Catholic Theology, TraceyRowland, Bloomsbury, 2017 (ISBN 978‐0‐567‐03439‐7), vi + 282 pp., pb £16.99

Adequately treating the key method(s), thinkers, concepts, events, and developments in Catholic theological reflection is a tall order for any expert. This task grows even more overwhelming for bemused theology students sitting in lectures given by different scholars tacitly using different methods and drawing different conclusions. In Catholic Theology, Prof. Tracey Rowland demystifies this problem by contrasting four approaches to contemporary Catholic Theology and distinguishes them by identifying the canonical authors and conclusions for each approach. In her own words, Rowland provides a guide ‘primarily for the millennial generation of Catholic scholars, as an aid to identifying the different species of theologians they are likely to encounter in their academic “zoos”’ (p. 207). As the Catholic ‘zookeeper’, Rowland attempts to preserve an endangered theological species from extinction, keeping carnivores apart from herbivores in an uncouth way at times to entertain visitors. This herculean roadmap depicting various Catholic theological methods is daunting, but Rowland ventures this task for readers by limiting the focus of her treatment to theological developments after the end of the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965) until the election of Pope Francis. With broad strokes, Rowland presents the four approaches as responding to ‘the Enlightenment project’ in concert with a wider philosophical context that influences them: Rationalism, Romanticism, and Critical Theory. Although Rowland avoids using labels like conservative, liberal, or radical in this book, one does not have to dig too far beneath the surface to notice that the four approaches of Thomist, Communio, Concilium, and Liberation Theology still can map on to such labels given her presentation of them. The central framing questions that each of the four approaches grapple with are (1) What happened at Vatican II?; (2) How should Catholic theologians respond to the process of secularization?; (3) What is the purpose of the Church in the (post)modern age?; (4) What is the purpose of Theology?; and (5) What is the role of the Pope? To see how each approach answers these questions, we must take a brief tour through Rowland's ‘zoo’. In the first chapter, Rowland provides a summary of the relevant positions taken up in various documents of the International Theological Commission despite the fact that ‘these documents do not carry the weight of magisterial authority’ (p. 7). For Rowland, this is home base for the confused theology undergraduate seeking the proper balance between nature and grace, faith and reason, history and dogma, theory and practice, Scripture and Tradition. In Chapter Two, Rowland introduces the reader to Thomism, which represents ‘the most significant’ approach in Catholic Theology with the largest number of subspecies (p. 43). Like Adam in the Garden, Rowland gives them names: Classical, Baroque, Leonine, Neo-, Strict Observance, Transcendental, Whig, Analytical, Lublin, Fribourg, Toulouse, River Forest, Laval, Existential, Christocentric, Augustinian, Romantic, and finally, Postmodern. This classification has proliferated significantly since Rowland's earlier book Culture and the Thomist Tradition: After Vatican II (Routledge, 2003). However, each label is meant to represent a different creature within the approach that seeks to articulate the views of St. Thomas Aquinas. Rowland attempts to simplify matters by grouping them together as three developmental ‘streams’ that broadly emphasize, respectively, Cartesian metaphysics, Kantian epistemology, and historical exegesis (pp. 53–54). As one might guess, it is not until stream three that the historical Thomas gets excavated and distinguished from a propositional reduction of the ‘Baroque’ positions of Cajetan and Suárez and the ‘Leonine’ positions of Zigliara, Lepidi, Curci, d'Azeglio, Liberatore, and Kleutgen. It is unfortunate that Rowland does not spend much time introducing the individual Leonine Thomists but instead hastily summarizes Alasdair MacIntyre's view of them (p. 50). In Chapter Three, we read about the journal Communio that becomes Rowland's shorthand for ‘The trio Ratzinger, de Lubac, and Balthasar’ (and Milbank) who represent the critical approach to ‘modernity from an explicitly Christocentric Trinitarian perspective and find it wanting, rather than seeking to correlate the faith to contemporary cultural fashions and idioms’ (p. 64). It is unfortunate that this attractive theological perspective is only asserted and not sketched out for the reader, especially for these theologians who engaged so seriously with ‘modern’ thinkers. As an aside, it is difficult to see how Rowland's presentation of stream-three Thomism differs from her presentation of the Communio approach in places (pp. 118–119). Yet Rowland does try to distinguish between the ‘High Church Anglicans’ in Radical Orthodoxy from the ‘Catholic’ Communio approach. For Rowland, although there is great overlap between them in what they oppose (Liberal politics, Kantian rationality, extrinsicist accounts of nature and grace, and accommodation of the faith to modernity), the greatest difference is ‘the theological significance of gender differences’ (p. 126). This difference enables Rowland to introduce Angelo Scola's ‘nuptial mystery’ approach to ‘Trinitarian Ontology’, ‘Christocentric theological anthropology’, and ecclesiology ‘without introducing sexuality into God himself’ (p. 130). It is clear that the Communio approach (endorsing the presumably uniform positions of Ratzinger, Balthasar, de Lubac, and Milbank) is Rowland's preference; however, one should not have to rely so heavily upon summaries by Cardinals to do the work of clarifying the clunky theological labels ascribed to these thinkers. One might begin to worry that the enthusiasm for the ‘mythopoesis’ of Tolkien and Lewis is starting to out narrate rather than supplement dogmatic theology (p. 123). For those not interested in hopping on ‘the de Lubac-Balthasar bus’, Rowland introduces ‘the Rahner-Schillebeeckx bus’ as an alternative (p. 190). In Chapter Four, we learn about the journal Concilium that becomes Rowland's shorthand for ‘the Dutch trend’ that privileged praxis over theory during the 1960s and 1970s in the work of ‘Leuven-Nijmegen theologians’ – an approach that Rowland earlier referred to pejoratively as ‘a quintessentially Protestant mental habit’ (p. 133) and ‘the Hinduization of the faith’ (p. 134). Rowland claims that ‘Rahner (unlike Ratzinger, Balthasar, or de Lubac) was generally positive about modernity’, and he thought of ‘modernity as something “here to stay” to which Catholics would have to adjust themselves, rather than adopting a countercultural stance’ (p. 64). Rowland argues that Communio and Concilium representatives differed in their understanding of ‘dialogue with the world’ – the former defined it as conversion of the world, whereas the latter defined it as conversion of the Church (p. 153). In Rowland's view, the Concilium approach to dialogue – chiefly represented in the writings of Schillebeeckx and subsequently in the writings of Lieven Boeve – wrongly presumes that the Church might learn something from the world that she has not already received from Revelation (p. 154). Rowland also observes that the Communio view of the development of doctrine is to make explicit that which is implicit in the deposit of faith, which does not involve an extrinsic addition (p. 160). Following Metz and Lyotard, Rowland presents Boeve as arguing that ‘narratives are interrupted and recontextualised by changing social conditions’ and the ‘Catholic faith is but one narrative among a plurality of narratives’, which remains open and not closed (p. 161). To this, Rowland retorts that ‘Christianity makes no sense at all, is not worth any bother at all, unless it is the master narrative’– that is, ‘the faith in an unadulterated form, handing on the same faith in the twenty-first century as they claim their forefathers received in the twentieth, tenth, fifth, and so on, receding back to the Apostles’ (p. 165). In Chapter Five, Rowland observes how feminist hermeneutics, Critical Theory, and Marxism endorsed in the Concilium approach eventually shaped Liberation Theology in the 1970s. Rowland argues that Liberation Theology is really a ‘product of the European intelligentsia planted in the countries of Latin America by priests who had been sent to Europe for their postgraduate studies’ (p. 167). Moreover, Rowland entertains the suspicion that Liberation Theology was ‘born in the KGB’ as a tool of revolution (p. 170). The dog-whistling McCarthyism is on full display here and grafts on neatly to Rowland's portrayal of Joseph Ratzinger's spat with Leonardo Boff in 1985 (p. 176). Although Pope Francis appears in the title of this chapter, what is said about him is disappointing to say the least. Rowland does try to distinguish Francis from the exotic version of Liberation Theology with what she calls ‘Argentinian People's Theology’, which has its roots in Marxist theory and German National Socialism (p. 182). Instead of taking the opportunity to link Francis to the legacy of Vatican II, Rowland associates him with a populist movement called ‘Peronizing Liberation Theology’, which is ‘less Marxist, but more Nationalist, and less intellectual’ (p. 184). Anyone who has read Rowland's two previous books dedicated to Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI will not be surprised by Rowland's fondness for ‘a world-class scholar to whom Oxbridge types could relate’ (p. 126). Referring to Francis, Rowland says ‘When a person says that he can't imagine anything more boring than Fundamental Theology, it is not likely that his publications will be full of treasure to be mined for a book on how to do theology’ (p. 192). Rowland concludes this book by revisiting the Amoris Laetitia (2016) controversy over Francis opening up the synod debates about giving Communion to the divorced and remarried, ‘which would alter 2,000 years of Tradition’ and be ‘inconsistent with the teaching of Scripture’, and ‘strongly opposed by both of his papal predecessors’ (p. 196). Rowland worries about the damage that might be caused by ‘the change of language from “morally disordered” or “mortally sinful” to an “irregular situation”’ in ‘the very ambivalent footnote 351’ (p. 198). Rowland speculates that ‘a pastoral crisis may arise if the lay faithful and their priests have to choose between the judgments of two popes (John Paul II and Benedict XVI) on the one side, and a third pope (Pope Francis) on the other’ (p. 199). This worry – which Rowland cribbed from the syndicated columnist Ross Douthat (p. 197) – bears a similarity to what she disparaged in Schillebeeckx's view of the papacy as a ‘“regulator” of the use of theological language and as a decision-making authority’ (p. 151). Moreover, in parroting the newspaper columnist, Rowland overlooks the fact that the synod is ‘a binding and authoritative teaching organ’ like a Council, comprised of ‘a body of duly ordained bishops convoked by a duly elected pope’ working together collegially ‘for the good of the church’, which ‘has at its disposal the full range of Catholic theologians and theological opinion on a world-wide basis’ – as John O'Malley rightly observes in his judicious reply to Douthat (America, 29 October 2014). Rowland also misses the deeper significance of the need for the Church's synodical reflection to mature without fear, which Pope Francis (rightly, I think) has highlighted during his papacy. Besides, the emphasis of Pope Francis on collegiality is not an intellectual weakness but rather reflects what Ratzinger described as a theological highlight of Vatican II. To be honest, I had hoped for more historical and theological nuance in this book written by a distinguished member of the International Theological Commission. Was it not Henri de Lubac who warned theologians of the misfortune that awaited those who learned their catechism against someone else? Readers wanting to introduce students to Catholic Theology as an intellectual tradition should consult Catholic Theology: An Introduction (Wiley-Blackwell, 2016) edited by Frederick Bauerschmidt and James Buckley.

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