Thomas Rausch, Emeritus Professor of Catholic Theology at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, wrote a book entitled Holy Blasphemies, certainly a curious name for a book in Christian Systematic Theology.  What he meant are “questions we are reluctant to raise with other Christians though we often find ourselves asking them in the privacy of our own hearts” (Introduction).  In other words, when most Roman Catholics over the age of 50 were told the meaning of basic Christian beliefs, we accepted them without qualification.  Many Roman Catholic under the age of 40 are not so sure.  Western culture is now heavily influenced by scientific method and empirical investigation.

Rausch’s choice in this era of postmodern Catholicism is to reflect on his own classroom debates with students about difficult issues or to rethink his own comments from the pulpit on various Scripture passages. Here he has done a fine job.  In 23 well written chapters he reviews current research on the Christian tradition in the following broad areas: God and Creation, Christ and His Body, Prayer and Worship, and Discipleship.  Effectively he shifted his  emphasis from “substance” to “system” for the examination of physical reality, a point already made by natural scientists. The danger in this appeal to one’s own experience is that it can readily slide over into ad hoc arguments  that lack rational consistency with one another.  In my judgment, what Catholic systematic theology really needs is instead a new rational underpinning or metaphysics with which to deal with possible counter-arguments from the scientists. Aquinas, after all, took the same risk in adapting Aristotelian metaphysics to explain Catholic doctrine.