Power and Peril: The Catholic Church at the Crossroads

Jay Newman is a professor of philosophy at the University of Guelph. His
most recently published work is Biblical Religion and Family Values: A
Problem in the Philosophy of Culture (2001).

Michael W. Higgins and Douglas R. Letson are affiliated with St. Jerome
University at the University of Waterloo. In this overly ambitious
study, they endeavour to address all the main problems of the Roman
Catholic Church. They strive to “make sense of the past, account for
the present, and dream for the future.” Higgins and Letson are good
writers with a substantial knowledge of Roman Catholic theology and
church history, but their analytic approach in this volume rapidly
swings back and forth between the journalistic and the academic. They
have a special interest in the Church in Canada, but this focus is
rarely sustained for long. They seem to be trying to steer a middle
course between disloyal radicals and ignorant reactionaries, but what
they offer in the way of practical wisdom is alternately bland,
arbitrary, or both. The book contains chapters on Vatican politics,
Catholic health care and education, sexual and family issues,
clericalism, and recent, inspirational forms of Roman Catholic
spirituality. Although the authors recurrently distance themselves from
inconstant progressivist Catholics, they periodically seem to take too
much upon themselves in explaining what John Paul II really meant and
suggesting what he might do well to be saying.

Given the often puerile or bigoted manner in which Roman Catholic ideas
and practices are routinely treated throughout a large part of the
Canadian media, we may agree with the authors that there is a need for
accessible but informed works that address the major problems of the
Church in Canada and the rest of the world. However, this particular
volume has not been carefully enough conceived, and the quality of the
analysis is disconcertingly uneven. This is particularly regrettable
inasmuch as the authors are obviously intelligent and knowledgeable.
They are probably at their best in the final chapter, where they provide
moving portraits of such visionary Catholics as Henri Nouwen and Thomas
Merton. They may be at their worst when they endorse Cardinal Dulles’s
remark that “commitment to the Church is a normal prerequisite for
competently criticizing the Church.”