Abstract
‘The Leuven Project: Enhancing Catholic School Identity?’ appeared in the May 2022 edition of ITQ.1 Motivated by concerns that the article misrepresents the Enhancing Catholic School Identity (ECSI) research in the academic forum and fundamentally rejects the theology of the Second Vatican Council from which it springs, I write to clarify some of its misconceptions and critique some of its theological assumptions. In particular, Dr McGregor’s claims that the ECSI Research has a ‘very novel account of revelation and especially of the meaning of “symbol”’ (2) colour the entire article and preempt its construal of the authors on whose work it comments: Didier Pollefeyt and Lieven Boeve.
Keywords
Introduction to the Project
In order to appreciate the significance of the claims of the article, it is first necessary to understand the nature of the ECSI Research and what it seeks to do. Catholic schools in Australia are an important part of the educational landscape, educating nearly one-fifth of all school-age students. 2 However, like other faith-based institutions, Catholic schools face the challenges of continuing to function meaningfully in societies that are secularizing, pluralizing, detraditionalizing and individualizing. 3 The ECSI Research seeks to address these challenges.
ECSI grew out of a partnership that began in 2006 between Didier Pollefeyt at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (KU Leuven) and the Catholic Education Commission of Victoria (CECV)—comprised of the four Victorian dioceses. The first part of the research is designed to investigate how members of Catholic schools understand their own and their school’s Catholic identity. In its diagnostic phase, the research surveys existing religious practices and uses quantitative instruments to measure belief styles, identity preferences and pedagogical approaches, each using a seven-point Likert scale. 4 Surveys sample every school and every person—like taking a census of the population. Because responses are anonymous within each school context, the research does not follow individuals, but cross-sectional cohorts over time. Subsequent to the statistical analysis of completed surveys, the research team gives a snapshot of the various perspectives on Catholic identity in the school, both factual (perceived) and normative (desired) and makes recommendations on theological grounds for schools to enhance their identity precisely as Catholic. The normative theological recommendation for enhancement is the ‘Catholic Dialogue School,’ which clearly and unambiguously witnesses to Catholic faith in dialogue with other religions and worldviews present in the context. 5 After several trials of the research instruments, the Project was fully launched in 2011 and the results to 2012 were published in 2014. 6 It has been implemented in many Victorian Catholic schools over several waves. The project is also used in many other dioceses in Australia and in Belgium. 7 Pilots have taken place in the Netherlands, as well as in parts of the Philippines, the United Kingdom and the United States. One of the principal benefits of the ECSI Research is that it enables the scientific collection of robust evidence about the lived reality of Catholic schools, and to May 2022, the Australian research had accumulated 418,767 cases, which is a very large sample size.
Dr McGregor notes that there is some resistance in Australia to the use of the research and cites several commentaries on the Project that have appeared in the online newspaper of the Archdiocese of Sydney, The Catholic Weekly. 8 While these reflections demonstrate concerns about the Project, the contributors do not appear to understand the research and the terms it uses, which derive from the academic study of theology and philosophy.
The Post-Critical Belief Scale
The first of the three quantitative instruments is the Post-Critical Belief (PCB) Scale. This originated as a psychological research tool using the theory of David M. Wulff, which was operationalized by Dirk Hutsebaut and has since been modified by Pollefeyt and his research collaborator, Jan Bouwens. 9 Using this tool, attitudes towards religion and faith can be mapped on two axes: the horizontal axis represents a continuum from believing to non-believing; the vertical, a continuum from having a literal frame of mind to having a symbolic frame of mind, noting that it is the believing/non-believing axis that involves questions of truth or falsity, whereas the literal/symbolic axis relates to the pre- and post-critical ‘how’ of believing or not. Believing and non-believing positions include various combinations and shades of literal or critical stances. These represent different ways of being disposed towards religious belief: literally or post-critically (for the believing attitudes) and externally critically or relativistically (for the non-believing attitudes). The intersecting axes form quadrants: on the left (believing) side sits Literal Belief above PCB; on the right (non-believing) side sits External Critique (Literal Atheism) and Relativism. In turn, each quadrant can be divided into four sub-scales, based on the strength of the attitude and its proximity to its neighbour. Evidently, research scales relate to theoretical constructs, and their validity rests upon their capacity to measure the constructs that have been hypothesized by the researchers. Survey results of the PCB Scale invariably plot individual results with complex attitudes drawing from all four quadrants. 10 The normative theological position is to be predominantly situated in PCB, positioned close to the Literal Belief quadrant. This is because Wulff’s theory proposes that mature believers are ultimately able to pass through critical and relativizing views and understandings of faith prior to arriving at a new commitment to faith which occurs in spite of the many problematic perspectives that can be raised in relation to it. 11
The author of the article communicates some of this information and does so quite accurately, but as becomes clear later in his text, there is an irony in his description of what the various quadrants represent. When we read ‘the correct way of understanding the transcendence of God in one’s belief is to hold that contact with God can never occur directly. Rather, it must always be mediated through symbols’ (110), we are wise to look further to understand exactly what he understands by these terms. Given that many of the author’s issues with the ECSI Research emerge from his misapprehension of the PCB Scale, I will spend time trying to clarify some of them.
Literal Belief
In his discussion of Literal and Post-Critical Belief, the author warns us that by using the one word ‘literal’ (to refer to the quadrant labelled ‘Literal Belief’), the ECSI researchers do not distinguish between two senses of ‘literalism’. One of the meanings of literalism he equates with reading the Bible with a grasp of ‘the meaning intended by the human author’, and the other with having a ‘misinterpret[ation] [of] the meaning intended by the author’. He is right, indeed, to distinguish between these two ways of reading Scripture, but might be on surer ground to nominate them literal and literalist, with the former aiming to grasp what the writer intended and the latter responsible for issues arising for persons who predominantly identify with this quadrant of the PCB model. One of the difficulties here, nonetheless, is that what an individual understands to be a ‘literal’ reading of Scripture might not actually reflect a grasp of what the writer intended. If we turn to the Pontifical Biblical Commission for guidance, we read in ‘The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church’ (1993) that the literal sense is ‘that which has been expressed directly by the inspired human authors’ and that discerning the literal sense is ‘by means of a careful analysis of the text, within its literary and historical context.’ 12 Moreover, the Commission distinguishes between literal and literalist interpretations (the Commission observes that fundamentalist interpreters understand ‘literal interpretation as ‘naively literalist interpretation’). 13 In other words, a ‘literal’ reading does not necessarily imply that the biblical writer is relating or referring to an eye-witness account of an event; a ‘literal’ reading of a text might involve recognizing clues in the text that plainly indicate that the writer is speaking metaphorically, for example.
The author then identifies what he perceives as a second problem with the ECSI Research, which is that ‘no distinction is made between very different kinds of events. The miracles of Jesus reported in the Gospels are lumped in with pre-historic accounts such as the narratives of Creation and the Flood’ (115). Here, he distinguishes between the mythic accounts in Genesis 1–11 and the miracles of Jesus as what he identifies as ‘real events’. 14 In affirming the miracle stories as ‘real events’, he cites the authority of the Catechism of the Catholic Church and claims that Pollefeyt contradicts Magisterial teaching on this score. It is possible to affirm the miracle stories as real events, however, without presuming that a literalist reading reflects an accurate grasp of what the biblical author intended. 15
A literal believer—the author correctly notes—is described in the research as someone who assumes that it is possible to have unmediated access to God. He later declares: ‘the truth is that believers such as I do not think that we can have “immediate” access to God’ (116). This is a significant element of agreement between the author and the theological stance taken in the research. The import of this point cannot be over-emphasized: it is fundamental to both Jewish and Christian faith that the face of God cannot be seen in this life. 16 The author questions, however, how mediation is understood in the ECSI Research. He immediately affirms that ‘our access [to God] is through the one Mediator, Jesus Christ’. Preoccupied with what he sees as an emphasis on God’s absolute transcendence in the theology behind the Project, the author overlooks Pollefeyt’s complete agreement with him on the centrality of Christ in revelation: ‘it is important to underline that this transcendence in the Christian tradition is also marked by immanence through the confession of a God who in history was incarnated in a unique way as Jesus of Nazareth, who is Christ’. 17 Christ is the one Mediator, indeed—let us be very clear: key to Christian belief is that it is Christ who reveals who God is and incorporation into Christ which makes relationship with God possible. Speaking not of the Mediator but of ‘mediations’ of God in human experience, Pollefeyt understands them to be symbols by means of which human beings are able to recognize God’s immanence to creation. It is perhaps more common to speak of symbols than mediations, but the author also takes umbrage with the use of the word ‘symbol’.
Symbol
Early in the article, the author quotes Pollefeyt and Bouwens at length in their exposition of PCB in relation to symbol. 18 He then asks: ‘what is meant by the terms “symbol,” “religious metaphors,” and “truths of faith”? Since, for the Project, the transcendence of God is absolute, “God is the radical other,” do these symbols communicate anything more than metaphorical meaning?’ (111). We must note, first, that the three terms ‘“symbol,” “religious metaphors,” and “truths of faith”’ do not occur together in the text from which the long quote comes. ‘“[R]eligious metaphors,” and “truths of faith”’ are referred to in the context of describing the cognitive style of a literal believer: ‘the literally believing human being . . . believes in a personal, immutable God and in fixed religious truth claims. Religious metaphors and truths of faith are objectified and interpreted literally’. 19 It does not appear to me, at least in this text, that Pollefeyt and Bouwens equate symbol with metaphor.
It is critical to press the distinction between symbols and metaphors further. In an article published soon after Vatican II, Avery (later Cardinal) Dulles observes: ‘Unlike historical or abstract truth, mystery cannot be described or positively defined. It can only be evoked.’
20
In a helpful definition, Dulles goes on to say: Very briefly, we may say that a symbol is a type of sign. It is a word, gesture, picture, statue, or some other type of reality which can be made present to the senses or the imagination, and which points to a reality behind itself. But this other reality is one which cannot be precisely described or defined; it is not know-able, at least with the same richness and power, except in and through the symbol. The symbol has power to evoke more than it can clearly represent because it addresses itself not simply to the senses and the abstractive intelligence, but to the entire human psyche. It works on the imagination, the will, and the emotions, and thus elicits a response from the whole man. Symbols, therefore, have an existential power which is lacking to purely conventional or conceptual signs.
21
In their work on Vatican II, ecclesiologist Richard Gaillardetz and his co-author Catherine Clifford directly link Dulles’s understanding of symbol to the understanding of revelation that is expressed in the Conciliar document Dei verbum. 22
If we turn to the OED, we read that a metaphor is ‘a figure of speech in which a name or descriptive word or phrase is transferred to an object or action different from, but analogous to, that to which it is literally applicable; an instance of this, a metaphorical expression.’ 23 Unlike a symbol, a metaphor is the use of one image or idea to represent another. A metaphor does not point beyond itself to the inexpressible. It could, therefore, be seriously diminishing of the work of a symbol to describe it as a metaphor, even if, in a second definition—which might apply to Gaillardetz and Clifford’s description—the OED allows that sometimes a metaphor is ‘something regarded as representative or suggestive of something else, esp. as a material emblem of an abstract quality, condition, notion, etc.; a symbol, a token.’
Do Pollefeyt and Bouwens confuse symbols with metaphors, or diminish the meaning of symbol in any way? Addressing their Victorian sponsors about the reality of God within the framework of the research, in 2010, Pollefeyt and Bouwens write: ‘One meritorious aspect of literal belief is the care for the ontological referent of the Christian faith: faith may not “become symbolized” in such a way that belief in the objective existence of God would no longer be significant.’ 24 In this context, ‘become symbolized’ refers to a popular misunderstanding of symbol. Writing about Catholic teacher-training programs in 2020, Pollefeyt states as the first non-negotiable element of his program that ‘the mediations of the religious tradition are taken seriously in their strength and meaning for their followers (and are not dismissed as “just” symbols or as “mere” subjective constructions)’. 25
Without citing his sources, the author commits to Catholics having three understandings of symbol: in the first instance, a symbol is used, he says, to ‘communicate meaning’; in the second instance, he speaks of sacramentals as symbols, and the third instance is the case of the Eucharist itself. He speaks of the Eucharist as the ‘abiding presence of the Son of God in the fullness of his divinity and his humanity’ (116). Significantly, he writes: ‘the language that we use about this presence is neither metaphorical nor literal, but may be called “sacramental”’ (116–17). This last sentence is very clear: the Eucharist is a type of symbol that Catholic Christians call a sacrament, and to speak of God as present in this symbol is neither to speak metaphorically nor literally but symbolically. Turning for a moment to the author’s own article in The Catholic Weekly, there he states: ‘a Catholic who accepts that God is transcendent is one who thinks that contact with God can never occur directly, but must always be mediated through symbols. God is “Other”, the radically different one, whom we can relate to only through symbolic representation.’ Then comes the ‘dog whistle’: ‘like “literal”, the Project recognizes only one meaning of “symbolic”. Catholic symbols communicate meaning but no more’ and ‘these symbols will not be understood as mediating presence, since, for the Project, God can never be Emmanuel.’ 26 No evidence is cited for these claims. That is because they are simply not true. In pushing this view to be that of the ECSI Project, the author speaks to his populist audience, to those who misunderstand how symbols work, who might say: ‘some people say that the Eucharist is “just a symbol” (but we know that this is not the case).’ If we look closely at what Dulles says about symbols, we should not understand them as representations, for symbols are symbols precisely because they evoke what is beyond presentation, and thus, beyond re-presentation. That interesting philosophical matter aside, the real problem for the author is that he gets tangled up at this point in the question of God’s presence.
Presence
Pollefeyt does not explain, the author contends, what he means by presence, and seems to refer to presence pejoratively when he is speaking of Literal Belief (117). He is probably right that Pollefeyt does not explain what he means by presence, although Pollefeyt writes for theologians, by and large, who are widely read in European thought. 27 The author complains in a footnote that ‘a serious deficiency in the work of Pollefeyt is his frequent failure to define his terms’ and maintains that his (the author’s) only option when seeking to understand Pollefeyt’s terms is to apply Boeve’s understanding of them. This is quite a methodological leap. Given the significant differences between Boeve and Pollefeyt (one is a fundamental theologian, who articulates the insights of ‘postmodern’ philosophy using the categories of negative theology; the other is a practical theologian, who draws on the work of Emmanuel Levinas to inform an ethics of Jewish–Christian relations and religious education), it is likely a mistake to make such an application. In any case, we can work out what Pollefeyt means by ‘presence’ by considering reasons why literal believers might have a problem when they think about how God is with them. Philosophically, presence is the coincidence of being and meaning that occurs in our daily encounters with objects. In this sense, presence occurs when what is coincides with what is meant. If one were to say that God’s being and meaning coincided for the human person, one would be saying that the human apprehends God as such—which, as we observed above, would be heretical. A literal believer might readily think of Eucharistic presence in this way and thus think of the Eucharistic elements as divine objects to be manipulated. It is important to stress then, that God’s presence in the Eucharist is a symbolic or sacramental presence: in Dulles’s words, the symbol points to a reality ‘which cannot be precisely described or defined’. To those who prefer the analogical language of Thomas Aquinas, one might say that God’s presence in the Eucharist is real as well as unlike anything human beings can imagine when they ordinarily use the word ‘presence’.
I submit that the author’s problems with the language of presence reflect something of the gap between the academic study of theology—particularly in its ongoing dialogue with philosophy—and the way that theological language is sometimes (mis)understood at a popular level. It is easy to bring alarm to well-meaning and faithful people by taking academic writing out of context and not communicating the depth and complexity of understanding it conveys. We have seen precisely this issue emerge in the COVID-19 emergency, when many of the populist, anti-scientific reactions to the use of vaccines came out of a lack of capacity to read the science, together with a belief that anyone could be an expert because the scientific (or other) material was largely accessible to them on the web.
God’s Radical Otherness
This lack of background is also evident in the way that the author picks up the language of God’s ‘radical otherness’, noting, for example, Pollefeyt’s comment: ‘God is the radical “other” to whom we relate through a symbolical representation, through the interpretation of a sign that refers to the transcendent.’
28
Pollefeyt’s reading of Levinas is more likely to be the influence here than Boeve. Levinas (as it happens, a favourite philosopher of Pope John Paul II) is writing during and in the wake of the Holocaust, concerned with the totalitarianism he sees in Heidegger and Heidegger’s complete lack of ethical concern in the Seinsfrage. Levinas argues that ethics is first philosophy, not ontology, and his work is focused on an always and already prior responsibility for the other person (Autrui, often translated as ‘the Other’)—to the extent of giving the Other ‘the bread from one’s mouth’.
29
So great is this respect that Levinas writes: I cannot describe the relation to God without speaking of my concern for the other. When I speak to a Christian, I always quote Matthew 25: the relation to God is presented there as a relation to another person. It is not a metaphor: in the other, there is a real presence of God. In my relation to the other, I hear the Word of God. It is not a metaphor; it is not only extremely important, it is literally true. I’m not saying that the other is God, but that in his or her Face I hear the Word of God.
30
Now, this is not a quote where the plain meaning is ‘literal’, either! 31 It does the work, however, of showing the way in which Levinas holds the other person in reverence. Levinas’s chief imperative is to insist on the ‘absolute otherness’ or ‘alterity’ of the other person, such that it is God who passes in the Other’s face. If we were to explicate this in terms of the literal believer, Levinas would be concerned that no one assume the simple ‘presence’ (= meaning + being) and thus comprehension of the Other. To reduce other people to our understanding of them is to do them great violence. Returning to Pollefeyt, who believes in God (as distinct from Levinas, but that is a much longer story), his reverential references to God’s absolute otherness are balanced by his theological insistence on God’s immanence in Christ.
Evidence Arising from the Use of the Post-Critical Belief Scale in Australian Schools
What has been learned about the believing perspectives of the various groups within Australian schools by means of the PCB scale? A 2020–22 snapshot reproduced as Figure 1 includes data from the five dioceses in the State of Queensland; one diocese in New South Wales (the other dioceses in that jurisdiction do not participate in the research), the four dioceses in Victoria and the two dioceses in South Australia.
PCB Scale-Means Normative (Ideal school) Results Differentiated Australia 2020–22
What the latest evidence shows is that the predominant view of students within Australian schools is the non-believing position of Relativism. On all ECSI Scales, a Likert response of 4 is the turning point between disagreement and agreement: scale means of greater than 4 show increasing agreement with the position; scale means of less than 4 show increasing disagreement. It is evident that senior primary school students (years 5 and 6) show some uncertainty of 4.5 in relation to Literal Belief and 4.9 in relation to PCB, but an agreement with Relativism of 5.2. Older year levels echo that approach with increasing strength, and their resistance to External Critique lessens. Yet, what is perhaps more significant is what the results show about teaching staff: where previously, teachers predominantly supported PCB, the pale green bars now demonstrate that support for Relativism amongst teachers has now overtaken that of PCB.
To consider the decline over the last 11 years from PCB to Relativism, especially amongst school teaching staff, we need to be mindful of the increased rate of secularization of Australian society more broadly, and especially amongst younger people. 32 We also need to differentiate between the history of undertaking the ECSI surveys and the capacity for systems and schools to implement the recommendations. In my experience working at the coalface with teachers, the recommendations have been difficult to implement: first, because levels of adult theological literacy are very low; second, because adults have not been enabled to engage honestly with where they stand in relation to Catholic faith; and third, because many Catholic schools are already functioning within models of religious education relying on the overt but somewhat disingenuous promotion of Literal Belief—in spite of the presence of the metaphorical elephant of dis-belief (both literal and relativist) in every school, that simultaneously undermines it. Instead of the ‘witnesses, specialists and moderators’ for whom Pollefeyt calls to enhance Catholic identity, teachers often feel isolated, unprepared and worried that they are called to teach what they cannot—in its literalist form—believe. 33
The Melbourne Scale
To develop the Melbourne Scale, Pollefeyt and Bouwens drew from an exploratory essay by their fundamental theological colleague Lieven Boeve, who moved in 2015 from his position as Dean of the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies at KU Leuven to Director of Catholic Education in Flanders. Boeve wrote the essay at the height of the sexual abuse crisis in the Church in Belgium when staff raised the issue of removing ‘Catholic’ from the title of the University because of the sexual abuse committed by the local bishop. In this essay, which has since been reworked in its application to schools, Boeve seeks to imagine potential ways forward for Catholic institutions in relation to their Catholic identity. 34 He considers four possibilities: Reconfessionalization (where schools would be revivified by teachers who are clearly practising Catholics, teaching Catholic doctrine to children of families who are committed to the Church); Secularization (where schools would entirely relinquish their ties to the Church); maintenance of a correlational methodology, which Boeve termed Christian Values Education (CVE) (where schools would continue to promote the values common to both Christianity and culture, in an attempt to remain relevant); and Recontextualization (where schools would aim to embody and articulate the teachings of Christianity clearly and without apology, in dialogue with other religions and philosophies of life present in the context). 35 Pollefeyt and Bouwens take account of a fifth position in their research: the Confessional School (to the extent that it still exists in some school communities), and seek to identify the existence and strength of such a position in every school. For the most part, however, students do not recognize or place great importance on the confessional elements in their schools. 36
In their analysis of the positions as they appear on the Melbourne Scale and the accumulated data, Pollefeyt and Bouwens (and Boeve) suggest that the only viable possibility in the current cultural situation in the modern West is Recontextualization. This is because each of the other positions is correlated with Secularization. In other words, the statistical analysis of the data collected in the surveys shows that schools scoring highly for Reconfessionalization and CVE (obviously as well as outright Secularization) are associated with Secularization. Perhaps the author is unaware of this outcome, although the correlations are clearly shown in the 2014 publication of the research. Let me underscore the significance of these correlations. Without mistaking correlation with causation, the researchers suggest that attempts to pursue a reconfessionalizing agenda are likely to end in a secularizing result. That is why the laudable goals ‘set out beautifully by the bishops of New South Wales in their pastoral letter Catholic Schools at a Crossroads. . .. [to ensure] that our schools are truly Catholic in their identity and life, are centres of the new evangelisation, enable our students to achieve high levels of Catholic religious literacy and practice [and] are led and staffed by people who will contribute to these goals’ are being frustrated on the ground. 37 Time and again, results of the Melbourne Scale surveys show that students and staff increasingly reject attempts at being evangelized at school and show increasingly less resistance to Secularization as an identity option. Well-meaning individuals reemphasize the need for Catholic schools to be places of mission and evangelization, without realizing that if these words carry the intent to convert others to Christianity, it alienates them from fruitful engagement with most students and staff.
Recontextualization
The author is highly critical of Recontextualization and claims that [the Project’s] ‘epistemological and theological foundations lie substantially in the recontextualization theology of Lieven Boeve’ (109). He is perhaps unaware that the concept of recontextualization is not original to Boeve; the word is first used in English in the 1950s by literary theorist Philip Wheelwright, but it refers to a method that has been used in theology since the earliest days of Christianity. 38 To recontextualize is to place something in a new context and to examine how this generates further and richer insights, enabling others to make sense of what one is saying. Paul is recontextualizing when he addresses the Athenians at the Areopagus and explains Christianity in terms of the statue of the unknown god (Acts 17:16–32); the writer of John’s Gospel recontextualizes the first verse of Genesis in adopting the Greek philosophical language of the Logos who was with God and was God from the beginning; Justin Martyr recontextualizes the language of Logos further by articulating it using the concept of logos spermatikos, the wisdom available to all people; when the members of the Council of Nicaea struggle to articulate an understanding of the Son’s relationship to God the Father, they recontextualize, again using Greek philosophy, to describe Father and Son as homoousios, and so on. Thomas Aquinas, no less, recontextualizes when he incorporates the newly rediscovered philosophy of Aristotle into his theological and philosophical thinking; indeed, Thomas’s explanation of transubstantiation is a recontextualized understanding of the Eucharist using the Aristotelean distinction between substance and accidents.
In 1954—just before the Second Vatican Council—Karl Rahner observes how the development of doctrine takes place through the ancient theological method which I name here as recontextualization. He argues that the limitations of human knowledge mean that no articulation of ‘spiritual and divine realities’ can be final. ‘[A]ll human statements, even those in which faith expresses God’s saving truths, are finite. By this we mean that they never declare the whole of a reality’. Moreover, he says: ‘anyone who proposes to regard these propositions of faith, because they are wholly true, as in themselves adequate to the matter in question, i.e. exhaustive statements, would be falsely elevating human truth to God’s simple and exhaustive knowledge of himself and of all that takes its origin from him.’ Rahner appreciates that human knowledge is always contextual, historical and involved: ‘the most wretched little physical process isolated in a carefully contrived experiment can only be described adequately if the investigator possesses the one comprehensive and exhaustive formula for the whole cosmos. But he does not possess such a formula; he could have it if and only if he could place himself in his own physical reality at a point which lay absolutely outside the cosmos—which is impossible.’ 39
I note that the author makes reference to an article by another Australian in the Polish journal Studia Ełckie—an article that is critical of ECSI and links it to Rahner’s theology: ‘the influence on Catholic education of what may be described as a popularly received version of the theology of Karl Rahner may have laid a foundation for problems of Catholic identity schools.’ 40 That article also opposes the view—tracing it to Rahner—that revelation is not only propositional but also relational: ‘the idea that divine revelation was something personally experienced was problematic. It had the potential to make divine revelation captive to subjective experience, discounting the unique role of Christ, and confusing revelation with the personal and individual work of the Holy Spirit.’ 41 Yet, it is just this very personal aspect of revelation that is explicitly brought forward in Dei verbum. 42 If there is any doubt, we just need to look at Joseph Ratzinger’s commentary on what was intended as Dei verbum was actually being drafted, which emphasizes the Conciliar corrective to thinking revelation as a static set of truths to be believed in favour of a recognition that God addresses the human person in their totality in an ongoing way, ‘in our own time [setting] man in the context of this history as the place of his salvation.’ 43 Ratzinger agrees that revelation in Jesus Christ is definitive (and final) while also taking place ‘in the constant address of God to man.’ 44 Returning to our main protagonist, his claim that ECSI proposes ‘a very novel account of revelation’, then, is simply not true. The only conclusion I can draw from this is that he is opposed to Vatican II theology.
In his consideration of ‘the epistemology and theology behind the Project’, the author spends substantial time commenting on the work of Boeve, particularly on recontextualization. He first refers to the contextual theology described and analysed by Stephen Bevans—by implication contextual theology is a modern innovation—and argues that Boeve seeks to supersede it with ‘recontextual theology’, which is neither a term Boeve uses nor a process that he promotes. The quote from Bevans (‘There is no such thing as “theology”; there is only contextual theology’) highlights that theology does not exist in a pure state apart from its incarnation in different contexts. This is true of Christianity from the beginning: it is articulated using Aramaic and Hebrew concepts, then Greek, then Latin. . . . When Christianity becomes the official religion of the Roman Empire, there is a substantial overlay between Christianity, society and culture; in the West, Roman Christianity is so embedded in the cultural landscape that it becomes foundational to society and to the expression of culture (and vice-versa). We could say that with Christendom, in a way, the ultimate correlation of theology with a particular context has been achieved. It is important to distinguish, however, correlation from contextualization. In correlation, there is an identification of two (or more) items as belonging together: when we see one, we also see the other. Bevans is making a different point: that there can be no articulation of Christianity without context.
The author reminds us that Boeve has written about Jean-François Lyotard and makes use of Lyotard’s idea that the ‘grand [or meta] narratives’ of modernity have been exhausted (112). 45 It is important to appreciate the nature of a metanarrative beyond the description that is given by our author. A metanarrative is, indeed, a ‘Story Which Explains Everything’, a story that tries to account for the way things are. By definition, a metanarrative excludes other competing metanarratives. Yet, like Rahner’s ‘investigator’ trying to describe ‘the most wretched little physical process isolated in a carefully contrived experiment’, a metanarrative cannot escape its cosmic bounds to give us a perspective from beyond or outside the cosmos. It is, therefore, doomed to be perspectival, and what we know of the fact of human perspectivalism is that it is invariably unable to account for all the moving parts simultaneously. Metanarratives always have victims—those they must exclude or suppress in order to impose their way of seeing as normative. As an example, we need only look to the metanarrative of ‘trickle down’ capitalism and see whose interests it protects and whose it excludes or ignores. Sadly, we can also look at the metanarrative of Christianity as it has been correlated with modern Western culture and observe a vast trail of devastation. As just one example, we could think of the ‘stolen generations’ in Australia: indigenous children who were taken from their families, often in the name of Christian love, to be placed in orphanages or with white families who would forbid them to use their languages or practise their culture, teach them to be Christian, and thus ‘civilize’ them. Boeve, however, challenged Lyotard on the charge that Christianity is just another metanarrative, and was able to show that authentic Christian love resists this impulse to dominate others and make them ‘the same’. However, there are many versions of Christianity that resist this resistance.
Boeve recognizes that the correlation of Christianity with Western culture has broken down: Christianity no longer makes sense in terms of Western culture and Western culture can no longer make sense of Christianity (remembering the situation—on which I cannot elaborate here—of secularization, pluralization, detraditionalization, and individualization). We do not need ECSI to tell us this—although it does so, in a very fine-grained way; there are many studies that demonstrate it and provide plausible explanatory theories. 46 In its contextualization in contemporary culture, which is plural, Christianity cannot simply be provided as the answer to the meaning of ‘life, the universe and everything’—not least because it is perceived by many to be ‘just another metanarrative’ among competing metanarratives. Boeve argues, thus, that we need a post-correlational strategy in order to do theology ‘after’ modernity. 47 This, he finds in recontextualization as a normative method. 48
While Pollefeyt and Bouwens take up the concept of recontextualization as Boeve first proposed it as an option in his original, exploratory article, their interest in it is quite different: they are interested in the praxis of Catholic education and not so much in the theory that Boeve brings to the development of a fundamental theology of tradition. Where Boeve speaks of effecting a ‘post-correlational method’, they speak of ‘mono-correlations’ and ‘multi-correlations’. For Pollefeyt and Bouwens, a mono-correlation is the imposition of a single meaning. Mono-correlation occurs when it is the teacher who makes the meaning for the students or when it is insisted that there is only a single interpretation of a multivalent text. 49 ‘Multi-correlations’ evidently refer to the recognition of more than one potential meaning. Let me be clear, however, that theology in a plural context takes place not in the belief that there is no truth (nihilism) and not in the belief that there is every truth (that is, relativism, where one person’s ‘truth’ is as good as any other), but in the recognition that human persons never come to a full grasp of the truth, and that discernment is necessary.
Interruption
There is no scope in the present article to offer a detailed analysis of each of Boeve’s specialized concepts. Commenting on the idea of the ‘open narrative’—which I will not attempt to explain—the author asks ‘from where does Boeve get this idea of interruption?’ While identifying the origins of the term in the work of Johann Baptist Metz, the author’s response is not heartening: ‘[Boeve] claims to find it in the Christian narrative itself’ (113). He notes without comment a few of the biblical passages cited by Boeve, and then leaves that thought until he is in the midst of a discussion of presence, whereupon he quotes some very orthodox, traditional negative theology and suddenly announces that ‘For Boeve, God’s “interruption” of the Christian narrative replaces Jesus Christ at the mediator between God and man’ (116). This claim does not withstand scrutiny, given that in Interrupting Tradition, Boeve writes: ‘The Christian narrative tradition does not simply tell a story about the relationship between God and humanity, its primary aim is to confess that God has definitively revealed Godself in a specific human person, Jesus of Nazareth, Jesus the Christ.’ 50 Later in the same chapter, Boeve speaks very directly: ‘It should become clear . . . that, for believers, Jesus is the very paradigm of the open narrative. . . . [T]he evangelists go so far as to present Jesus as God’s interrupter, interrupting closed narratives on behalf of God.’ 51 If anyone is worried that Boeve is heretical, they need only read chapter eight of God Interrupts History to be reassured that his understanding of the centrality of the place of Jesus Christ with respect to God’s revelation is perfectly in accord with tradition. What does interruption mean? When we are interrupted, we are confronted by the unexpected, we are asked to respond in ways that may take us out of our comfort zones, we are challenged to see or hear differently. There is no hocus-pocus here. That God interrupts in the person of Jesus (and the Holy Spirit) simply says that our safe old ways of thinking and understanding and interpreting the world are insufficient for the in-breaking of the kingdom. Moreover, if we refuse to allow ourselves to be interrupted (‘Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not take care of you?’, Mt 25:44), we will be judged.
Hermeneutics
Part of the issue identified by the author is the emphasis placed within the theological discussion in the ECSI Research on the need for ‘hermeneutics’ or ‘interpretation’. In speaking of ‘interpreting Sacred Scripture’, he notes that interpretation is insufficient; readers ‘need to move’, he argues, ‘to “pondering” a shared experience of reading the text with the Holy Spirit’ (118). In fact, the positive relationship between prayer and Catholic school identity is a key finding in the major research report published by Pollefeyt and Bouwens in 2014, where they urge those who lead Catholic schools to ‘focus on prayer life, spirituality, rituals and liturgy’ and to ‘[use] the scriptures and [read] the Bible at school.’ 52 The author might reasonably not be aware of the recent resources made available through the ECSI collaboration that respond to these findings and are designed to renew and nourish the experience of prayer in Catholic schools. Pollefeyt and Bouwens write: ‘it is important to acknowledge that biblical interpretation does not only happen in the classroom during course times but that it permeates various expressions of a school’s Catholic identity. . . . [T]he students and the adults should be able to recognize and integrate biblical interpretation at school in personal and communal prayers as well as in liturgy and sacramental celebrations.’ 53 It is certainly the case that through resources such as these being developed in the ECSI partnership, many schools around Australia are now learning to appreciate the value of drawing from the tradition to engage in practices such as lectio Divina, which is, precisely, ‘“pondering” a shared experience of reading the text with the Holy Spirit’. In this way, the Project seeks to connect faith with experience. For those who are open to engaging in prayer, the aim of lectio Divina is for them to listen carefully to where they might hear God speak to them in the text, and to explore what that might mean in the concrete circumstances of their lives and their futures. 54 For those who cannot—if they are to perceive themselves to be authentic—engage in prayer as such, they are welcomed in to the activity without judgment, invited to be respectful of others, and to see how the text speaks to them.
So, what of the author’s questions about hermeneutics and interpretation? He claims: since the ‘hermeneutical process’ is never ending, since there are no ‘certain answers,’ only ‘meaningful’ ones, any answer could be arrived at. Also, what is meaningful for one person may not be meaningful for another. Hence there is no guarantee that different Catholics will not arrive at contradictory reinterpretations of ‘faith contents,’ leading to multiple and mutually exclusive ‘Catholic identities.’ Moreover, a self-constructed faith is in danger of leading to a self-constructed god, one made in one’s own image and likeness. (120)
The author points out the real danger that an individualist gloss on the freedom of interpretation may lead to relativism in matters of faith. However, as Pollefeyt has already countered: ‘hermeneutics is not the same as relativism because a certain number of rules binds the hermeneutic interpretation. One can compare this with the musical performance of a composition. The musician “interprets” the composition during his performance, but that does not mean that anything is permissible or that every performance is good and authentic.’ 55 A primary concern for hermeneutics as a discipline is to clarify the criteria for the interpretation that is superior to its alternatives. Hermeneutics, in a Catholic context, is always tested against the faith of the community of the Church and never provides a licence for each and every interpretation to be endorsed. Wise teachers are able to moderate hermeneutical discussions, bearing in mind that some positions will be in accord with a Catholic perspective, others will arise from differently identified worldviews, and still others will be implausible and merely individualistic expressions—perhaps devised to shock or entertain.
Nonetheless, it may be that the author is approaching the question of truth, here, with what Bernard Lonergan called a ‘classicist mindset’, by which is understood a mindset untroubled by the problems that history, language, and the possibility of transcendence pose for the idea of absolute knowledge. 56 The alternative to classical consciousness is historical consciousness, and as celebrated Australian theologian Ormond Rush explains, Vatican II ‘was the first council in the history of the church that explicitly worked out of a historical awareness.’ 57 Historical consciousness is the recognition that all thought is historically situated and conditioned. Rahner, a peritus alongside Ratzinger at the Council, preempted that awareness ecclesially, as we saw above: ‘The statements which we make about [spiritual and divine realities], relying on the Word of God which itself became “flesh” in human words, can never express them once and for all in an entirely adequate form.’ The development of hermeneutics bears witness to the fact that not only are human words finite and historically conditioned, but also that no person is able ‘to place himself in his own physical reality at a point which lay[s] absolutely outside the cosmos’ in order to gain a ‘God’s-eye’ (non-perspectival) view. It is really not so surprising that we find the profound statement in Gaudium et spes that ‘the Church has always had the duty of scrutinizing the signs of the times and interpreting them in the light of the Gospel. Thus, in language intelligible to each generation, she can respond to the perennial questions which men ask about the present life and the life to come’. 58 An acceptance of fundamental hermeneutical principles does not mean that there is no meaning; neither that every possible meaning is truly meaningful, but that meaning relies on the discernment of truth in ever new contexts. 59 Hermeneutics is an appeal to what Pollefeyt and others call ‘epistemological modesty’. 60 As Jean-Luc Marion writes: ‘Nothing appears that does not pass via its interpretation; every interpretation is achieved in the manifestation of what appears. . . . Day comes to the given only by its hermeneutic.’ 61
We must be cognisant that the author also names the concern that with the use of hermeneutics there might be ‘contradictory reinterpretations of “faith contents”, leading to multiple and mutually exclusive “Catholic identities”.’ If we appeal to the best in this concern, we can appreciate the desire for Catholic (and Christian) unity. However, Catholicism is already a very broad church, and we can see in many places the existence of a plurality of views. This is not just at the level of ordinary parishioners, but at the highest levels of the Church. We see it in Vatican documents: sometimes written by committees, these texts frequently betray their plural origins. 62 We see plurality at work in the opposition to Pope Francis by a small but vocal minority. 63 We see it in the lived opposition of classical to historical consciousness. We see it in the embrace of synodality. We see it in theological discourse. And we see it—this time from a psychological point of view—in attitudes emergent from the construct of the PCB Scale. Difference is already everywhere in the Church. There should not arise competing Catholic identities as a result, but a unity-in-difference that is founded on the creeds—which are, themselves, multiple. 64 The clearest defence of plurality in the Church is the plurality within God as Triune. This does not mean, of course, that the persons of the Trinity are at war with one another as we seem to be in the contemporary ‘culture wars’, but simply that difference as well as unity is constitutively part of God.
The Victoria Scale
Using a third instrument that they developed as a pilot in Victoria (hence, the Victoria Scale), Pollefeyt and Bouwens consider the ways that different pedagogical approaches might impact on the Catholic identity of a school. They identify four possible school types, again plotted on two intersecting axes: a Monologue type (where the pedagogy emphasizes listening and being obedient to the voice of religious authority); a Colourless type (where the pedagogy emphasizes that religion is a private matter); a Colourful type (where the pedagogy emphasizes that all religions are equal and that diversity is valued); and a Dialogue type (where the pedagogy emphasizes the importance of witnessing to the Catholic tradition at the heart of the school, and placing it into dialogue with other religious traditions and worldviews) (19f). 65 Given the current reality of many Catholic schools as communities where diverse religious and philosophical perspectives are present, Pollefeyt and Bouwens argue that a recontextualizing, Catholic dialogical school model best serves current cultural contexts. This is because a dialogue school enables the Catholic tradition to be profiled clearly and without ‘dilution’, while at the same time serving the whole school population in respectfully and sensitively recognizing other perspectives and identities as partners in dialogue. As host, the Catholic school remains the privileged dialogue partner, that is, it is the Catholic school as such that welcomes and is hospitable to others, and the Catholic school that lives out its Catholic identity and is entitled to name, celebrate and live from that reality (20f).
One of the most telling points of the article is that the author wonders ‘why we should believe our narrative rather than someone else’s’ (119). Catholic schools cannot presume that many, if any, of their students or staff members share Catholic faith. So, to speak of ‘we’ and ‘our narrative’ and to presume that everyone in a Catholic school will simply recognize and accept Christianity’s truth claim is to misunderstand the problem that has given rise to the Project in the first place. What this says to me is that the author has not understood that the ECSI Project calls for the witness of a Christian faith that is genuinely lived and thus is genuinely attractive, rather than one that insists that it is right and that everyone should submit to it. He forgets the old adage that fundamentally, Christianity is ‘caught, not taught’. More recently it was Pope Benedict XVI who observed that ‘it is helpful to reaffirm that the Church does not impose but rather freely proposes the Catholic faith, well aware that conversion is the mysterious fruit of the Holy Spirit’s action.’ 66
There is a need to attend to the modest but urgent call of Pope Francis, who characterizes the current situation as one in which respect for the other person as other is indisputably required, and operationalized in dialogue. 67 We must wonder why the author refers primarily to Vatican documents on Catholic Education written in large part in the 20th century, without noting the corresponding changes in culture and society through history and the significant recent work undertaken by the Dicastery for Culture and Education (114). 68 I note, in particular, the 2013 document Educating to Intercultural Dialogue in Catholic Schools: Living in Harmony for a Civilization of Love, which identifies the significance of the contemporary context and observes: ‘Catholic schools have in Jesus Christ the basis of their anthropological and pedagogical paradigm; they must practise the “grammar of dialogue”, not as a technical expedient, but as a profound way of relating to others.’ The ECSI Project was presented by Pollefeyt to the Congregation for Catholic Education (now the Dicastery) in March 2014. Making a concerted effort not to name any particular project, in a 2019 interview, we can see clearly that Archbishop Zani’s vision of Catholic education accords with the theological approach of ECSI. 69
The 2022 instruction, The Identity of a Catholic School for a Culture of Dialogue, emergent from the 2015 World Congress: ‘Education Today and Tomorrow’, aims to be an ‘intentionally concise and practical tool’, responding to a ‘widespread educational emergency’.
70
It observes: ‘Today’s societies are characterized by a multicultural and multireligious composition. In this context, “Education contains a central challenge for the future: to allow various cultural expressions to co-exist and to promote dialogue so as to foster a peaceful society”.’ Moreover, it declares: ‘“what is required . . . is courageous and innovative fidelity to one’s own pedagogical vision”, which is expressed in the capacity to bear witness, to know and to dialogue with diversity’ (no. 27). This document rejects too narrow a view of what it means to be Catholic (nos 68, 69). In this way, it rejects the monological style of Catholic Identity as it is identified on the Victoria Scale. It also rejects a managerial (or ‘Colourless’) model of Catholic education: ‘School leaders are more than just managers of an organization. They are true educational leaders when they are the first to take on this responsibility, which is also an ecclesial and pastoral mission rooted in a relationship with the Church’s pastors’ (no. 48). Moreover, it further rejects that model which is reflected in the style of the ‘Colourful’ School: ‘the educational action pursued by the Church through schools cannot be reduced to mere philanthropic work aimed at responding to a social need, but represents an essential part of her identity and mission’ (no. 10). Instead, the document clearly states: a Catholic school is endowed with a specific identity: i.e. ‘its reference to a Christian concept of life centred on Jesus Christ’ (no. 20). the Church considers dialogue as a constitutive dimension, as she is rooted precisely in the Trinitarian dynamics of dialogue, in the dialogue between God and human beings and in the dialogue among human beings themselves. Because of its ecclesial nature, the Catholic school shares this element as constitutive of its identity’ (no. 30).
Pollefeyt and Bouwens have recently published an analysis of this document. 71
The Importance of Particularity and Difference
It is necessary to point out that ‘dialogue’ has a particular meaning in this context. Dialogue does not mean ‘let me tell you what I think’ or ‘let us tell one another what each of us thinks and then I will tell you why you are wrong’. Neither does dialogue mean ‘I will agree with your position as much as possible so that you don’t feel excluded’. Each person in a dialogue has a perspective to communicate and will not only uncover similarities with another’s position, but also real differences. One of the problems in dialogue is that people often feel they must state only what they hold in common with others, when the recognition of differences (particularities) is just as, if not more, important. Pollefeyt is fond of using ‘love’ as an example. It is easy to speak of love as the supreme thematic of Christianity. God loves you. ‘For God so loved the world that he gave his only son. . .’ (Jn 3:16). What is more, non-Christians like the word ‘love’ because it is an essential and attractive part of life. So, it seems that Christians have much in common with others because life is all about love. At the same time, how love is actually understood within Christianity is quite different from other interpretations of love, for Christ asks Christians not simply to love their friends, but also to love their enemies (Mt 5:43–48). In Christianity, love is a choice that often calls for sacrifice and a commitment that goes beyond how one feels at any particular point in time.
The Potential Risk of Too Kerygmatic a Dialogue
I have already pointed out that the Catholic Dialogue School is a place where the Catholic faith has a privileged position and is articulated clearly and without apology in dialogue. However, the author has observed a concern within documents relating to the ECSI Project where it is stated that the dialogue should not be predominantly ‘kerygmatic’ (120). To understand what this means we have to imagine the two axes of the Victoria Scale and the four quadrants that their intersection creates. Then we must appreciate that within each quadrant there are four positions that are further defined in relation to their proximity to each neighbouring pedagogical style, as shown in Figure 2.
Catholic Dialogue School sub-types
Within the ‘Dialogue’ box there are four sub-types: Kerygmatic Dialogue (closest to the Monologue quadrant, Formally Tolerant Dialogue (diagonally closest to the Colourless quadrant), Actively Plural Dialogue (closest to the Colourful Quadrant), and the Recontextualizing Dialogue position in the final corner. These sub-types refer to what motivates the dialogue, and those sub-types closest to the positions of the other quadrants, in each case, risk collapsing into them. The Kerygmatic Dialogue, then, risks becoming monological, if its intention is to dialogue with others in order to convert them. Authentic dialogue, in contrast, is outlined by Pope Francis: ‘Dialogue, in fact, educates when the person relates with respect, esteem, sincerity of listening and expresses himself authentically, without obscuring or mitigating his own identity nourished by evangelical inspiration.’ 72
In Sum
In his critique of the Enhancing Catholic School Identity Research, Peter McGregor does not appear able to support foundational theological perspectives of Vatican II on the nature of revelation, tradition, symbol, history and interpretation. By simplistically interpreting ECSI, he undermines the seriousness of the issue it seeks to address: how can Catholic schools remain Catholic in a world where secularization, pluralization, detraditionalization and individualization—not to mention a severe and continuing loss of moral authority on the part of the Church—make it increasingly difficult for students and their teachers to be touched by the Gospel? By demonizing the research and its calls for authentic renewal, Dr McGregor remains blind to the finding that further, frantic efforts at just telling people what they should believe are correlated with increased levels of secularization. It is time to stop shooting the messenger and accept that the research provides a scientific basis for understanding the current situation in Catholic schools in Australia and beyond, and a genuinely Catholic way forward.
The ECSI Research offers a considered attempt to help schools negotiate questions of faith in the contemporary world. It offers a challenge to schools especially to provide mature theological support for teachers to enable their engagement with a Christian faith that involves them credibly as persons. It challenges those who are intentionally Catholic to embrace their living witness and to adopt a recontextualizing and dialogical approach to engaging students with questions of ultimate meaning. It brings personal dignity and respect to those in school communities who have varying perspectives on life and how it should be lived, and it allows everyone to be clear that the school’s Catholic identity is central to the hospitality and loving concern that it offers.
Footnotes
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
1.
Peter John McGregor, ‘The Leuven Project: Enhancing Catholic School Identity?,’Irish Theological Quarterly 87, no. 2 (2022).
3.
See the analysis in Lieven Boeve, Interrupting Tradition: An Essay on Christian Faith in a Postmodern Context, trans. Brian Doyle (Leuven: Peeters, 2003); God Interrupts History: Theology in a Time of Upheaval, trans. Brian Doyle (New York/London: Continuum, 2007).
4.
On request, this is sometimes supplemented with qualitative research instruments (interviews, photographic portfolios, annotated school histories, document analysis and guided observations).
5.
See Didier Pollefeyt and Michael Richards, ‘Catholic Dialogue Schools: Enhancing Catholic School Identity in Contemporary Contexts of Religious Pluralisation and Social and Individual Secularisation,’ Ephemerides Theologicae Lovanienses 96, no.1 (2020): 77–113.
6.
Didier Pollefeyt and Jan Bouwens, Identity in Dialogue: Assessing and Enhancing Catholic School Identity. Research Methodology and Research Results in Catholic Schools in Victoria, Australia (Berlin: Lit, 2014). The future of Catholic schooling in Australia has been a topic of much reflection. For an example of a different approach, see the document by The Bishops of NSW and the ACT, ‘Catholic Schools at a Crossroads,’ (Sydney: Catholic Education Office, 2007).
7.
In Australia, in the dioceses of Adelaide, Ballarat, Brisbane, Cairns, Melbourne, Parramatta, Port Pirie, Rockhampton, Sale, Sandhurst, Townsville, and Toowoomba. It has also been trialled in the Archdiocese of Perth.
8.
Brendan Arthur, ‘Melbourne Priest Speaks: Leuven Has Serious Problems,’ The Catholic Weekly, 30 June 2017; Monica Doumit, ‘Catholic Faith Education Project Has a Lot in Common with Safe Schools,’ ibid., 17 May; John Flader, ‘Q&A with Fr John Flader: Leuven Project Opts for Surrender in Thinking About Faith and Society,’ ibid., 21 June; Peter John McGregor, ‘Theologian’s Perspective: The Leuven Project Presents a God Who Is Always ‘There’, Never ‘Here’,’ ibid.; ‘Evangelise or Re-Contextualise? The Problem with the Leuven Project,’ The Catholic Weekly, 15 September 2017. See, in response, Paul Sharkey, ‘Monica Doumit Is Wrong: Leuven Faith Project Is Catholic,’ ibid., 31 May; Stephen Elder, ‘Setting the Record Straight: Responding to Criticism of the Leuven Project,’ ibid., 4 September.
9.
David M. Wulff, The Psychology of Religion: An Overview (American Psychological Association, 1996). Dirk Hutsebaut, ‘Post-Critical Belief: A New Approach to the Religious Attitude Problem,’ Journal of Empirical Theology 9, no. 2 (1996): 48–66; ‘Identity Statuses, Ego Integration, God Representation and Religious Cognitive Styles,’ Journal of Empirical Theology 10, no. 1 (1997): 39–54; Karolina Krysinska et al., ‘Measuring Religious Attitudes in Secularised Western European Context: A Psychometric Analysis of the Post-Critical Belief Scale,’ International Journal for the Psychology of Religion 24, no. 4 (2014).
10.
‘In using any typology of this nature, it should be underscored that the primary types produced through a typological analysis should be understood as theoretical ideal-types. That is, they do not either indicate four exclusive categories into which all subjects must somehow fall or four exclusive style descriptions meant to label a subject.’ Pollefeyt and Richards, ‘Catholic Dialogue Schools,’ 79 n.3.
11.
See also James W. Fowler, Stages of Faith: The Psychology of Human Development and the Quest for Meaning (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1981); Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil, trans. Emerson Buchanan (Boston: Beacon, 1967).
12.
Pontifical Biblical Commission, The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1993), II.B.1. For a helpful introduction, see Daniel J. Harrington, How Do Catholics Read the Bible? (Lanham, MA: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), chapter 7.
13.
Pontifical Biblical Commission, The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church, I.F.
14.
‘Like other symbols, a myth is a figurative representation of a reality which eludes precise description or definition. But in contrast to the rather sophisticated symbolism of parable and allegory, mythical symbolism involves a minimum of critical reflection’. Avery Dulles, ‘Symbol, Myth, and the Biblical Revelation,’ Theological Studies, no. 27 (1966): 8.
15.
Dulles recalls Augustine’s Tractates on the Gospel of John 24 in this regard: ‘Interrogemus ipsa miracula, quid nobis loquantur de Christo; habent enim, si intelligantur, linguam suam. Nam quia ipse Christus Verbum Dei est, etiam factum Verbi verbum nobis est’ (‘Let us interrogate the miracles themselves, what they tell us about Christ: for they have a tongue of their own, if they can be understood. For since Christ is Himself the Word of God, even the act of the Word is a word to us.’). Ibid., 3 n.3.
16.
Exodus 33:20–23. Thomas Aquinas, The Summa Theologica, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (Benziger Bros, 1947), I. q. 12.
17.
Didier Pollefeyt, ‘Religious Education as Opening the Hermeneutical Space,’ Journal of Religious Education 68, no. 2 (2020): 121. This restates the position of ‘The Lustre of Life: A Hermeneutic-Communicative Concept of Religious Education,’ Narthex 13, no. 1 (2013).
18.
‘Post-critical Belief stands for a symbolic affirmation of faith contents. It is characterised by faith in a transcendent God and in a religious interpretation of reality in which the transcendent is not considered literally present but is represented symbolically. God is the radical “other” to whom we relate through a symbolical representation, through the interpretation of a sign that refers to the transcendent. People relate to the transcendent reality through mediations only: through stories, rituals, traditions, institutions, churches, ministries, communities, social organisations, and so forth. Faith is acquired through the active, creative, and interpretative handling of these mediations. . .. [To] believe is a continuous process of symbol-interpretation; the revelation of new layers of significance in the symbolic relationship with God.’ The quote is from Didier Pollefeyt and Jan Bouwens, ‘Framing the Identity of Catholic Schools: Empirical Methodology for Quantitive Research on the Catholic Identity of an Education Institute,’ International Studies in Catholic Education 2, no. 2 (2010).
19.
Ibid., 195.
20.
Dulles, ‘Symbol, Myth, and the Biblical Revelation,’ 1.
21.
Ibid., 2–3. See also Avery Dulles, Models of Revelation, Rev. ed. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1992), ix, 128, chapter IX.
22.
‘As embodied creatures, the primary way in which we come to know our world is through symbols. We learn through language, concepts, images, and metaphors. It is through these symbols that God is able to “mediate” the sharing of divine life that is the substance of revelation. . . . These symbols mediate or make present God’s self-gift. God comes among us in ways that we can grasp, in deeds great and small and in a special way in the testimony of Scripture.’ Richard R. Gaillardetz and Catherine E. Clifford, Keys to the Council: Unlocking the Teaching of Vatican II (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical, 2012), 35.
23.
Oxford English Dictionary, ‘Metaphor, N.’ (Oxford University Press).
24.
Pollefeyt and Bouwens, ‘Framing the Identity of Catholic Schools,’ 195.
25.
Didier Pollefeyt, ‘Hermeneutical Learning in Religious Education,’ Journal of Religious Education 68 (2020): 9.
26.
McGregor, ‘Theologian’s Perspective: The Leuven Project Presents a God Who Is Always ‘There’, Never ‘Here’.’ Emphasis added.
27.
The author draws on the published version of the doctoral thesis of Connor [sic] Sweeney in tackling Heidegger, which is to place a great burden on Conor Sweeney. Conor Sweeney, Sacramental Presence after Heidegger: Onto-Theology, Sacraments, and the Mother’s Smile (Cambridge: James Clarke, 2015).
28.
Pollefeyt and Bouwens, ‘Framing the Identity of Catholic Schools,’ 197, quoted in ; McGregor, ‘The Leuven Project: Enhancing Catholic School Identity?,’ 110.
29.
Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981), 74.
30.
‘Philosophy, Justice, and Love,’ in Entre Nous: Thinking-of-the-Other (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 109–10.
31.
See Robyn Horner, ‘On Lévinas’ Gifts to Christian Theology,’ in The Exorbitant: Emmanuel Levinas between Jews and Christians, ed. Kevin Hart and Michael Signer (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010).
32.
See the extraordinary speed of the rise of ‘no religion’ in Australian Census data in 2011 (21.8%), 2016 (30.1%) and 2021 (38.9%). Note, however, that no religion does not equate to atheism. See also Andrew Singleton et al., ‘The AGZ Study: Project Report,’ (ANU, Deakin and Monash Universities, 2019).
33.
‘The confession of the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God of Jesus Christ is the confession of faith that the religion teacher will need to present herself in the classroom as a witness.’ Pollefeyt, ‘Opening the Hermeneutical Space,’ 121. See also ‘Hermeneutical Learning in RE,’ 9.
34.
Lieven Boeve, ‘The Identity of a Catholic University in Post-Christian European Societies: Four Models,’ Louvain Studies 31, no. 3–4 (2006); Theology at the Crossroads of University, Church and Society: Dialogue, Difference and Catholic Identity (London: Bloomsbury, 2016).
35.
This approach was first characterized in ‘The Identity of a Catholic University,’ 238–58. There is a degree of confusion by teachers about the precise meaning of ‘Christian Values Education’—it does not refer to education in Christian values but to an emphasis on those values held in common by Christianity and humanist traditions—the lowest common denominator between Christianity and culture.
36.
Pollefeyt and Bouwens, Identity in Dialogue, 185.
37.
Flader, ‘Q&A with Fr John Flader.’
38.
Philip Wheelwright, The Burning Fountain: A Study in the Language of Symbolism, 2nd ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968), 124.
39.
Karl Rahner, Theological Investigations, trans. Cornelius Ernst, XXIII vols., vol. I (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1961), 43.
40.
Gerard O’Shea, ‘Vulgarised Rahnerianism and Post-Critical Recontextualisation: Solvents of Catholic Identity in Contemporary Catechesis,’ Studia Ełckie 3, no. 16 (2014): 342.
41.
Ibid., 347.
42.
Vatican Council II, Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation: Dei verbum (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vatican, 1965), art. 2.
43.
This is remarkably close to Rahner where he speaks of dogmatic development expressing ‘the same reality and truth, appropriate to just this age of the Church: it is change in, not of, identity. Rahner, TI, I, 43–44. Emphasis added in both cases. See chapter 1 of Boeve, Theology at the Crossroads.
44.
Joseph Ratzinger, ‘Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation Chapter I,’ in Commentary on the Documents of Vatican II, ed. Herbert Vorgrimler (London/New York: Burns and Oates/Herder and Herder, 1969), 172–75. Emphasis added. The principal author under discussion does not critique the development of doctrine proposed by John Henry Newman but only Pollefeyt’s apparent connection with it; a link with Newman is not apparent in the section of Identity and Dialogue to which the author refers in his note.
45.
Lieven Boeve, Lyotard and Theology: Beyond the Christian Master Narrative of Love, Philosophy and Theology Series (London: Bloomsbury T & T Clark, 2014). See my extended review: Robyn Horner, ‘A Theology of the Differend: Engaging Boeve Engaging Lyotard,’ Modern Theology 31, no. 3 (2015).
46.
Pre-eminently, Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA/London: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 2007). See also, for example: Linda Woodhead, ‘The Rise of ‘No Religion’: Towards an Explanation,’ Sociology of religion 78, no. 3 (2017); Singleton et al., ‘The AGZ Study: Project Report.’; Nicola Madge and Peter J. Hemming, ‘Young British Religious ‘Nones’: Findings from the Youth on Religion Study,’ Journal of Youth Studies (2016).
47.
The idea of the postmodern is more complex than is sometimes assumed. Lyotard’s comment that ‘“postmodernism” . . . is not modernism at its end but in its nascent state, and that state is constant’ gives a hint in this direction. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1984), 79.
48.
‘The concept of recontextualisation functions both descriptively and normatively. As a descriptive category, it assists us to analyze the ways in which tradition has been challenged by contextual change and novelty—varying from stubborn condemnation and suppression of this novelty to its uncritical embracing and adaptation. As a normative category, recontextualisation calls for a theological program in which insight into the intrinsic link between faith and context inspires theologians to take contextual challenges seriously, in order to come to a contemporary theological discourse that can claim both theological validity and contextual plausibility.’ Boeve, God Interrupts History, 3 n.4.
49.
I use the word ‘text’, but text has a broad rather than a narrow meaning. I note that the Pontifical Biblical Commission observes the possibility that there might be more than one literal interpretation of a text. See II.B.
50.
Boeve, Interrupting Tradition, 110.
51.
Ibid., 119.
52.
Pollefeyt and Bouwens, Identity in Dialogue, 298, 307.
53.
Ibid., 310.
54.
See Raymond Bieringer and Mary Elsbernd, eds, Normativity of the Future: Reading Biblical and Other Authorative Texts in an Eschatological Perspective (Leuven: Peeters, 2010).
55.
Pollefeyt, ‘Hermeneutical Learning in RE,’ 8.
56.
Lonergan describes the classicist as one who thinks in terms of universals: ‘philosophy is perennial, values are unchanging, truth is certain.’ ‘The classicist is no pluralist. He knows that circumstances alter cases but he is far more deeply convinced that circumstances are somehow accidental and that, beyond them, there is some substance or kernel or root that fits in with classicist assumptions of stability, fixity, immutability.’ Bernard J. F. Lonergan, Method in Theology, 2nd ed. (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1973), 301.
57.
Ormond Rush, The Vision of Vatican II: Its Fundamental Principles (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical, 2019), 23.
58.
Vatican Council II, Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World: Gaudium et spes (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1965), article 4. Emphasis added. See also article 62.
59.
Note the comment by the Pontifical Biblical Commission, The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church, II.A.2. ‘To avoid . . . purely subjective readings, an interpretation valid for contemporary times will be founded on the study of the text, and such an interpretation will constantly submit its presuppositions to verification by the text.’
60.
Didier Pollefeyt, ‘Unrevoked Covenant—Revoked Consensus—Indestructible Love? The Reception of Nostra Aetate 4 in Jewish–Catholic Relations,’ in Res Opportunae Nostrae Aetatis, ed. Dries Bosschaert and Johan Leemans (Leuven: Peeters, 2020), 491.
61.
Jean-Luc Marion, ‘The Hermeneutics of Givenness,’ in The Enigma of Divine Revelation: Between Phenomenology and Comparative Theology, ed. Jean-Luc Marion and Christiaan Jacobs-Vandegeer (Cham: Springer, 2020), 40.
62.
See, for example, the conservative/traditionalist versus progressive/liberal splits traced by Norman Tanner, The Church and the World: Gaudium et spes; Inter mirifica (New York: Paulist, 2005).
63.
See, for example, the dubia sent to Pope Francis. Edward Pentin, ‘Full Text and Explanatory Notes of Cardinals’ Questions on ‘Amoris laetitia’,’ National Catholic Register, 14 November 2016.
64.
See, for example, the earliest creed expressed by Paul in 1 Cor 15:3–8; the Apostle’s Creed; the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, the Chalcedonian Creed, the Athanasian Creed, and so on.
65.
Pollefeyt and Bouwens, Identity in Dialogue, 194–95.
66.
Pope Benedict XVI, ‘Address of His Holiness Benedict XVI to the Ordinaries of Central Asia on Their ‘Ad Limina’ Visit,’ (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2008).
67.
Pope Francis, ‘Address to Participants in the Plenary Assembly of the Congregation for Catholic Education,’ (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 9 February, 2017); ‘Speech to the Students of the Jesuit Schools of Italy and Albania,’ (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2013); The Joy of the Gospel: Evangelii gaudium (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2013); On Fraternity and Social Friendship: Fratelli tutti (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana 2020).
68.
Congregation for Catholic Education, Educating to Intercultural Dialogue in Catholic Schools Living in Harmony for a Civilization of Love (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2013); Educating Today and Tomorrow: A Renewing Passion (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2014); Educating to Fraternal Humanism. Building a ‘Civilization of Love’ 50 Years after Populorum Progressio (Vatican City: Librarie Editrice Vaticana, 2017); Dicastery for Culture and Education, The Identity of the Catholic School for a Culture of Dialogue (Vatican City: Libraria Editrice Vaticana, 2022); Pope Francis, ‘Address to Participants in the Plenary Assembly of the Congregation for Catholic Education.’
69.
Angelo Vincenzo Zani, interview by Emmanuel Van Lierde, 22 May 2019.
70.
Dicastery for Culture and Education, Identity of the Catholic School, numbers 7 and 33. Hereafter, references will be made in the text.
71.
Didier Pollefeyt and Jan Bouwens, ‘The Vatican and the Catholic Dialogue School as a "Place of Differences Living Together in Harmony",’ Marriage, Families & Spirituality 28 (2022).
72.
Pope Francis, ‘Address to Participants in the Plenary Assembly of the Congregation for Catholic Education.’