264 - The New Church: Essays In Catholic Reform

The New Church: Essays In Catholic Reform
By Daniel Callahan
222 pp. New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1966. $4.50.

Daniel Callahan, Associate Editor of Commonweal, is a genre in himself. He is a Catholic layman whose stance, while markedly liberal, is not polemically frozen. He writes with refreshing candor. I know of no religious journalist whose style so reminds one of James Reston.

This book is a pot pourri of collected articles by Callahan covering the 1960-65 period in American Catholic history-one of the most explosive and decisive five years in the entire history of the Church. In effect, this book is one man's diary of the emerging Catholic Church, done in a style which has the photographic fascination of a slow motion study of the birth of a butterfly out its old wrappings. Callahan has organized the seventeen essays under the headings: I "Early Tensions," II "Wrestling with the Secular," III "Forming the Laity," and IV "Freedom, Order and Integrity."

265 - The New Church: Essays In Catholic Reform

To my knowledge, this is the best single work which succinctly summarizes and outlines where the Catholic Church in this country has been, where it is trying to go, and the obstacles and opportunities which now surround it. Callahan, for example, takes the reader back over the ruined landscape of Pio Nono's era and then on up to the inevitable "Is God Dead" chapter. Affairs have moved so fast in the last year or so that two of the essays are slightly dated: "Reforming the Catholic University" and "Birth Control and the Theologians."

My favorite essays are his analyses of "Secularity and Ecumenism," with its superb realism about the necessity for and the limitations of ecumenicity in our pluralistic society and his "Liberal Catholicism in America," with its portrayal of liberal Catholic clergy and laity who are determined to get out of and beyond the nervous conservatism of chancery fiefdoms.

There is a frustratingly brief hint by Callahan about the biggest of all storms, I suspect, still making up on the Roman Catholic horizon: a ruthless public debate of "basic doctrines," including papal infallibility. I think "L'affaire Charles Davis" is but a straw in this wind. I believe Daniel Callahan would like to see, despite the pain involved, what he terms "a total reexamination of Christianity and the Church."

Walter D. Wagoner
Fund for Theological Education
Princeton, New Jersey