The nine essays on ecclesiology found in this volume in honor of Fr. Thomas F. O'Meara, OP, were first presented during a symposium in September 2014. That meeting was marked both by its high level of theological conversation regarding the past and future of Roman Catholic ecclesiology, and by its deep sense of gratitude to O'Meara for his intellectual service to the academy, to the Christian churches, and to many of the scholars there gathered. The editors, Richard Gaillardetz and Edward Hahnenberg, and the two other organizers of that gathering, Stephen Bevans and Vincent Miller, are to be commended for bringing these scholars together, both in 2014 and now in this collection of essays.
The essays are organized in three parts. Part 1, “A Church of Missionary Disciples,” includes essays by Stephen Bevans, SVD, on the missionary nature of the church and a “missionary ecclesiology”; and by Paul Lakeland, on demography, apostolicity, and the possibilities of a kenotic ecclesiology. Two strong essays comprise part 2, “Church and Culture.” The first is Natalia Imperatori-Lee's challenging essay on Latino/a theology and the future of the church in the United States and beyond; its central location in the volume conveniently exemplifies her argument that Latino/a reality must be as central to contextual US ecclesiology as it has always been, whether noticed or not, to the history of the Catholic Church in this country. Vincent Miller's essay relates the history of Catholic treatments of “culture” in Gaudium et Spes and the postconciliar period. In today's new “media ecology,” he argues, the challenge for the church in relation to culture is not homogenization of culture, as feared in the 1960s, but fragmentation of culture, “in which sectarianism is the default stance” (80).
Part 3, “Ecclesiological Openings,” is the longest section of the book, comprised of five chapters: Richard Gaillardetz writes on power, authority, and the exercise of authoritative teaching; Mary Ann Hinsdale, IHM, discusses gender complementarity as “the issue under the issues” in postconciliar ecclesiology; Susan Wood, SCL, provides a liturgical ecclesiology rooted in a liturgical theology of the assembled community; Edward Hahnenberg points to ministerial anomalies as a key for understanding future forms of ministry; and Michael Fahey, SJ, gives a masterful survey of the history of ecumenism and points to its future in forms of receptive ecumenism.
As might be expected with such a collection of accomplished, thorough scholars, each of these essays stands alone as an important contribution to future ecclesiological discourse. The book as a whole would make an excellent source for an upper-level undergraduate or graduate course in ecclesiology, as well as for the educated lay reader. It meets and exceeds one standard for evaluation of a collected volume, therefore—there are no weak essays, no “duds,” but nine examples of creative, substantive scholarship.
It is more difficult to trace the unifying thread of the volume as a whole. The editors are correct in noting that the unity of the volume is “the shared conviction that Catholic ecclesiology cannot remain closed in on itself” (xv), and in that sense the “church with open doors” of the book's title may be all the work needs. But one also gets the impression that the authors have opened doors in a number of different directions at the same time; rather than ecclesiology en conjunto, a method of Latino/a theology highlighted by Imperatori-Lee, this is more ecclesiology en paralelo. In that sense one can see the limitations of the genre of the collected volume. While contemporary ecclesiology may, thankfully, have moved beyond the model of the single volume De ecclesia written from the limited viewpoint of a single theologian, we have not yet found the forms for a successful collaborative ecclesiology. Nevertheless, these essays, and the conference from which they arose, provide an excellent foundation for further development of such an ecclesiology, and perhaps it will be in the classroom use of the essays and of the work as a whole that a dialogical Catholic ecclesiology for the third millennium will continue to take shape.
