The Silencing of Leonardo Boff: The Vatican and the Future of World Christianity

by Harvey Cox

Book Overview

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0940989352
• ISBN13: 9780940989351
• Release Date: January 1988
• Publisher: Meyer Stone Books
• Length: 208 Pages
• Weight: 0.50 lbs.

Customer Reviews

When good churches go bad, OR when bad things happen to good theologians

For a comprehensive view of these darkening days tenty years ago, and an understanding of the forces at play, please read this work in companionship with the Reverend Father Charles Curran's Faithful Dissent and Loyal Dissent: Memoir of a Catholic Theologian (Moral Traditions) and the Reverend Father Schillebeeckx's Schillebeeckx Case, etc., and the Reverend Father Hans Kung's Why I Am Still a Christian and the several others in this vein such as the ever excellent Peter Hebblethwaite's The New Inquisition? The Case of Edward Schillebeeckx and Hans Kung and those of other such subjects of the eighties. Discover how our Church on the brink of leaping as did Saint Paul across the river to Asia Minor to bring the Gospel to the whole world, and become truly a world religion, instead retreated into a much diminished and restrictive silent pre-conciliar Polish National parish and now tightly centralized corporation with hand picked rubber stamp legislature. This too shall pass. Why I am still and ever Catholic, hiding out with our "preferential option for the poor," learning and living the truths of our Faith among our most unlettered. Harvey Cox, Protestant professor of theology at the Harvard School of Divinity, world-renowned author of The Secular City, here writes his take as an independent (and thus not subject to silencing and interrogations) yet informed and sympathetic observor, discerning certain signs of the times in the Eternal City of the eighties, and in Brazil. Here he weaves a brilliant tapestry from many perspectives, including inside the Vatican and Petropolis, etc., whose warp and woof is nevertheless occassionally jarringly interrupted by a stylistic pebble in the thread, such as an inexact adjective (the term gothic for example is normally associated with the present Pope, and principal of this gothic tale,'s native Bavaria and not with the first centuries of our Church) or the superficial understanding of an outsider straining to understand. Nevertheless, as a trained academic, Professor Cox does his homework completely and well, doing much research and travel, reading where we might not read, and interviewing all of the players, including the then prefect Ratzinger. Unfortunately his report of that interview consists of telling us the questions he wished he had asked had he not been so intimidated by the inquisitiotnal odor. However Cox does manage here one of the best and most complete analyses available of the infamous Ratzinger Report: An Exclusive Interview on the State of the Church, interviews done with the vacationing prefect just prior to his interrogation of the Reverend Father Leonardo Boff. On the twentieth anniversary of the publication of this work, therefore, we do well to revisit her in order to understand our present coyuntura, much as Cox's Secular City was also once, or twice, Revisited. The theological reflection is excellent, and the second half of the book, once the narrative of Boff is handled, is engro

Church politics exposed.

"Takes the reader behind the scenes of the silencing of Leonardo Boff (a Latin American priest/theologian) into the chamber of the Prefect and the cloister of the Friar and into the mindsets of Joseph Ratzinger and Leonardo Boff. This is not just a religious book with a parochial interest but a treatise that any who wants to stay abreast of social and political developments in the world must read" -- Ignacio Castuera (from the back cover of the book) Includes a great exposition of the character of Boff's thought and theology! Really good stuff.