Festschrift for Fr Richard McBrien

Roman Catholics are celebrating the career of Fr. Richard McBrien, who taught theology at Notre Dame for more than 30 years, and where he was Chair of the theology department for 11 years.  

After 45 years of his award-winning weekly column (2,364 in all) titled “Essays in Theology”; after 20 books, including Catholicism, originally a two-volume synthesis of Catholic theology; after serving as president of the Catholic Theological Society of America and after being the recipient of its highest honor, the John Courtney Murray Award; after countless papers and speeches; after all this and more, McBrien will be honored April 27 at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana…

According to John Thiel, president of Catholic Theological Society of America and professor of religious studies at Fairfield University in Connecticut, “McBrien is the theologian who has done the most in the American church to teach the continuing heritage of the Second Vatican Council. Through his many books and essays ... [he] has prompted a couple of generations of post-Vatican II Catholics to reflect on nothing less than what it means to be the church.”

St. Joseph Sr. Elizabeth Johnson, professor of theology at Fordham University in New York, said of McBrien: “His love of the church and his knowledge of its history, both sinful and graced, led a whole generation to a greater critical appreciation of what it means to be Catholic. ...

Although some Roman Catholics don’t like him:

The name Richard McBrien is synonymous with the Second Vatican Council. It helps explain why, as Pope John Paul II’s and Pope Benedict XVI’s conservative episcopal appointments have taken firm hold, many diocesan newspapers have dropped his column. Once his weekly reflections appeared in 24 diocesan papers and in the bulletins of two dozen parishes. Today, only six diocesan newspapers and eight parishes publish McBrien, who is a Hartford, Conn., archdiocesan priest. (McBrien has written for NCR from at least the early 1970s. His weekly column has appeared in the paper and online since 2008.)

It bothers McBrien to see bishops dropping his writings. He makes this clear in conversations with friends. But the reason he is disturbed is only partly personal. He sees implications for the wider church and for freedom of expression in theology.

“My column might be viewed as a kind of barometer,” he said April 4 in a telephone interview. “I’ve not changed; the bishops have.” McBrien said he takes pride that what he says in private he repeats in public, and then went on to say, “If there are any reasons for the bad patch the church is now going through, it is the appointments to the hierarchy and the promotions within made by John Paul and Benedict. By and large, they have all been conservative. That’s why so many Catholics have left the church, are on extended vacations, or are demoralized or discouraged.”

By contrast, he pointed to Popes Pius XII, John XXIII and Paul VI who appointed, he said, conservatives, moderates and liberals. “A healthy mix,” he added.

Eugene Kennedy, longtime McBrien friend and another Vatican II evangelist, in an email called McBrien “an ironic hero of Vatican II and its teachings.”

“For reasons that remain unclear, Fr. McBrien has been judged by many bishops and those who would please bishops as a dissident and dangerous priest whose column was banished from many diocesan newspapers as if it were a modern version of Luther’s theses, too threatening to be nailed to their editorial pages,” Kennedy said. “In truth, and throughout years of unjustified and unjustifiable criticism, Fr. McBrien calmly returned to the lectern of his column every week to teach the faith in depth and in its application to social and political issues in an orthodox manner that respected his knowing readers and even the bishops who apparently did not read him before condemning him in a highly self-satisfied, let’s-play-this-safe fashion.”