Book Reviews -- By: Anonymous

Journal: Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society
Volume: JETS 32:4 (Dec 1989)
Article: Book Reviews
Author: Anonymous


Book Reviews

Contemporary Roman Catholicism: Crises and Challenges. By Rosemary Radford Ruether. Kansas City: Sheed and Ward, 1987, 81 pp., $5.95 paper. One Church, Many Cultures. By Joseph P. Fitzpatrick. Kansas City: Sheed and Ward, 1987, 205 pp., $8.95 paper.

E. Trueblood tells us that the changes in the Roman Catholic Church have been so fast since Vatican II that pundits now predict that the cardinals will come to Vatican III with their wives, and the pope will come with (you guessed it) her husband.

These two small works provide a glimpse into the changing Catholic Church that evangelicals would do well to view. The books are alike in attempting to put both changes and challenges in historical perspective, perhaps the most helpful aspect for readers of this Journal. The amount of historical information makes both books worth reading for anyone with an interest in contemporary Catholicism. With many of the value judgments, though, there will be considerable disagreement.

Fitzpatrick achieves a degree of objectivity as he surveys the impact of American culture on Catholicism and the challenges American Catholicism faces with a burgeoning Hispanic population. On the other hand Ruether is sometimes shrill, often strident, as she examines the problem of democratizing the Church, sexual issues and liberation theology.

While both authors deal with the problem of poverty and wealth in Latin America, neither really presents a substantive analysis of the fundamental issues involved. Fitzpatrick seems to favor liberation theology generally, although he presents a caveat as to how far the principle of absolute truth should yield to praxis. Naively he implies that the Marxist connection may be more appearance than substance. This reviewer would recommend the works of R. Nash, A. Nuñez and especially M. Novak, a Catholic who began by favoring liberation theology but now argues against it. These three give more adequate treatment to the issues at the base of the Latin American theology.

Ruether deals with three topics: (1) liberalism in the Church, by which she means replacing hierarchical control from Rome with local, democratic election of bishops; (2) equality for women, meaning ministry leadership including the priesthood, and related sexual issues such as birth control, abortion, homosexuality and celibacy—she speaks against the Vatican positions on all these; and (3) third-world issues focusing on liberation theology, where she argues for “regimes that sponsor grassroots democratic socialist methods of development” (p. 52). She underscores the usual rhetoric—e.g., locating the “roots of violence in the institutionalized violence of poverty and repression” (p. 53). She too is uncritical of ...

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