All God's People: Catholic Identity After the Second Vatican Council

Normally an archbishop's weekly column in his own personal archdiocesan weekly would not deserve more than the nap it would take to get through it, and the motion towards the wastebasket to "file" it forevermore. Yet this is Milwaukee's Archbishop Rembert Weakland, OSB, and this reprint of his columns from the early and mid Eighties in the Catholic Herald rewards careful reading now, once more, and always. Here republished by the very mainstream and orthodox English-language Roman Catholic Publishing House, the Paulist Press, these columns continue urgently to call to action now, Faithfully, a generation later, even us, the now nodding sleepers. Let us stay and pray one hour more in the Garden with this great and Very Reverend Archbishop. These articles are here divided into four parts. Part One entitled Seeking Catholic Identity in the Church Today explores what it means to be Catholic, as well as various aspects of our ecclesiology: The Church as Institution, as Mystical Communion, as Sacrament, as Herald, as Servant. These are very beautiful and true meditations upon the true charism of the Roman Catholic Church in its fullness as servant of the People of God, as important now to read as The Church With a Human Face: A New and Expanded Theology of Ministry or as Church: The Human Story of God or even The Mission of the Church. This is must-read ecclesiology similar to The Church: The Evolution of Catholicism and Church: The Continuing Quest,. Part Two more expansively and specifically examines various issues encountered along our pilgrimage as Church: Proclamation of the Gospel, Priesthood's call, Religious Life, Children, the Elderly, Our Neighbor, Marriage (and annulments), Abortion, the nature of Sin, the Facts of Life, Religion and nothingness, the occult, Signs in the Skies, Collegiality, the roles of Women in the Church, Cain and Abel, the Nuclear question (Challenge of Peace: God's Promise and Our Response a Pastoral Letter on War and Peace (Publication / Office of Publishing and Promotion Services, U) being released about this time), and teaching. As you can quickly see, there is much here which we can well consider now as our lectio divina, much to pray with, much pastoral worth, much guidance and all the right questions. These issues remain on the front burner today, or must be moved forward from the back. The third section presents a spirituality for the Post-Conciliar Church, looking carefully first at the kinds of Spirituality, including a spirituality for the nuclear age. Then the archbishop writes of our sacred relationship with God, in several aspects, in one of the lengthier sections of this generously portioned book. We read here, among several other sections equally as important, of the command to Love, of Forgiveness, of times we are angry with God, of our Growth in the Faith, of Transformation (a Benedictine charism; the archbishop being former Abbot Primate of the Benedictine Order), of Piety and of so much more. Th