Since the late 1980s, a group of North American Jesuits has met every two years for a John Paul II Symposium, whose purpose has been to promote scholarly discussion of the Pope's teaching, both across the various academic disciplines and open to differing interpretations of the meaning and pastoral implications of his thought. In the past, these Symposia have taken up such themes as ecclesiology, or moral theology, or applied ethics, each of these as they are found in the thought of John Paul II. So in this volume too a broad theme is addressed under the heading of Creed and Culture and incorporating papers from two Symposia, one on ‘Priesthood, Religion and Culture in John Paul II’ held in 1998 and the second on ‘Pope John Paul II on Faith, Culture and the New Evangelization’ held in 2000.
If on the whole the particular topics addressed here express broadly North American concerns for America's own cultural and political identity and its place in the western tradition, there are nonetheless some rich pickings here and from people with international experience and education. It is clear that the contributors understand their work to be a way of sharing in the teaching office especially in the context of institutions of higher education, both Roman Catholic and non-denominational, and they address their topics with a not-uncritical generosity. There are papers that take up the problem of relations between Church and state, relations that are uniquely and differently framed in Canada and the United States, and that consider the nature of the Church's own ‘religious culture’. All of them are informed by an evangelical concern for the Church's mission in the contemporary world, being inspired by John Paul II's own sensitivity towards and respect for the plurality of cultures but also by his deeply felt critique of much that characterised contemporary western culture.
Two pieces are included by Cardinal Avery Dulles, the first of which speaks warmly of John Paul II as a theologian whose concern is for the transmission, enrichment and full expression of faith, and the second of which analyses his teachings on priesthood, inspired as they are by a desire to stir up the priestly vocation in the face of its cultured despisers and sometimes well-intentioned demythologisers. By firmly placing this vocation under both the general call of all the faithful to holiness of life and to prayer and under the special call to obedience of the evangelical counsels, the Pope's own personalism and thus his emphasis on the person of the priest, his style and his form of life, can be clearly seen. Such the Cardinal claims is ‘a high doctrine of priestly ministry’ that John Paul II uniquely understood to be consistent with, indeed demanded by, Vatican II (p. 207), and that is ‘admittedly countercultural in the American context’(p. 208). This is one of the places in the book where the connection between renewal of a prophetic witness within a particular culture and revitalisation of the Church itself are seen to be closely intertwined. Whether, however, this teaching can be heard in a redemptive register, when across the board it is given an overwhelmingly and exclusively moral interpretation, is a serious question throughout the contemporary world. For now it can be taken up with a vengeance in the prevailing climate of litigation, and with justification, it seems, from the very top.
There are two fine investigations of the relation of nature and grace by Peter Ryan, who enquires into the gratuity of the beatific vision, and by Stephen Fields, who attends to the problem of their mediation after the prolific aesthetic productivity of the Baroque. Both of these pieces are theologically astute and careful readings of the Pope's thought, the latter especially attuned to some of the more paradoxical moments in Fides et ratio. If Fields's call for an ‘ecclesial religion’ as a refashioned cultural synthesis of nature and grace ‘analogous to that of the Baroque’(p. 236) seems altogether ‘American’ in its language and its desire, it echoes nevertheless a concern for what has been lost and for what may yet be hoped for in many of the other pieces. An especially careful piece by Arthur Madigan on the evangelisation of American intellectual culture and the response to his paper by Christopher Cullen both exemplify this same concern. It is significant that after considering various strategic possibilities for engagement of faith in the academy, Madigan concludes with ‘a most delicate question…concerning the liturgy, especially the liturgy of the Eucharist’(p. 109, his emphasis). Expressly refusing an instrumental understanding of the Eucharist, he raises a most heart-felt question about what it is that people ‘come into contact with’ in Catholic worship.
The volume is filled out with papers on the vocation of the artist, on interreligious dialogue with a close and lengthy analysis of Dupuis's work but strangely without any reference to Dominus Iesus, and on the countercultural and prophetic character of John Paul II's thought in relation to liberalism, the new age and its movements, modernity and postmodernity. It is a pity that there is no piece specifically addressing critically the question of what culture is, not in its qualities but in its essence, and thus of why it presents itself as so problematic today. Closer attention to the philosophical tradition in which John Paul II was trained would have opened up this area of enquiry in a way that would help the reader understand what all the fuss is about, and would furthermore have disclosed some of the inherited philosophical assumptions with which contemporary theology seems burdened.
It should be said that the book is nicely produced in hardcover large format and is comprised of short-ish papers which are enjoyable and not difficult to read. Directed I would say at a predominately lay or non-specialist readership, the papers offer thoughtful ways for the general reader to become acquainted with the Pope's many writings as well as questions and insights that will stimulate further reflection and contribute to a deepening of faith's understanding. Most papers include good references to his published works and there are several indices.
