Originally published at National Catholic Register
COMMENTARY: It says something about the current Roman atmosphere of ecclesiastical intimidation that several of those who attended this Lateran conference declined to discuss in detail what was said there.
Various cultures — English, Turkish, Chinese — claim to have invented the maxim, “The fish rots from the head down” (a favorite in Your Nation’s Capital during the unhappy years when the Redskins/Commanders were owned by Daniel Snyder).
Applied to the Catholic Church, the idiom suggests that when theology is decadent, bad things will follow in the life of faith. Or, to put it more stringently, intellectually decadent Catholicism (Catholic Lite) inevitably leads to dead Catholicism (Catholic Zero).
Which brings us to the conference on “The Future of Theology,” sponsored by the Vatican’s Dicastery for Culture and Education and held at the Pontifical Lateran University this past Dec. 9-10.
Among the conference’s featured speakers were Jesuit Father James Keenan of Boston College and Nancy Pineda-Madrid of Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles.
Father Keenan came to public attention in 2003 when, in testimony before the Judiciary Committee of the Massachusetts State Legislature, he opposed a bill defining marriage as the union of a man and a
