(Vatican Radio) An international conference took place place at the Pontifical Gregorian
University last week focusing on “Revising Lonergan’s anthropology “. Canadian Bernard
Lonergan who was born in 1904 and died in 1984, is a Jesuit most noted for his work
on philosophical and theological method. Author of «Insight: A Study in human Understanding»
and «Method in Theology» he taught at this university from 1953 to 1965.
One
of the speakers at this conference is fellow Jesuit Father Michael Paul Gallagher,
Professor of theology at this same university, whose special contribution to this
conference is a talk by the title of : ‘Lonergan therapy for cultural confusion ’.
Veronica Scarisbrick went round to call on him earlier in the week. This
is what he told her:
" I think we're confused about truth, I think if you
really pushed many people would be hard-put to defend how they believe in God. I
think we're confused about objectivity and subjectivity, Lonergan was brilliantly
clear about this having gone to the foundations.
Again I think we're very confused
over how to read the evil of history, what the source of healing is. Where Lonergan
would see the whole of history, what he calls the dialectic of history, as suffering
from this swing, this pendulum between making a bit of progress and decline, progress
and then decline again ... he specifies how what we have forgotten is the third element:
redemption. We have forgotten how to bring into our thinking about history, about
where history is going, that God is active in this world through us ...":