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Though the Catholic Church has become more mindful of the role that mental illness, especially depression, often plays in suicide, this greater awareness needs development so that Catholic theology can de-stigmatize suicidal people without normalizing suicide. To this end, the article draws upon recent psychological work on suicide to highlight the deep suffering of suicidal people and to indicate that they are, generally, victims of severe mental illness. Furthermore, attention is drawn to a group who is especially stigmatized: those who have already died by suicide. In response, Johann Baptist Metz’s emphasis on anamnestic solidarity with the dead provides an important corrective to this forgetting. Lastly, this revised understanding of suicide decedents helps Catholics develop the doctrine of the communion of saints for today.

Nostra Aetate initiated a revolutionary shift in Catholic theology, opposing supersessionism and affirming that Jews remain in a salvific covenantal relationship with God. However, this shift raises for Catholics a deep tension regarding the value of this “Old Covenant” vis-à-vis the “New Covenant,” as this article illustrates using the statements of Walter Kasper and The Gifts and the Calling of God Are Irrevocable. While speaking positively about the Old Covenant, both deem it essential to maintain the superiority of the New Covenant as universalistic, fulfilling the promises in the Old Covenant and transcending its limitations. The author demonstrates how they seek to reduce this tension by characterizing the two covenants as good and better covenants, rather than as bad and good covenants, thereby avoiding a lapse into supersessionism.

The author addresses the doctrinal affirmations of the universality of God’s salvific will and the necessity of the church for salvation. Jacques Dupuis and Gavin D’Costa propose distinct ways of reconciling them; comparing their proposals illustrates the challenge that contemporary Catholic theology faces in its current context of religious pluralism. The author appeals to Bernard Lonergan’s work to suggest an alternative that both anticipates the presence of God outside the church and simultaneously affirms the necessity of the church for the salvation of all.

The author asks whether the criteria for Catholic theology presented by the International Theological Commission's Theology Today (2011) are meant to constitute “walls” that seal out or “windows” that open to the rich reality of God's dialogue with humanity through creation and history. Careful exegesis leads the author to conclude that the document, while including restrictive paragraphs, intends to open up perspectives for a legitimate plurality of theologies within the living tradition of the Catholic Church. The article ends with a nuanced evaluation and highlighting of the document's strong and weak points.

Conventional Catholic interpretations of Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventure often pose them as dialectical opposites representing two distinct theological traditions. This article calls these interpretations into question, and, after offering an alternative sketch of each thinker's theological accomplishment, argues for a Catholic theology of history and tradition that can admit plurality without resorting to binary opposition.

The author mines William Spohn's notion of the grace of indirection as it relates to the potential impact of the arts on the moral imagination. The article moves beyond exposition of Spohn's idea, first, by showing how the grace of indirection is a concept with deep connections to long-standing Christian convictions about God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit; and second, by offering an extended example of what the grace of indirection might look like relative to a contemporary short story by Tim Gautreaux.

How can Christian hope transform ecclesial life and in turn illumine contemporary culture? The articles by Richard Lennan and Dominic Doyle address this question from different perspectives. Lennan develops and spells out the implications of an ecclesiology based on the church as a sacrament of hope. Doyle examines the nature of hope with particular attention to Aquinas's view, finding resources therein to reflect critically about the clergy sexual abuse crisis, the "trauma of modernity," and contemporary ecclesiology's focus on the local church. Responding to these articles, James McEvoy reflects on their authors' views of hope in order to address an issue raised by Doyle. Earlier versions of Lennan's and Doyle's articles were presented at the 2010 annual meeting of the Catholic Theological Society of America at a session entitled "Hope: The Church's Prophetic Challenge. ".

Catholic emphasis on Mary's role in the Christian story of salvation and on the unique privileges given her by God to accomplish that salvation for humanity continues to trouble some Protestants and seems to distract from the Church's central preaching. This article attempts to show the continuity between Catholic and Orthodox liturgical and theological traditions on Mary, despite apparent differences in terminology and image, and draws on the works of Sergei Bulgakov and Karl Rahner to reflect on the fundamental meaning of Mary for both Eastern and Western forms of Christian faith.

Avery Dulles' postconciliar theology must be placed historically in the broad context of what he called postcriticism. His models approach to theology, moreover, attempted to address the theological pluralism of the postconciliar era in a way that contributed to the unity of the faith. His nearly lifelong Ignatian commitment to thinking with the Church, his openness to development, his ecumenical stance, and his respect for diverse theological constructions made him a major representative of postconciliar currents in Catholic theology.

Fruitful interreligious encounter is the meeting of human beings, and calls for a metaphysics, a common humanum in order to proceed to dialogue. Rahner's transcendental method could serve as an important tool for entering into interreligious encounter. It offers a metaphysics that in its apophatic aspects has resonances with some forms of postmetaphysical thought, particularly the notion of gift. The author here pursues this idea but only after considering some critiques of Rahner's transcendental project.

The historiography of Modernism has concentrated on the doctrinal issues raised by partisans of reform and their condemnation, to the relative neglect of social and political aspects. Where such connections have been made the linkage has often been extrinsic: those involved in social and political reform subscribed to theses articulated by historical critics and critical philosophers. The connections, however, run deeper, reaching into issues surrounding authority and autonomy, ecclesiastical control of not only Catholic intellectual life but also Catholic political and social activity. This article revisits the Oath against Modernism and brings these connections into sharper resolution.

For Bernard Lonergan and Karl Rahner, grace is a reality that can be not only professed in worship or inferred through metaphysical analysis but also experienced in the depths of consciousness. Here the author uses a Lonerganian hermeneutic to study the evolution of the theology of grace from the writings of Augustine through the Scholastic work of Aquinas to the theology of Lonergan. His analysis demonstrates that the transition to an account that expresses grace in terms of human experience represents a development in the Catholic theology of grace.

The article presents interventions by certain expert-consultants (periti) just before and during Vatican II's opening weeks in 1962. Discovering mediocrity in passages of the prepared schemas on God's revelation, Joseph Ratzinger, Pieter Smulders, Karl Rahner, and Jean Daniélou formulated criticisms and framed alternatives that this article reviews. In time, several key conceptions of their alternative texts, such as the soteriological centering of revelation, found a place in Dei Verbum nos. 1–6.

Recent provocative reinterpretations of Karl Rahner's theology illustrate the hermeneutical challenge of retrieving his achievement for a new era. The spectrum of positions is exemplified by Karen Kilby, Patrick Burke, and Philip Endean. The essay proposes an alternative interpretive scheme attentive to Rahner's metaphoric logic.

More detailed than preceding social encyclicals, Pope Benedict XVI's Caritas in veritate appears to supply a theological foundation for the Catholic Church's social doctrine. The article argues that the theological anthropology contained in the encyclical (which leads to a notable revaluation of the role of grace) complements Joseph Ratzinger's life-long reflections on the relationship between faith and reason, and provides a key to understanding choices the pope makes in his effort to offer a reliable Catholic orientation in a rapidly changing world.

The author argues that the intention of the theological commission in proposing the change from “is” to “subsists in” was no longer to affirm full identity between the church of Christ and the Catholic Church, for the reason that such full identity contradicted the tradition followed by the popes and Western councils of recognizing the separated Eastern communities as churches. He supports his case with two statements by Joseph Ratzinger: one made as a professor of theology, the other as cardinal prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

The author argues that the Christian historical realism of Ignacio Ellacuría and the “saving history” Christology of Jon Sobrino form a post-Vatican II contextual theology unified by two fundamental claims: the historical reality of Jesus is the real sign of the Word made flesh, and the analogatum princeps of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth is to be found today among the “crucified peoples” victimized by various forms of oppression around the globe. Sobrino and Ellacuría are situated as important interpreters of Rahner, Ignatius Loyola, Augustine, Medellín, and key European phenomenologists.

Theological ethicists around the world are turning toward history to comment on the method and arguments of earlier authoritative voices. The intent of this turn to the tradition is precisely to liberate theologians so as to find grounds for Roman Catholics to enter into greater dialogue with others around the world. To examine this development, the Note reviews recent research in narrative, responsibility, and virtue ethics, as well as related works on Christology and ethics and on globalization.

The authors, replying to criticisms of the Catholic Church's teaching on homosexual acts presented by Todd Salzman and Michael Lawler in an article in this journal, argue that marriage is a multi-leveled personal union, essentially including the bodily as well as the emotional and volitional levels of the human self. Only sexual acts between a man and a woman who have consented to the kind of union that would be fulfilled by conceiving, bearing, and raising children together (that is, marriage) can consummate or actualize marital communion.

The principle of subsidiarity has a parallel in the Dutch Calvinist tradition of Abraham Kuyper. Seeking to create space for intermediate entities between the state and the individual, Kuyper developed the idea of “sphere-sovereignty” to express this. While the two principles are parallel, there are differences regarding the nature of each sphere, their interrelationships, and the role of the institutional church. Nevertheless, the combined strengths of these principles are instructive for those seeking to witness to Christian faith in all areas of contemporary, pluralistic societies.

The author accepts two of Charles Hefling's corrections, but the second in a qualified fashion: Lonergan's appeal to love as a starting point for the psychological analogy is open to an analogy based in religious love. Christiaan Jacobs-Vandegeer's article in the March 2007 issue of this journal highlights the distinction of sanctifying grace and charity. The author here amplifies that distinction more than in his previous article. Neil Ormerod's theological arguments for the distinction and the hypothesis based on it are warmly welcomed.

In response to a recent article by Robert Doran, this article compares and contrasts the systematic coherence of Karl Rahner and Bernard Lonergan—how they interrelate the divine mysteries of the Trinity, incarnation, grace, and beatific vision. It argues that on all grounds Lonergan's position provides a more satisfying response to relating these mysteries to one another than does Rahner's. It also examines the possible origins of Lonergan's four-point hypothesis.

Because of its commitment to the Incarnation and the Resurrection, Catholic theology is impelled to deal productively with the issues of embodiment and particularity. These have been noticeably absent in postmodern discussions of religious experience, which tend to be abstract, “dis-embodied,” and dismissive of specific religious traditions. This symposium continues the important intervention of Catholic fundamental theology in these discussions, so that theology might respond more adequately to the embodied religious experience of Christians and the sacramental imagination of the Catholic tradition. The authors argue for the necessary employment of “incarnation” as a fundamental hermeneutical strategy, and apply it to issues in eschatology, theological anthropology, interreligious dialogue, and theological epistemology.

[In some recent prominent studies, Josef Pieper has merited only brief attention. He is presented as one who accommodated Roman Catholic theology and philosophy with National Socialism in the early 1930s. Alongside such thinkers as Michael Schmaus and Karl Eschweiler, Pieper's name appears as evidence for the Catholic pursuit of rapprochement with the Nazi State. The writings of Pieper, however, contain considerable evidence to maintain a contrary reading of his involvement with the National Socialists. He may in fact be understood as a man who said no to the spirit of his age.]

[Theologians have discussed for a century and a half the ecclesial institution of the ordinary universal magisterium of bishops when it functions apart from an ecumenical council. Teaching by bishops from the entire world involves the activity and identity of the bishop and his relationship to other Christians who ponder and teach the faith. Analysis of how grace impacts the bishops in their scattered college has been little developed in theology as well as in the psychology and social interaction of the teaching. The author here looks at this activity of an episcopal teacher within the worldwide college as it flows from human nature and from divine grace.]

[Convictions about human personhood, rooted in an analysis of women's experience, are often foundational to Catholic feminist theologians. Drawing on the work of Mary McClintock Fulkerson and Rebecca Chopp, the author identifies challenges to Catholic feminist theological anthropology. Fulkerson and Chopp adopt a poststructuralist approach to human personhood, emphasizing the relationships that exist among human consciousness, language, and politics. Although poststructuralism's understanding of subjectivity differs significantly from that of most Euro-American Catholic feminists, it does offer ideas that Catholic feminists need to explore further.]

[Recent Vatican documents affirm a unique salvific efficacy for the Catholic Church by establishing its representations of the Absolute as uniquely close to the Absolute. But what is the human problem necessitating salvation? Buddhist traditions have defined that problem as the human tendency to absolutize and cling to representations, in daily life and in religious reflection. The author traces the history of Buddhist perspectives on other religions in light of that central concern, concluding with a suggestion toward a Buddhist theology of religions that avoids relativism without privileging any particular representation of the Absolute.]

[Roman Catholic teaching on marriage focuses on interpersonal love of spouses, of which sacramentality and procreation are dimensions. Post Vatican II disputes about sexual morality, divorce, and birth control have taken place in this general context. A new generation of scholars—married, with children—argues for a more social view of marriage, with special concern about socioeconomic pressures. They emphasize that marital and parental commitment needs more attention and support than the justified exceptions, though they do not stress absolute norms.]

[The author first examines the application of the qualificatio theologica or theological norm as an aid to doctrinal interpretation in Catholic neo-Scholastic theology. He then explores the emergence of related interpretive questions at Vatican II, particularly with regard to two sections of Lumen gentium. His examination suggests a hermeneutical principle for interpreting the documents of Vatican II, namely the importance of being attentive to the nature of the council as a transitional event in Catholic theology. His study also highlights the continuing need for a consistent method of qualifying doctrinal statements.]

[The conviction that the common teaching of the bishops was a sure guide for Christian faith goes back to the earliest centuries. In the decades since Vatican II, appeals to this category of common episcopal teaching, now referred to under the rubric “ordinary universal magisterium,” have grown dramatically. The author here documents the expanded appeals to the ordinary universal magisterium under the pontificate of John Paul II and explores the difficult theological questions that this practice raises.]

[The gifts of the Holy Spirit played a major role in the moral theology of Thomas Aquinas. For a variety of theological and ecclesial reasons, they were largely ignored after the Council of Trent. A review of theological and literary interest in the gifts in the first half of the 20th century shows that they are essential to an adequate moral anthropology and that they provide a corrective to excessively rational and naturalistic approaches to the moral life.]

[In an effort to clarify foundational categories for moral theology, the author explores several polarities that have often been woven into discussions of moral formation. The first issue she addresses concerns the roles of socialization and autonomy, tradition and innovation, “heritage” and “discovery” in moral development. These principles of change are seen to be complementary rather than contradictory. She then engages the question of the distortion of development through sin, exploring the dialectic of authenticity and inauthenticity. Finally, she applies these categories and relations to the unfolding of moral theology with the Christian tradition, elucidating implications for Christian ethics today.]

[The discussions between Joseph Ratzinger and Walter Kasper on the relationship between the universal Church and the local/particular churches touch on one of today's major theological and pastoral issues. If the universal Church is ontologically and temporally prior to the local church, then how is the local church fully Church, and how are bishops truly vicars of Christ and not simply delegates of the pope? Does a renewed eucharistic ecclesiology and a renewed theology of the episcopal office compromise the character of the universal Church and papal primacy? Does the simultaneity of local churches and universal Church point to a solution?]

The encyclical Fides et ratio has received much attention since its appearance in 1998. This article examines several of its strengths and weaknesses. One strong point is its significant emphasis on conceptual pluralism, a pluralism affording a wide berth to philosophical and theological speculation. One weakness is the document's failure to respond to the most pressing contemporary philosophical challenge, the historicized hermeneutical approach, to the encyclical's call for a renewed metaphysics. In general, the encyclical encourages pluralism within the boundaries circumscribed by the Church's faith.

The declaration of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Dominus Iesus, has frequently been misunderstood. It does not assert that Catholicism is the sole path to salvation and it has a number of important points to affirm. Yet some of its judgments in regard to other churches may go beyond what was actually taught by Vatican II. If this is so, the congregation has exceeded its authority and runs the risk of closing off theological dialogue.

The author highlights one of the primary contributions of Yves Congar's pneumatology. In contrast to early-20th-century Roman Catholic theology that divorced reflection on the indwelling of the Holy Spirit in the human person from a systematic ecclesiology, Congar developed a theology of personal indwelling that was inseparable from a theology of the Church. The author then illustrates the fruitfulness of Congar's approach by using his theology constructively to address the postconciliar discussion as to whether the Catholic Church is a hierarchy or a democracy.

The author assembles and interprets archival materials, advancing a preliminary assessment of the significance of mysticism for the development of Lonergan's intellectual project. Lonergan assigns priority to a mysticism of transforming union as the existential principle from which flow charitable service and theological reflection. The density of Lonergan 's published account of religious experience is relieved by an exploration of its relation to the thought of Karl Rahner, Harvey Egan, and William Johnston. A suggestion is made about the continued importance of systematic reflection for the refined articulation of religious experience.