Word: boffs
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...challenged traditional dogmas about both the nature of Christ and the authority of bishops and priests. Kung was forbidden to teach as a Roman Catholic theologian, and Schillebeeckx's writings are still being examined. Last week the Vatican announced a disciplinary step against another scholar, Franciscan Father Leonardo Boff, 46, Brazil's leading advocate of liberation theology. It ordered him not to publish, lecture or edit religious journals for an unspecified period, presumably one year...
...liberation theologians like Brazil's Boff, the base communities are also the true pillars of a church-to-be--as he puts it, the "church being born from the faith of the poor." Boff's views provide a theological underpinning for the so-called Church of the People, a grass-roots vision of Catholicism that sees the base communities as a separate source of spiritual inspiration for the faithful--an alternative, in other words, to the inspiration of Rome...
Last September Boff was invited to Rome for a discussion with Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, head of the Vatican's watchdog Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Boff recalls the four-hour meeting as "cordial--Ratzinger mainly just sat and listened." The cordiality may have been influenced by the presence at the Vatican of two of Brazil's most influential Cardinals, Paulo Evaristo Arns, Archbishop of Sao Paulo, and Aloisio Lorscheider, Archbishop of Fortaleza, who accompanied Boff on his trip...
...Boff's escort underlined the delicacy of the meeting, and perhaps even signaled to the Pope the need for compromise in dealing with the liberation theology issue. In Boff's case, the Vatican's concern was that if the friar took a defiant stand, he might gain further support from important elements of the Brazilian church, turning a disciplinary action into a no-retreat showdown...
...tensions and maneuvers that accompanied the Boff and Gutierrez affairs are quite likely to continue. However successful the Pope has been so far in fixing the limits of church orthodoxy, an informed Jesuit in Rome acknowledges that "the church in Latin America is changing, and everyone accepts that a long-term process has begun." For the Supreme Pontiff, the task of defining liberation also may be a long...