The Spirit of Catholicism
By: Vivian Boland OP
272 Pages
- Hardcover
- ISBN: 9781441178022
- Published By: Bloomsbury Continuum
- Published: January 2022
$28.00
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There is so much debate about the Catholic Church today. How can an institution rocked by scandal survive? The answer is its spirit.
In 1924, Karl Adam's classic work The Spirit of Catholicism caught the zeitgeist and was an international bestseller. The need for a similar book for our times is very urgent and here it is. As now, the privatization and spiritualization of religion was a major issue. Boland stresses however the social, embodied character of Catholicism, a fact he regards as crucial for the social and political situation in which we find ourselves today. We are not just witness to the presence of Christ's body under the form of bread but also to Christ's body as the community of those who have come to believe in Christ. This is the "earthen vessel" in which a treasure is carried and Catholicism acknowledges and celebrates this embodiment. This is the spirit of Catholicism.
Vivian Boland OP is professor aggregatus in the Faculty of Theology at the Angelicum University in Rome. He taught at St Mary’s University, Twickenham, and at Blackfriars Hall, Oxford and is author and editor of several books, including St Thomas Aquinas in the Bloomsbury Library of Educational Thought (2014).