The article presents interventions by certain expert-consultants (periti) just before and during Vatican II’s opening weeks in 1962. Discovering mediocrity in passages of the prepared schemas on God’s revelation, Joseph Ratzinger, Pieter Smulders, Karl Rahner, and Jean Daniélou formulated criticisms and framed alternatives that this article reviews. In time, several key conceptions of their alternative

Although the much-postponed subject of papal primacy in the ecumenical dialogue between the Catholic and the Orthodox Churches finally got to a formal start in 2007, it was set in a wider framework of synodality or conciliarity. Thus the Roman primacy is theologically twinned with the ecumenical councils. In this context the article draws attention

Responding to a question of Pope John Paul II on what light evolution can throw on creation in the image of God, this article first considers how the creation of humanity in the image and likeness of God (Gen 1:26–27) has been variously understood. It then examines how sociobiology seeks to explain the origin and

The author argues that humans have a right to beauty, and that the poor, often immersed in ugliness, have a particular and urgent need for and claim upon this right. Beauty provides a contemplative and self-transcending rest essential to human flourishing, while the encounter with beauty enables human persons to realize their vocation as cocreators.

More detailed than preceding social encyclicals, Pope Benedict XVI’s Caritas in veritate appears to supply a theological foundation for the Catholic Church’s social doctrine. The article argues that the theological anthropology contained in the encyclical (which leads to a notable revaluation of the role of grace) complements Joseph Ratzinger’s life-long reflections on the relationship between

Benedict’s first encyclical, Deus caritas est, assigned political work to the laity and restricted the Catholic Church’s social activities to charity. Benedict’s Word Christology, presented in Jesus of Nazareth, coheres with his longstanding vision of a countercultural Church centered in Europe. Caritas in veritate envisions the Church and its representatives as advocates for global justice.

Providing a critical reading of Pope Benedict’s Caritas in veritate from an African perspective, the note examines several key issues in the encyclical to determine their relevance to the situation of development and underdevelopment in Africa. The note also points out some omissions and troubling situations regarding the role of women in development and the

Caritas in veritate collapses distinctions in Catholic moral theology between “social issues” and “life issues.” This note examines Pope Benedict XVI’s “pro-life environmentalism” and the underlying assumptions concerning the meaning of freedom, the contours of nature, and the significance of sexual differentiation on which the pope relies. While the encyclical powerfully critiques liberal Western preoccupation

Spe salvi emphasizes the difference between eschatological and secular hope, but does not adequately articulate their connection. Drawing on Aquinas, the article advances arguments that spell out the connection between eschatological and secular hope. Secular hopes not only participate in eschatological hope but are its means of realization. Aquinas’s biblical reflections on the law and

Recent provocative reinterpretations of Karl Rahner’s theology illustrate the hermeneutical challenge of retrieving his achievement for a new era. The spectrum of positions is exemplified by Karen Kilby, Patrick Burke, and Philip Endean. The essay proposes an alternative interpretive scheme attentive to Rahner’s metaphoric logic.