to reassert and augment values pre-existent in the spiritual-material compound of the world." The author tries to put this definition into English and apply it to the Church. He does this in two ways. First, he situates reform in the context of general reforming movements, much as Herbert Grundmann did in his groundbreaking work, Religi.ous Movements in the Middle Ages, a book that Bellino curiously does not cite. This has the advantage of seeing an entire age as a whole, then seeing the details (be they heretical or orthodox movements) as expressions of the whole. Bellino puts this technique to good use in the chapters on the High Middle Ages and on the Reformation. Second, Bellino sees reform as personal and spiritual, with all of the reforms attempting to return to the original sources: Christ, the Scriptures, and the Fathers. He does not pass judgment on these reform movements, but is satisfied to describe them dispassionately, and he does this in a balanced way (except when generalizing about the Modernists), using the verylatest sources. By design this method tends to place all "reform" movements-regardless of their merits and demerits--on the same level. Waldenses, friars, mystics, Protestants, Puritans, High-Church Tractarians, and Modernists are all presented as if they are pieces of the same...