Author Description

"In his classic 1947 work, Catholicism, the Jesuit theologian Henri de Lubac sought to present a picture of Catholicism, not as a body of dogmas or a set of institutional structures, but as a living social organism that "grows under the action of a single life-force" and whose "scope remains God's secret" (de Lubac 1988, 47). Confronted with a Church grown defensive in the face of modern Western culture, a Church that deployed its doctrines and structures to fend off a hostile world, de Lubac sought to remind his readers that the doctrines and structures of the Church are not ends in themselves, much less weapons, but rather are part of a dynamic social process that we might call "being Catholic." This activity of being Catholic is the subject of the Companion"--