Abstract
Jesuit historian John W. O’Malley presents us with an engaging collection of essays tackling a variety of aspects germane to the Roman Catholic Church. He divides these essays into three sections: the first section focuses on various aspects of the papacy, the second deals with the First (Trent) and Second Vatican councils, and the third is a set of miscellaneous essays dealing with four topics on the practical reality of Roman Catholicism. In the first set of essays O’Malley offers a developmental history of the role of the Pope both as the head of the Roman Catholic Church and as highly influential public personality. The history that O’Malley traces serves to emphasize that the role of the Pope has evolved in response to the changing needs of the Roman Catholic Church and with the developing concerns of the world at large. This evolution of the papacy is contiguous with the Roman Catholic Church’s self-understanding and with her teachings. Nowhere is the process of evolving Roman Catholic self-understanding and teaching more visible than in the councils of Trent and Vatican II. O’Malley helps us to see the importance of both councils, carefully articulating the differences between them. Each council was very much a response to a particular historical and cultural moment. O’Malley’s final four essays tackle issues of contemporary concern including the celibacy of the priesthood, Catholic education, refusing to administer Eucharist as political protest and the different orders of priesthood that cohabitate and collaborate within the Roman Catholic Church. These seemingly disparate essays serve to emphasize an overarching theme throughout O’Malley’s text. O’Malley’s organizing theme is that the practical realities of contemporary Roman Catholicism have a deep and malleable history. O’Malley is acknowledging that this history and capacity for adaptation enables the Roman Catholic Church to step confidently into the future.
As an evangelical scholar who has spent a fair amount of my theological career in a pontifical institution, I consider myself fairly well versed in O’Malley’s subject matter. Therefore, I was expecting O’Malley’s offering to be a fairly quick read. I was delightfully surprised to discover an engaging historian who readily drew me into a story that was both familiar and insightfully refreshing. Through this collection of essays, O’Malley gives us an accessible and thoughtful history of contemporary Roman Catholicism that is suitable for any interested lay person or for an undergraduate student seeking to understand the role of the papacy or to appreciate the influence of Vatican I and II. Despite being an engrossing read, O’Malley’s work is lacking a robust set of footnotes that would assist a reader to dig further into this important subject matter. This deficiency is regrettable as there is no end to dry academic accounts of these great councils. The other real challenge with O’Malley’s work is that it is written exclusively for the Roman Catholic reader, so other readers may struggle with the language O’Malley freely uses. Despite these issues, O’Malley’s collection is a welcome introduction to some interesting aspects of Roman Catholicism.