Theologians Descend on Trent to Discuss Tradition and Contemporary Culture
(27 Jul 10 – RV) Six hundred theologians from all five continents descended on the
Northern Italian city of Trent this week to discuss “Catholic Theological Ethics in
World Culture”.
With over 50 sessions on topics ranging from family to environmental
protection, from sexuality to good governance, the theologians sought to approach
each issue from the point of view of the Catholic Church tradition in Moral Theology
and contemporary culture.
Theologians of the stature of Italian Archbishop
Bruno Forte, the Archbishop of Munich and Freising Reinhard Marx, chaired sessions
alongside lay men and women theologians from the US Latin America, Asia and Africa.
Jesuit
Priest James Keenan is professor of Theology at Boston College in the US. He is also
the co- chairman of the convention. He pointed out that where once most theologians
were formed in Rome, Paris or Holland, over the past thirty years, major faculties
of theology have arisen in Brazil, the Philippines and India, making meetings such
as this one in Trent an important focal point for Catholic theologians.
Of
the numerous interventions, Fr Keenan highlighted the presentation made by American
Theologian Julie Hanlon Rubio, on Family practise and Archbishop Reinhard Marx’s intervention
on the Future of Moral Theology: “He gave us this discourse about the need to work
with one another to be able to appreciate how social ethics is a deep part of our
own theological tradition and about how we need to get to a moral objectivity that
is really rooted in tradition”.
Fr Keenan noted that there is often tension
between the need to root research in tradition and the need for theologians to engage
with contemporary culture.
Asked about what Pope Benedict XVI has termed
as a “creeping secularism” and his call to address the moral relativism of today’s
society, Fr Keenan said that the notion of relativism “ cuts two ways”.
“We
can have a relativism in which we simply say; ‘what the church once taught in 1548
has never changed and always remains the same’”, which Fr Keenan notes, is not possible.
“There is the relativism of those who want to objectify tradition is such as way that
they want us to be living in the past with rules that do not address some of the contemporary
challenges that we have. So there is a relativism that comes from objectifying the
tradition”.
But then notes Fr Keenan, “there is a relativism that is subjective,
that is very liberal, that is very progressive, that says that tradition can be anything
that I want it to be, that we don’t read the scriptures, that we don’t read tradition
itself. This is another type of relativism. We shouldn’t think that relativism comes
simply from the left, it can also come from the right. What I think a real Church
is looking at, if it wants to be harmonious and integrated, is to really find the
tradition as it needs to be now, in light of what it once was and what it will be”.