Papers Invited for the Rahner Consultation in 2012

Jesuit Andreas Batlogg, the Research Director for the Karl Rahner Archiv in Munich, spoke about Karl Rahner's view of the saints at the Annual Convention of the Catholic Theological Society of America at the Fairmont San Jose on June 10, 2011.  Rahner not only viewed them as exemplary figures, Batlogg argued, but also as "subversives."  In other words, their radical commitment to the gospel indicated a world beyond themselves, namely, the world of God's grace.

Batlogg's paper was presented to the "Rahner Consultation" as part of the annual convention of the Catholic Theological Society of America.  Paulette Skiba (Clarke College) convened the session, and Jessica M. Murdoch (Villanova University) moderated it.  Participants were also invited to the Rahner Breakfast on June 11.

Apart from their authentic witness to the Christianity, the lives of the saints contain what Batlogg called "a hidden brisance" or friction.  They rubbed up against the assumptions of the everyday Christian life in their time.  In his paper, entitled How Subversive Are Saints Allowed to Be?, Batlogg probed this hidden brisance.   “How well-behaved,” he asked, must they be to get canonised? Which Saints and Blessed are mentioned by Rahner explicitly and why? What are “anonymous saints”? What can we learn from the Church's Saints?

Mary and the Saints in Rahner

The 2011 Karl Rahner Consultation also featured a paper entitled “Between Center and Periphery: Mary and the Saints in Rahner,” by Peter Joseph Fritz, the Edward Sorin Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Notre Dame, and Assistant Professor at the College of the Holy Cross.

The paper focused on Rahner's Mariology (particularly his 1951 manuscript on Mary's Assumption) and his theology of the saints as exemplifying his overall way of doing theology. Certain moves Rahner made resist fixing a single, stable core for Catholic theology and life, said Fritz. Rahner's approach contrasted with others from Rahner's and our own day. Fritz's paper argued that in avoiding a fixed center of theology and instead setting the center in motion, Rahner enacted Catholicism's constitutive ethos: openness to the numerous facets of God's revelation and various paths toward human fulfillment.

Leo O’Donovan, SJ (Georgetown University) made the third presentation at the Karl Rahner consultation, entitled “Where Are the Saints?  Karl Rahner on Recognizing Holiness in Time and Eternity.” 

The role of saints in the church was a major concern for Karl Rahner throughout his life, said O'Donovan, and he treated the saints from a wide range of viewpoints: their embodiment of God’s promises, their complement to institutional structure, the question of intercessory prayers, etc.  The topic of the saints becomes a prism, said O'Donovan, through which to glimpse the entirety of Rahner's theology.