bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Noncombitant Immunity and St Thomas: carrying the debate further
Authors: Dombrowski Daniel A. 
Published: July 2007

In 1983 one of the most powerful nations in the world, the United States, fought one of the weakest, Grenada. Even in this lopsided affair, which lasted only a few days, twenty innocent people were killed when United States fire hit a mental hospital. The American people received this news with equanimity, in that they had become inured to the slaughter of innocent people, say by the Nazis against the Jews or by the Soviets against their own people, but also by their own government’s bombers at the end of World War Two or by its lieutenants at My Lai. Nuclear weapons notwithstanding, the issue of noncombatant immunity poses the greatest threat to the continued efficacy of the just war theory.At present James Turner Johnson, of Rutgers University, editor of The Journal of Religious Ethics, offers perhaps the most sophisticated treatments of just war theory, specifically Christian just war theory, and he astutely claims that a primary task of the Christian ethicist is to reintroduce acquaintance with what has been lost in Christian tradition (HT, 300). But what is the Christian tradition regarding noncombatant immunity? Obviously no answer to this question can afford to ignore St. Thomas Aquinas, but exactly was his position on this issue? The American Catholic Bishops and various Thomistic textbooks, acting as distilling agents for the various drops of Catholic tradition, imply that for St Thomas it is always wrong to intentionally kill noncombatants, which leaves open the possibility of killing some noncombatants if such killing is compatible with the proportionality dimension of the principle of double effect.
Mozart, Amadeus and Barth
Authors: Sherry Patrick 
Published: July 2007

In an article in The Times, published to coincide with the premiere of the film Amadeus early in 1985, the playwright Peter Shaffer said that his own apprehension of the divine was very largely aesthetic. What he meant is illustrated by a remark he quoted from his play Amadeus, on which the film was based: ‘The God I acknowledge lives, for example, in bars 34 to 44 of Mozart’s Masonic Funeral Music’, and indeed by the whole of that play. Shaffer’s statement and the view expressed in his work raise some profound theological questions, and provide an interesting point of comparison with a leading 20th-century theologian, Karl Barth, for whom Mozart ranked almost as a Father of the Church. I want to use the comparison between them to raise some questions about the role of the Holy Spirit in creation, particularly the Spirit’s connection with beauty, both in nature and in art.Shaffer and BarthShaffer’s theology is simple: for him Mozart was an instrument of the spirit of God. The remark which he quoted in his article is put into the mouth of Antonio Salieri, the Viennese court-composer, who is depicted by Shaffer as recognizing the spirit of God speaking through Mozart, but led by jealousy to attempt to block this spirit. Early on in Amadeus Salieri says ‘Dimly the music sounded from the salon above ... It seemed to me I had heard a voice of God—and that it issued from a creature whose own voice I had also heard—and it was the voice of an obscene child’ (p. 37).
A Covenant to the People
Authors: Phillips Anthony 
Published: July 2007

A sermon preached at the Judges Service held at Portsmouth Anglican Cathedral on Candlemas Day 1986, in the presence of the Lord Chancellor and attended by judges, magistrates and members of the legal profession.Says the prophet:
I have given you as a covenant to the people, a light to the nations. (Isaiah 42:6)How, though, did the man who first summoned Israel to this vocation understand her mission?Ironically, he was writing at a time when the very future of Israel’s identity as a people was most in jeopardy. Forty years before she had suffered humiliating defeat by the Babylonians. Her temple was destroyed and her leaders, together with the king, exiled in heathen Babylon. The first prophet of the exile, Ezekiel, had assured his fellow captives that if they remained faithful to their God they would be restored to their land. But nothing had happened and, as the generation which had gone into exile died off, it seemed that God had totally abandoned his people.Then suddenly a second prophet sounded his triumphant message: Comfort, comfort my people, says your God.Speak tenderly to Jerusalem,and cry to herthat her warfare is ended,that her iniquity is pardoned. (Is. 40 : 1—2))But he was not just content to proclaim Israel’s return to her land: he saw her as the agent by whom the whole world would be brought under God’s rule. Her restoration was not just to vindicate God’s people, to allow them fellowship with him irrespective of what went on elsewhere in his world. Rather it was to be a light to the nations.
Peace and the Clergy
Authors: Flessati Valerie 
Published: July 2007

Fifty years ago Sheed and Ward published a book called Peace and the Clergy. It was attributed anonymously to ‘a German priest’ because its author, Fr. Francis Stratmann OP, a Dominican, was the persecuted leader of the German Catholic peace movement, Friedensbund Deutscher Katholiken. With about 40,000 members, this was one of the first organisations to suffer the full force of Nazi oppression. It had been dissolved by the Nazis on 1 July, 1933.Stratmann was born in 1883 and ordained in 1912. After the First World War he had become a university chaplain in Berlin, and it was there that he had begun his struggle against National Socialism and for peace. His book, The Church and War, published in 1924, drew on Scripture, Catholic moral theology and papal pronouncements to challenge the justification of war. When, in 1936, Peace and the Clergy appeared, it was in its English translation. ‘A work of this kind cannot be published in Germany today’, the preface explained. Temporarily arrested by the Gestapo after the Friedensbund was banned, Stratmann survived the war by going into exile, first in Rome, and then to Venlo, in Holland, where he was working as chaplain to Jewish converts in the Sluis refugee camp when the Nazis invaded. Going into hiding, he was sheltered in the Flemish Dominican convent at Lint, in Belgium. In exile he kept a diary, later published, and, in addition to other books, wrote a five-volume work on The Saints and the State.
Theology in its Natural Environment: Issues, Implications and Directions
Authors: Killen David P. , Killen Patricia O'Connell 
Published: July 2007

This article was originally presented (in a modified form) to the continuing seminar on Pastoral Theology of the Catholic Theology Society of America at its 1985 annual meeting. There, and here, it is intended to be the starting point for a discussion and reflection on the nature and significance of a theological process which is playing an increasingly important role in the life of the Catholic Church and other Christian bodies. We refer to it as ‘theology in its natural environment’. It is also variously called indigenous theology, contextual theology, local theology, practical pastoral theology, or theological reflection. The variety of names and of methods all point to an essential quality of theology in its natural environment, its specificity or particularity in terms of a concrete community whose essential unit is the small group.Our experiential base for theology in its natural environment has centered in seven years of work with the Education for Ministry Program of the Bairnwick Center at the School of Theology of the University of the South, U.S.A. Currently enrolling nearly 6000 students in six countries, this is the largest program of theological education by extension in the English-speaking world. At its heart is a model and various methods for theological reflection that enable people to do theology in their daily lives with the ongoing critical support of a small group of six to ten peers.
Christianity and Cultures
Authors: Hill Edmund 
Published: July 2007

There is a paradox—one, no doubt, among many—about contemporary Euro-American culture. On the one hand it has developed a capacity for systematic, and critical, ‘self-consciousness’, unequalled by any other, or by its own ancestral cultures. This is exemplified by the development in the last hundred years, practically from zero, of the human sciences, in particular of psychology and sociology. In Academe, at any rate, the intellectual leaders of our culture live in a world of ‘meta’s’—‘metahistory’, ‘meta-science’, ‘meta-psychology’, and meta-sociology too, I shouldn’t wonder. A capacity and techniques for reflexive thinking have been carried much further than ever before. In the Christian dimension of our culture the ecumenical movement and above all the Second Vatican Council illustrate the same trend; the Church ‘self-consciously’ reflecting on what it means to be Church—and whether and how far it is succeeding in being Church. Ecclesiology (the Church reflecting on itself), is now a most important branch of theology. A hundred years ago, when the word ‘ecclesiology’ itself had a different meaning, the Church’s reflecting on itself was rarely more than one weapon in an arsenal of polemical apologetics.On the other hand Euro-Americans, in their cultural leaders and in the mass, still retain by and large the serene uncriticised assurance that their—or should I say ‘our’?—culture is normative, and that it is the only authentic realisation of human potentialities. It is, to be sure, not the only way of being human or organising human society, but it is certainly the best, and the only one that has a future.
Fidel y la Religión: Preaching before Princes
Authors: Alison James 
Published: July 2007

‘...It is absolutely right and just to state that the revolutionary movement must have a correct attitude towards the (religious) question, and avoid, at all costs, a doctrinal rhetoric which offends the religious sentiments of the people, including that of workers, peasants and the middle layers, and which would only serve to help the system of exploitation.’ Thus Fidel Castro, having offered an explanation as to why religion had been seen as the simple ideological ally of the forces of exploitation, answers Frei Betto’s suggestion that ‘one of the gravest errors of the Left in Latin America was to preach atheism in their work with the masses’.This is just one of many points covered in a book which is the result of twenty-three hours of interview between the Commander-in-Chief of the Cuban Revolution and a Brazilian Dominican friar known already to readers of New Blackfriars .Even had the contents been much less interesting than they are, their publication would already have been an historical occasion. Published in Havana in December 1985, the book sold 1,000,000 copies within four months (in an island of ten million people); it has been on the bestseller list in Brazil for a similar length of time, has gone through several editions in Mexico and other Latin American countries. It has been published in Spain, Italy and Poland. But for a few headlines such as ‘Convert Castro woos Church’ earlier this year, it has received scant attention in the British media. At the time of writing this—July—the only English-language edition is available in Australia and Oceania, but not in the U.S. or Great Britain.
Gender and Sacrifice
Authors: Edwards Adrian 
Published: July 2007

This is an attempt to see what some of the underlying assumptions in the current debates on the ordination of women in the Roman Catholic priesthood are. It seems to me that the debate is not getting anywhere because of the lack of common language of discussion. In such a quandary, the best thing to do would seem to be to look at the implicit assumptions of both sides. Perhaps we are really present at one of those night battles which both Newman and Matthew Arnold saw as characteristic of controversy in their own day, where neither side understands either the explicit arguments or the implicit assumptions of the other. If so, the best service an observer can do would be to see how these implicit assumptions plug into wider world-views.One of the major arguments for the ordination of women is that the Church is inevitably affected by the social structures and cultural values of the age it is living in. Therefore the supposed argument from tradition lacks weight. There were not women priests for the same reason that there were not women lawyers or engineers. Objection to the ordination of women is just another case of the way in which religion of any sort seems to become a bulwark of extreme conservatism in social ideas, perhaps because of religion’s sociological role in stabilizing society and maintaining identities over time. Another form of this argument is that the Church cannot afford to continue neglecting the very great pool of ministerial talent that undoubtedly exists among women.
Morality: between Law and Real‐life Needs
Authors: Häring Bernhard 
Published: July 2007

The investigation that culminated last July in a letter from the Vatican to Professor Curran, criticising the distinction made by him and many others between ‘infallible’ and ‘non-infallible’ Church teaching and initiating his removal from his post at the Catholic University of America, has been one of the most hotly discussed events to have happened in the modern American Catholic Church, has been written about throughout the Catholic world, and has troubled many theologians. We are publishing this translation of an article by Bernhard Haring, ‘Moral zwischen gesetz und Lebensnot’ (which appeared in the German Church magazine Christ in der Gegenwart in August), because its author, who taught Curran in Rome and in March accompanied him to the Vatican for ‘informal dialogue’, has such a close knowledge of this theologian’s thinking, which in some places has been misrepresented. The text has been updated where essential.Who is Charles Curran? And what was the ‘Curran affair’ about? Curran is a diocesan priest from the diocese of Rochester in the State of New York. He gained his Licentiate in Theology in Rome, at the Gregorian University, and took his Doctorate in Moral Theology in Rome, at the Academia Alfonsiana, where I taught for many years. I was one of his teachers but not his moderator. He wrote his doctoral thesis about Conscience and Intelligence according to Saint Alphonsus of Liguori (1696—1787). Like Alphonsus, but paying special attention to the human sciences, Curran set out to study conscience as challenged by the call to discipleship but as also influenced by clearly perceived values.
Divine Creation and Human Creativity
Authors: West Philip 
Published: July 2007

Like the man who gathered from the vicar’s sermon on sin that ‘he were agin it’, one gathers from reading the literature that ‘creativity’ is something to be approved of. Exactly what this creativity consists in, however, and how it relates to the concept of divine creation on the one hand, and the spheres of art and work on the other, is far from clear. It is the purpose of what follows to investigate these relationships.The terms ‘creation’ and ‘creativity’, as opposed to more mundane alternatives such as ‘making’ and ‘productivity’, seem to be used in many contexts because of the positive feel they carry over from the idea of divine creation. It is much harder, for example, to disagree with an activity called ‘wealth creation’ than to object to the same process labelled ‘making money’. ‘Creation’ and ‘creativity’ are thus not merely neutral, descriptive terms; they alter our attitude to the activities that they designate. To designate an activity ‘creative’ is—for good or ill—to legitimate it, not just to describe it.In some cases, however, the activity so legitimated is less obviously wholesome than is divine creation itself, and the designation then serves to conceal dubious aspects of human behaviour. In such a case, the use of language acquires ideological overtones. In what follows I shall examine three examples of the use of the idea of creation, or the use of the terms ‘creation’ and ‘creativity’, in recent literature. In the first two I shall detect tendencies towards such a descent into ideology. The examples chosen are deliberately extreme in order to make my point.
Quaestio Disputata‐Sex and Catholicism
Authors: Meynell Hugo 
Published: July 2007

TIME: the present.SCENE: A coffee-shop on the way to Piraeus. Two ladies, Clodia and Augustina, both in their early forties, sitting at adjacent tables. Clodia gets up and tentatively addresses Augustina; she sits down at Augustina’s table once she has introduced herself.Clodia: Excuse me—I seem to know you, though I can’t for the life of me remember from where and when.Augustina: My dear Clodia, how lovely to see you again! Let’s see—it’s over twenty years. Don’t you remember, we used to sit together whispering at the back of O.B.’s class on informal logic.Clodia: Oh yes, Augustina! Have you got a few minutes? I have, and would very much like to find out how life has been treating you. Don’t look pained so directly—surely the last twenty years haven’t been that bad for you!Augustina: Well, I doubt whether it has been as bad as the siege of Leningrad or the Warsaw ghetto. But if you sincerely ask me whether I have been in general happy during the time since we last met, and you expect an honest answer, that answer must be no... By the way, why was our esteemed lecturer called O.B.?Clodia: That I can remember. O.B. was short for Old Bedsocks. According to the more charitable, the reference was to the mustiness of his discourse. Those who sat in the front row said the mustiness also pertained to his person.Augustina: Well, never mind about O.B. What I remember most about the two of us at the time was how proud we were to be Catholics, in those days of obvious moral chaos in the world at large, and exuberant theological absurdity (as it seemed to us) among the non-Catholics, in the early sixties.
The Spanish Civil War 1936‐9: Catholicism's minority voice
Authors: MacKinnon Donald 
Published: July 2007

July 18th 1986 saw the fiftieth anniversary of the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, and the event has been widely commemorated both in writing and in exhibitions, both alike often focussing on the heroism of the men of the International Brigade who made the cause of the Spanish Republic their own. Less attention has been paid to the fact summarized by Professor Adrian Hastings in his recent History of English Christianity 1920—1985 that ‘probably at no other moment in 20th-century history has the English Catholic community, as such, taken up so strongly a political position, and to such effect’ (p. 325). The largely uncritical endorsement of the rebels’ claim to be engaged in the defence of the Catholic Church in Spain against a threat vaguely and frighteningly characterized as a ‘Communist-anarchist dictatorship’ was powerfully and passionately sustained, and the nationalists’ atrocities, for instance at Badajoz on August 15th 1936 or (at the hands of their German supporters) at Guernica in April 1937, either brushed aside or denied.Of course, the cause of this enthusiasm lay in the appalling actions that accompanied the revolutionary situation of July 1936. The lapse into chaos defined for the nationalists by the murder of the right-wing deputy Calvo Sotelo on July 13th inevitably increased the readiness to welcome the military pronunciamento long in preparation, by social groups feeling their future threatened by the quickening pace of social change. The moderate socialism of Prieto was rapidly being taken over by the radicalism of Largo Caballero, and the fundamental, seemingly intractable issue of agrarian reform tackled no longer by legislation but by spontaneous occupation of land long denied to the landless.
Aids and All Saints
Authors: Mason Stuart 
Published: July 2007

A sermon given by a London senior social worker on All Saints’ Day 1986, during the Spode House conference ‘The Catholic Church and Aids’.It is a happy chance for me to preach the sermon at Mass on All Saints’ Day, because twenty years ago today I became a Catholic. It is a doubly happy chance that I should do this at a conference on the Catholic Church and Aids, for when we think about the saints and sanctity we will arrive at a clearer idea of what, Aids being in our midst, we can do about it.For twenty years, each All Saints’ Day, I have heard homilies which have all had one theme in common—that today is the feast primarily of the unsung heroes of the Church—those countless men and women not singled out for special mention, through canonisation and special feast days, who are in heaven. As an antidote to the plaster statue school of piety which manages for me to make the whole idea of sanctity at once impossibly remote and unattractive, I can only applaud the general trend of All Saints’ homilies. (Who is really inspired by knowing that St. Aloysius, as a baby, refused his mother’s milk on Fridays?) Also it does us no harm to be reminded that we are all called to be saints, that our hallowing—so far from being some horrid obstacle course comprised solely of self-denial and martyrdom—is the great gift of life that God has in mind for all of us.
George Tyrrell and the Development of Doctrine
Authors: Nichols Aidan 
Published: July 2007

Early last summer, when he was in Peru, Cardinal Ratzinger disclosed that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith was preparing a document on the ‘central issues of the Modernist crisis’. He enumerated these as the nature of doctrine, principles in the interpreting of the Bible, and the role of philosophy in theology.If we want to get those thorny ‘central issues’ into historical perspective, how should we go about it? If one belongs to the Englishspeaking world, there is, arguably, no better way than to explore the thought of the Modernist George Tyrrell, who was born 125 years ago this year. However severe may be our final assessment of him, it is a fact that the questions Tyrrell raised were those of a theological genius, and we cannot ignore them or brush them away. To understand his thought we must trace its history—his ideas of what theology should be developed dramatically in the course of his life. And if we want to get to grips with what was really distinctive about his thought—where he was addressing himself to the ‘central issues’ which Cardinal Ratzinger has recently listed—then we must consider especially what he had to say about the notion of doctrinal development. His ideas of what theology should be formed, so to speak, a series of photographic lenses through which he peered at his favourite subject: the continuity and discontinuity of Christian tradition.