Theology and Catholic Higher Education emphasizes theology’s present “identity crisis” as a university discipline. Postconciliar developments not only “emancipated theology from ecclesiastical control, but … also emancipated the Catholic Church from academic theology” (11). The church goes on but the resulting rift is a mortal threat to theology’s future. Faggioli challenges contemporary university theologians to recover their ecclesial role while they still can.
He weaves this book together from nine pieces published previously between 2018 and 2023 in English, Italian, and German in such journals such as Commonweal, La Croix International, NCR, Studia Patavina, and Herder Korrespondenz. A historical theologian of Vatican II, trained at Bologna, Faggioli frames his account in a narrative of three phases of Vatican II’s US reception: 1965–1978; 1978–1990; 1990–2000s (39). Following an introductory description of “The Great Displacement of Theology,” this book offers theologians a “wake up call” (7) in five chapters. Losing majors and core courses is not just “a marketing problem.” It’s “a product problem” (2).
Chapter 1, “Recognizing the Identity Crisis,” asks what remains of Vatican II and surveys five “interruptions” in the council’s US reception: (1) lack of continuing serious conciliar scholarship, (2) breakdown of relations between institution and academy (31), (3) lack of conciliar attention to the “polycrisis” (106) of sexual abuse, race, colonialism, and gender as discrediting its legacy, (4) differences in interpretations of the council’s significance in different regions of a global church, (5) the council’s role in decentering the church from Europe and the United States to the world. Faggioli suggests that opposition to Pope Francis and synodality comes from the decentered.
Chapter 2 considers university theology’s increasing distance from the “institutional church” (as if there could be a non-institutional church), with corresponding changes in their perceptions of Vatican II. This includes broken relations between bishops and theologians with the latter often disengaged from the life of the local church. In place of “conciliar agnosticism,” he calls for an “act of fidelity to the synodal church” and a theological reengagement with ecclesial tradition that is still honest and critical but also a “constructive engagement with the past” (55–56).
Chapter 3 urges “liberal Catholic theologians,” considering Francis’s “truce,” to “see as a thing of the past the previous three decades” (78) of conflict with the magisterium and to ask if they still see themselves with “an ecclesial role … in subdisciplines that are other than Catholic social thought” (79). He proposes three foci for a new “Land O’ Lakes Statement.” Ecclesiologically, do Catholic universities have a constitutional role in the church? Politically, is the politics of knowledge expressed in terms of autonomy in 1967 still adequate? Intellectually, are bishops the real threat to academic freedom? Or is it the corporate embrace of the “technocratic paradigm” (Laudato Sì, 107)Footnote 1 by university leaders?
Chapter 4, “De-Theologization and Catholic Higher Education,” calls the theological profession “to conversion” (105). Though not catechists, their work is incompatible with “anti-devotional animus” (24) and “holds within it a seriousness in the care of students in the totality of their humanity” (110). “Constant critical analysis cannot alone satisfy our existential hunger…” (110). Faggioli laments that few Catholic universities contribute to the intellectual formation of seminarians and the “apparent mutual indifference” between the synodal process and Catholic universities (86). Most crucial for the church is scholarly analysis of the sex-abuse crisis from various disciplinary perspectives in Catholic universities.
Chapter 5 expands on theology’s challenges in the church, the university, and technocratic society. With the “business turn” a greater threat than bishops, and research outsourced to other types of centers, academic theology’s “gladiatorial role” toward church authority will only make it “more self-referential, superfluous, and isolated” (119). The choice is not between reduction to “desperate ecclesiodicy” (133) and “ecclesioclastic” (128) narratives. Faggioli observes astutely that the less ecclesial theology became in the United States, it became “even less critical because of the supporting role it played in a system of cultural production” (142).
A brief sixth chapter sketches a way forward for academic theology: (1) reengagement with the institutional dimension of the church’s life, (2) a new coherent vision around Vatican II, (3) a new constructive engagement with the tradition of which Vatican II is a part. “A church without theology—without faith seeking understanding …—is at risk of becoming a body exposed to the political, social, and economic alliances of the day” (151).
Faggioli challenges theologians to ask where they stand when accusing tradition of racism, cultural genocide, and gender bias. Do they speak from some “false universalism” (128) above any tradition? Or are they calling the institution to be faithful to its own ideals?
This book is timely, important, and provocative. It proposes urgent questions and tasks for individual theologians, as well as departmental and faculty committees, along with a Vatican II–centered framework in which to consider them. Failure to face them will jeopardize academic theology’s future.
