Various cultures—English, Turkish, Chinese—claim to have invented the maxim, “The fish rots from the head down” (a favorite in your nation’s capital during the unhappy years when the Redskins/Commanders were owned by Daniel Snyder). Applied to the Church, the idiom suggests that when theology is decadent, bad things will follow in the life of faith. Or, to put it more stringently, intellectually decadent Catholicism (Catholic Lite) inevitably leads to dead Catholicism (Catholic Zero).
Which brings us to the conference on “The Future of Theology,” sponsored by the Vatican’s Dicastery for Culture and Education and held at the Pontifical Lateran University this past December 9–10.
Among the conference’s featured speakers were Fr. James Keenan, S.J., of Boston College, and Dr. Nancy Pineda-Madrid of Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles.
Fr. Keenan came to public attention in 2003 when, in testimony before the Judiciary Committee of the Massachusetts state legislature, he opposed a bill defining marriage as the union of a man and a woman as “contrary to Catholic teaching on social justice” because such a law would constitute “active and unjust discrimination against the basic social rights of gay and lesbian persons.” At the Lateran conference last December, Keenan was reported to have devoted a considerable part of his allotted time to railing against Donald Trump, whose relationship to “the future of theology” is not immediately evident.
Dr. Pineda-Madrid’s faculty page at the LMU website describes her as “a feminist theologian who researches the Latina/x faith experience” and the author of a book “arguing for a fresh theological interpretation of salvation where women’s lives matter.” In June 2024, she was elected president of the Catholic Theological Society of America. But do CTSA theologians represent “the future of theology”?
Evidence for that is not abundant at Dr. Pineda-Madrid’s own university. For while Loyola Marymount counts, at present, 7,094 undergraduates, LMU’s “Institutional Research and Decision Support” website reports that the university awarded one bachelor’s degree in theology in the 2023–2024 academic year. That marked lack of student interest might be explained in part by the faculty page of Dr. Pineda-Madrid’s LMU theology department colleague, Dr. Layla Karst, who offers a seminar entitled “Bad Catholics.” There, students learn from the “voices” of “Feminist theologians, Black and Womanist theologians, Queer theologians, and Eco-theologians” about the “struggle over orthodox belief and right practice that take[s] place under asymmetrical power relations.”
It says something about the current Roman atmosphere of ecclesiastical intimidation that several of those who attended the Lateran conference declined to discuss in detail what was said there, although one brave soul did describe the conference as “vapid.” Irrespective of the theological wokery that framed the conference’s content, however, the imposition of the small group discussion method of “Conversation in the Spirit” on the conference participants guaranteed that there would be no robust exchange of views of the sort that once characterized medieval Catholic universities, where even the most distinguished professors were expected to publicly defend their positions, at length and in-depth, against all comers.
For despite the hype extolling its use at the last two Synods—indeed, based on that experience—“Conversation in the Spirit” is an instrument of manipulation, not a process that yields serious conversation or debate. Participants (some of them brilliant and learned) were given two minutes in “Moment One” to share ideas or reactions to what the principal speakers said to the whole conference; a minute of silence followed; participants got another two minutes to state “what resonated with them most from the contributions shared by others in Moment One” (note: not what they might have thought to be utter nonsense); another minute of silence ensued; and finally, the group’s “secretary and facilitator” concocted “a concise summary to be presented to the assembly.”
If you can imagine serious deliberation on anything emerging from a process in which a human egg timer controls the flow of discussion, well, your imagination is more fertile than mine.
It is absurd to suggest that a creative, evangelically empowering “future of theology” is going to be defined by a stacked deck of major presenters and an infantilizing process. Even worse, though, is that, in certain quarters, this “Conversation in the Spirit” methodology seems to be considered a template for all Catholic deliberative bodies. Might that include, in some minds, the general congregations of cardinals that precede a conclave? Might some even dare to suggest that the conclave itself should be conducted according to the “Conversation in the Spirit” method?
Those concerns were being quietly bruited in Rome last month. As they certainly should be.
George Weigel’s column “The Catholic Difference” is syndicated by the Denver Catholic, the official publication of the Archdiocese of Denver.
George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow of Washington, D.C.’s Ethics and Public Policy Center, where he holds the William E. Simon Chair in Catholic Studies.
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Image by Calu777, via Creative Commons. Image cropped.
