The episcopal silence and secrecy associated with the recent pedophilia scandal echoes a larger inability of the Catholic episcopal hierarchy to enter into open and honest dialogue about a wide range of sexual issues. For more than three decades the chasm between official teachings on sexuality and gender and the belief and/or practice of the majority of Catholic laity, clergy and theologians (and an unknown number of bishops) has been growing. Still, attempts to address or bridge this divide have met with a fourfold silence. It is a silence that has kept bishops from speaking their true minds, a silence sought by restricting, investigating and sanctioning theologians, a silence that renders pastors mute or covert on sexual matters, and a silence that ignores the experience and voices of women. Such a silence undermines magisterial authority and deprives Catholics of a useful and persuasive sexual ethic, while marginalizing those willing to speak out and demoralizing those who feel they cannot.

This paper examines the use of themes from J.R.R. Tolkien in the work of John Dunne, C.S.C. of the past two decades, but especially The Mystic Road of Love (1999) and Reading the Gospel (2000). Dunne has “culled” four sentences from Tolkien that express Dunne's own sense of being on a journey with God: “Things are meant. There are signs. The heart speaks. There is a way.” These sentences not only express Dunne's personal journey but also indicate where, according to Dunne, humanity is going in its collective journey with God. The paper concludes by shifting the focus from Dunne to Tolkien and asking how, if Dunne is close to right about Tolkien's significance, the conventional view of twentieth-century English literature and Tolkien's place in it would have to change.

The New Political Theology has always raised questions regarding the contrast implied by its qualification as “new.” The qualification “new” suggests a comparison resulting from an innovation, a departure. Precisely what comparison, is at stake? Various kinds of readings assume that the innovation of Metz's political theology is established in relation to Rahner's transcendental theology, in relation to left-Hegelian and neo-Marxist influences, or to the voices of Jewish testimony after Auschwitz. Taken alone, these lines of interpretation are valid yet insufficient, therefore potentially misleading in following the development of the New Political Theology. A different reading, therefore, proposes that Metz's New Political Theology is an effort to delegitimate and deliver an alternative to the antidemocratic and anti-Semitic political theology of Carl Schmitt. In diametric opposition to the violent identity politics of exclusion that defines Schmitt's decisionist political theology, the New Political Theology proposes an identity politics of difference, empowering responsibility for movements of justice and reconciliation in pluralistic societies through a deliberative social democracy oriented towards solidarity by the memory of the suffering of others.

The theological aesthetic framework of Hans Urs von Balthasar can be used to develop a “continuity” model for relating liturgy and the moral life: each supports the Christian's response of faith but in distinctive ways. The fundamental source of Christian faith is the graced encounter with Christ. For Balthasar, this encounter occurs narratively: our stories are invited into Christ's story where we discover a personal God calling us by name. Both liturgy and the moral life mediate the Christian's entrance into this salvific narrative; however, each does so by emphasizing a different aspect of it: liturgy underscores the eschatological fullness of the narrative; the moral life invites us into Christ's story at a point “between the times.” This different eschatological emphasis leads liturgy and the moral life to take on complementary roles in nurturing the Christian's encounter with Christ.

What does one say in a presidential address? First of all, and as always, it is good, and very good, for us to be here as we come together to renew the bonds of collegial respect and affection that make our Society unique. Looking back on the events of the past two years, however, “difficult” hardly begins to describe them. That short period saw the bishops of the United States acquiesce to Rome's demand for a juridical implementation of canon 812, and we have been wrestling both individually and as a society with the ramifications of that decision. Then, dwarfing all else, there burst upon us the towering horror of 9/11 with its awful images of fiery destruction and plummeting human bodies. Where that leaves us as a nation remains to be seen, but the specious practicality of Realpolitik seems to be the order of the day. An Afghan wedding party becomes “collateral damage,” while a spiral of violence sweeps over the Holy Land, engulfing even Bethlehem, birthplace of the Prince of Peace. At the same time the church that looks to him as its founder staggers through a sordid scandal of clerical sexual abuse and hierarchic cover up. We mourn and lament as even our heroes sink into the quagmire. On a personal level, this two-year term began with news that my father had fallen ill, and I attended his deathbed shortly before our board meeting last November. These have been a difficult two years.

Twenty-five years ago I happily compared Thomas Merton to Flannery O'Connor, finding in each of them an “urgency of vision,” and although I have not changed my mind about Merton's importance, I have had to fight my way through a substantially diminished admiration. Reading him a quarter of a century later was disturbing because, bluntly put, I did not like him as much as I did when I was younger. He seemed neurotic, over-published, and extraordinarily self-centered. Had I outgrown him? The arrogance of that question paralyzed me for a month even when I could find colleagues who agreed with me, but I decided to pursue it and began by making a list of things about Merton that bothered me now in ways I never even thought of a quarter of a century ago.