This overview of de Lubac's work considers his background in French Catholicism at the opening of the twentieth century; the intellectual currents a-swirl in his formative years; his own education in Jesuit institutions; the mosaic of his highly disparate writings, and the broad lines of his ‘career’ as priest and cardinal. This ‘panorama’ is complemented by a proposal, intended to illuminate the ‘mosaic’ referred to: the author's suggestion is that unity – in a variety of analogical senses of that word – constitutes the key to de Lubac's entire enterprise.’

A sacramental ontology, informed by a ressourcement of the Church Fathers, informs the theology of the mid-twentieth-century Catholic movement of nouvelle théologie. Rejecting the neo-Thomist separation between nature and the supernatural, the nouvelle theologians focused on the sacramental presence of supernatural grace in natural realities. To be sure, differences among these ressourcement theologians cannot be denied: de Lubac and Bouillard emphasized the a-scending character of human participation in divine grace, while Balthasar and Chenu stressed the de-scent of the Incarnation into the created realities of time and space. Nonetheless, the four theologians shared a deep appreciation for the Greek Fathers, which enabled them to counter the neo-scholastic separation between nature and the supernatural with a sacramental ontology.

People cannot receive information about philosophy while being themselves dispensed from philosophising, thinking. This requirement is reasonable, since “all men desire to know”. A dualist approach to philosophy and theology obscures that they are the same. Revelation is immanent within the thinking person and grace, pace Thomas, is not extrinsic. Ecumenism, the principle, underpins this. So the philosophy of theology transcends external confessionalism, as does Christian faith itself.

Many authors are hesitant to speak of the Eucharist in the pre-Nicene period and some modern scholarship has attempted to cast doubt on the traditional view that Christ instituted the Eucharist at the Last Supper. This article examines contemporary liturgical studies on the early history of the Eucharist. In light of this it proposes that the traditional view is still the only possibility for an authentic Catholic theology and that liturgical history is, in fact, part of the discipline of Church history that cannot be confused with secular methods of the historical sciences. In this sense, the history of the Eucharist and its later developments must be studied in a manner that acknowledges Providence and the work of the Holy Spirit in the history of the Church. In particular the crystallization of the early “shape” of the liturgy must be understood to be a fundamental element of the divine institution of the Church and not merely a chance selection of one tradition of Eucharistic worship from many equally valid options.

Given the reputation of Bernard Lonergan as a thinker, whose philosophical discourse is about intentionality and the seamless connection of cognitional theory, epistemology, and metaphysics, and whose self-confessed role in theology is to generate a method that meets the exigencies of a world that is on the move and culturally diverse, the article tells the story of his contribution to economic theory, and how this effort occupied both the beginning and the end of his mind's journey. There occurs, of course, the question about how these interests are related, and the key to the answer is found in the motto of Leo XIII, where the vetera imply especially Aquinas’ clear vision of the meaning of being human, and the nova include responses to the two-fold challenge emergent in both the object (to promote genuine development in the economic order) and the subject (to work out a coherent explanation of the structure of the human good).