Theological Studies

This essay challenges the claim that the practice of Mass intentions is a “Germanic” distortion, foreign to the biblical and patristic tradition. It frames the development of Mass intentions not as a decline narrative but as a natural outworking of the biblical witness to prayer as a divine-human synergy, tracing this development through Augustine, Dionysius the Areopagite, Carolingian liturgical legislation, and Thomas Aquinas.

This essay reassesses the life and legacy of the Salvadoran martyr and saint Óscar Romero, focusing on his relationship to liberation theology. Drawing on his writings before and after becoming archbishop in 1977, I argue that the theological category of liberation forms a consistent thread in Romero’s theology from the early 1970s onward, and that his theology of liberation continues to deepen over the remainder of the decade. In Romero’s mature thought, God’s liberative work centers on forming Christian liberators conformed to Christ’s love—a vision that invites renewed reflection on liberation theology as a diverse and contested tradition.

This article is a critical examination of the Second Vatican Council’s teaching on doctrinal development contained in Dei Verbum 8. Through a survey of preconciliar theological appeals to experience, and by an examination of the conciliar Acta, the article argues that the council’s inclusion of the category of experience was based on a well-trodden Scholastic theological tradition on connatural experience linked to the gifts of the Holy Spirit, and that the textual amendments sought to eliminate a Modernist understanding of experience and revelation. The article seeks to contribute constructively to ongoing fundamental-theological discourse on revelation and doctrinal development.

The idea of American exceptionalism has been present through much of American history. But the idea is often abstracted: The character and purpose of the United States are rendered as timeless and glorified attributes apart from the sinfulness and limits of history. In this response to Thomas Massaro’s essay, I examine the historicized nature of the idea in both a spirit of criticism and construction. If Catholic social ethics is to contribute to a renewal of the idea of American exceptionalism, it must do so in an historicized and contextual key.