Reviews for The Challenge of Reproductive Medicine at Catholic Universities: Time to Leave the Catacombs

The average rating for The Challenge of Reproductive Medicine at Catholic Universities: Time to Leave the Catacombs based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-11-26 00:00:00 Heath Forrest Hermann Pottmeyer in his book, Towards a Papacy in Communion, begins with the present moment, addressing some fundamental challenges to articulating a truly ecumenical expression of the papal office, including overcoming Catholic and ecumenical presuppositions about the centralized operation of the Petrine ministry. In an effort to provide a systematic historical presentation, Pottmeyer argues that the church has been shaped by two fundamental "paradigms of ecclesial self-consciousness," namely, the church as witness to tradition and the church as interpreter and fashioner of tradition. These two paradigms, along with their differing views of the papacy, contributed to the disputes around the papal-episcopal relationship at Vatican I and Vatican II. This book is a very well researched and presented analysis of those disputes at both councils, how they arose, how the debates were similar and different, and, in response to the late Pope John Paul II's desire to express the Petrine ministry in a meaningful way ecumenically, offers a good persepctive on how in both cases church leaders and theologians came together in a time of crisis to come to a decision rooted in pastoral concern. In spite of this, I do think a major drawback of the book is that there is a clear effort to "harmonize" Vatican I's teaching on universal papal jurisdiction and infallibility with Vatican II's teaching on collegial papal / episcopal authority without dealing with the social influences of the problematic 'maximalist' interpretation of papal infallibility from Vatican I. This does not detract from Pottmeyer's effort to harmonize them, but indicates that a strictly intra-Catholic theologial approach in doing so, and not attending to influences of the maximalist interpretation of Vatican I in other areas of piety, liturgy, and the wider society, represent some key limitations of the work.

Review # 2 was written on 2017-05-25 00:00:00 Frank Marzano This is a very good book written from a former Catholic. His views are straightforward. To be a Catholic you need the Bible and Tradition. At the end of chapters, he has a Q&A. These are simple questions people raise, with the answers contained in the chapter just read. This is a nice way to know what you would read in the chapter as well as to help your research.