{"id":172,"date":"2007-09-12T16:54:55","date_gmt":"2007-09-12T16:54:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2007\/09\/investigating.html"},"modified":"2007-09-12T16:54:55","modified_gmt":"2007-09-12T16:54:55","slug":"investigating","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/09\/investigating.html","title":{"rendered":"Investigating"},"content":{"rendered":"

John Allen has some breaking\u00a0Georgetown theologian-bishop-CDF type\u00a0news:<\/a>
\n<\/p>\n

B<\/strong><\/font>oth the Vatican and the U.S. bishops are investigating a book by a prominent American Catholic theologian, Vietnam-born Fr. Peter Phan of Georgetown University. The book raises issues about the uniqueness of Christ and the church, issues that were also behind recent censures of other high-profile theologians, as well as a recent Vatican declaration that the fullness of the Christian church resides in Catholicism alone.
\nThe case confirms that no subject is of greater doctrinal concern for church authorities, including Pope Benedict XVI, than what they see as \u201creligious relativism,\u201d meaning the impression that Christ is analogous to other religious figures such as the Buddha, or that Christianity is one valid spiritual path among others.
\nCritics of writers such as Phan, who offer a positive theological evaluation of non-Christian religions, assert that their work courts confusion on these points, while others believe church authorities are drawing the borders of theological discussion too narrowly.
\nPhan, a priest of the Dallas diocese, is a former president of the Catholic Theological Society of America. The book in question is Phan\u2019s 2004 Being Religious Interreligiously<\/em>, published by Orbis.
\nSources who asked not to be identified said that Phan received a July 2005 letter from the Vatican\u2019s Congregation for the Doctrine for the Faith signed by Archbishop Angelo Amato, the congregation\u2019s number two official. It presented 19 observations under six headings, charging that Phan\u2019s book \u201cis notably confused on a number of points of Catholic doctrine and also contains serious ambiguities.\u201d
\nThe letter said the book is in tension with the 2000 Vatican document Dominus Iesus<\/em>, which states that non-Christians are \u201cin a gravely deficient situation in comparison with those who, in the church, have the fullness of the means of salvation.\u201d
\nThe congregation asked Phan to write an article correcting the problems identified in Amato\u2019s letter, and to instruct Orbis not to reprint his book. Phan wrote back in April 2006 offering to comply under certain conditions, and, according to sources, to date has not had a response.
\nLast May, Bishop William Lori of Bridgeport, Conn., chair of the Committee on Doctrine for the U.S. bishops, also wrote Phan to indicate that the Vatican had asked his committee to examine the book, and that it wanted Phan to respond to an enclosed three-page set of observations. Lori indicated that the committee \u201cfeels obliged to publish its own statement.\u201d
\nIn a subsequent letter dated June 20, Lori indicated that his committee\u2019s examination is separate from that of the Vatican.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Sherry Weddell of the Siena Institute comments:<\/a><\/p>\n

My initial concern with Phan’s work was staggeringly bad history and worse statistics. Phan’s ahistorical reading of contemporary Christian missions systemically ignored massively documented realities like the explosive growth of Christianity in the third world which a casual reader could uncover with a 60 second Google search.
\nI knew that it was almost certainly theology that was driving this strange obtuseness on Phan’s part because “missionary failure” would enable him to portray his theological positions as “realism” – the stoic acceptance<\/span> of the fact that Asians had voted with their feet and rejected Christianity en masse – rather than an ideology that he was asserting in the teeth of overwhelming evidence that Asia (especially China) is on the verge of becoming one of the evangelizing dynamos of the Christian world.
\nSo I’m relieved that serious questions are being raised at the highest level about the theological issues behind the lousy missiology.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

John Allen has some breaking\u00a0Georgetown theologian-bishop-CDF type\u00a0news:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-172","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-religion"],"yoast_head":"\nInvestigating - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/09\/investigating.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Investigating - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"John Allen has some breaking\u00a0Georgetown theologian-bishop-CDF type\u00a0news:\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/09\/investigating.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2007-09-12T16:54:55+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"awelborn\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"Investigating - Via Media","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/09\/investigating.html","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"Investigating - Via Media","og_description":"John Allen has some breaking\u00a0Georgetown theologian-bishop-CDF type\u00a0news:","og_url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/09\/investigating.html","og_site_name":"Via Media","article_published_time":"2007-09-12T16:54:55+00:00","author":"awelborn","twitter_card":"summary_large_image","schema":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/09\/investigating.html","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/09\/investigating.html","name":"Investigating - Via Media","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/#website"},"datePublished":"2007-09-12T16:54:55+00:00","dateModified":"2007-09-12T16:54:55+00:00","author":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/#\/schema\/person\/aea2dcda1635c9c2d6030d9c7595725a"},"breadcrumb":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/09\/investigating.html#breadcrumb"},"inLanguage":"en-US","potentialAction":[{"@type":"ReadAction","target":["https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/09\/investigating.html"]}]},{"@type":"BreadcrumbList","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/09\/investigating.html#breadcrumb","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"Investigating"}]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/#website","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/","name":"Via Media","description":"Amy Welborn","potentialAction":[{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/?s={search_term_string}"},"query-input":{"@type":"PropertyValueSpecification","valueRequired":true,"valueName":"search_term_string"}}],"inLanguage":"en-US"},{"@type":"Person","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/#\/schema\/person\/aea2dcda1635c9c2d6030d9c7595725a","name":"awelborn","image":{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/#\/schema\/person\/image\/","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-content\/wphb-cache\/gravatar\/9f2\/9f2100183464289fedc5b8a621c15110x96.jpg","contentUrl":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-content\/wphb-cache\/gravatar\/9f2\/9f2100183464289fedc5b8a621c15110x96.jpg","caption":"awelborn"},"description":"Amy Welborn was born in 1960, the only child of a now-retired professor of political science, a teacher-librarian-artist mother,deceased since 2001, was a teacher, librarian and artist. The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=172"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=172"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=172"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=172"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}