Profiles in courage

PROFILES IN COURAGE: Most of the contemporary Catholic theologians profiled in the October issue of Theology Today--Jacques Maritain, Henri de Lubac, Bernard Lonergan, John Courtney Murray, Karl Rahner, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Edward Schillebeeckx and Joseph Ratzinger--were at one point considered controversial and worked under a cloud of suspicion.

Fergus Kerr, a Dominican who introduces these profiles, argues that "they belonged to a generation of Catholic theologians who believed that there would be no new life in the Christian body without participation in the Passion of Christ. Amazing as this may seem to us now, [these] theologians ... regarded their suffering, both physical and intellectual (inflicted by church authorities), as a necessary element in their vocation." One of the group, Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI), experienced initial rejection of his dissertation at the University of Munich because it was judged to be academically defective and to betray a "dangerous modernism." With revision, however, it was eventually approved.

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