 So, good afternoon, I'm John Thiel, Professor of Religious Studies here at Fairfield University. Welcome to our panel discussion devoted to the career, long work of our colleague and friend Paul Lakeland, who stands on the cusp of retirement and who is most deserving of our recognition and appreciation. For opening remarks, I invite to the podium Dr. Richard Greenwald, Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, and Professor of Politics, Dean Greenwald. Thank you very much. On behalf of the university and the administration, faculty and students, I want to welcome you here. I have to use the moment to say a couple of things, though, if that's okay. So unlike everyone here, I think I probably know Paul for the shortest amount of time, right, just six years. But I've witnessed something that speaks volumes, and he's been a constant voice for justice on this campus and a line of the faculty. For the graciousness he's presented, but also for the way he's mentored so many on this campus, so many faculty. There's something about the way he carries himself, the way he watches the goings on in the meetings and sometimes has a smile about it. And the chats he has in the hallways with colleagues, he's been a trusted member of the faculty and everyone knows that. And I say he's guided this faculty, the university for so long that he's helped cement the mission into the culture. And that's a hopeful thing. And so I've been thinking about what I might add to tonight. I'm not a theologian. I don't know Paul all that much. So I did what academics do. I read some of Paul's books and articles, right? And I read his 2018 book, Catholicism at the Crossroads. And in that book, he addressed the theme of hope. And I just want to quote Paul. Quote, hope is not a feeling that everything will turn out well, but a conviction that the work is worth doing no matter how it turns out. And to me, that sums up Paul. Hope is the means more than the ends. And I want to thank you for all your service and all the hope you've given us. So, thank you. Our program this afternoon is entitled Thinking as the Church, An Appreciation of the Theology of Paul Lakeland. Some of you may have noticed that that phrase, thinking as the church, is a play on a famous phrasing of St. Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits. Ignatius is most known for the genius of his spiritual exercises, which chart the course of a powerful emotional journey through the Christian drama. But even many who make the spiritual exercises don't know that Ignatius appended to the exercises a catalog of various rules to guide the spiritual director and through the director, the person who makes the exercises. These rules include what he calls rules for thinking with the church, which include the following directions. Quote, with all judgment of our own put aside, we ought to keep our minds disposed and ready to be obedient in everything to the hierarchical church. And to keep ourselves right in all things, we ought to hold fast to this principle. What I see as white, I will believe to be black if the hierarchical church thus determines it. End quote. Paul Lakeland would not agree with this. He has developed a theology of the agency of the entire church that would have all believers with a common authority, thinking and acting as the church that they are all together. We are very fortunate to have with us today three internationally recognized Catholic theologians, Roger Haidt, Masimo Fajoli, and Elizabeth Johnson, who will offer reflections on Paul's work, reflections to which Paul will respond. We will enjoy and learn from the dialogue among our panelists and then open our discussion to the audience. So our first speaker is Roger Haidt of the Society of Jesus. Professor Haidt earned his doctorate at the University of Chicago Divinity School, writing on the topic of Roman Catholic modernism at the turn of the 20th century. He has held successive professorships at four Jesuit graduate schools of theology, at Loyola School of Theology in the Ateneo de Manila, in the Philippines, at the Jesuit School of Theology in Chicago, at Regis College in the Toronto School of Theology, and at Weston Jesuit School of Theology in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He is currently visiting professor at Union Theological Seminary in New York City. Professor Haidt is the author of 14 books on a wide variety of theological topics on the nature of theology as a discipline, Christology, ecclesiology, grace, liberation theology, spirituality, and the dialogue of Christian theology with science and evolution. He is a past president of the Catholic Theological Society of America. Please join me in welcoming Professor Roger Haidt. Thanks, John. Thank you for that wonderful introduction. I am very, very pleased to be here. Paul retires with mixed emotions, of course, but I'm absolutely thrilled to be among the people who remember his contribution to theology and so on. Now I'm going to go right into my text because I'm on the clock here. Paul finished his doctorate at Vanderbilt University in 1981, the same year that he joined the theology department at Fairfield, and he has consistently contributed to the discipline of theology for over 40 years. This panel has the pleasant task to review Paul's work, reflect on it with you, and pose some questions that might stimulate more reflection by himself on his own work. Given the size of this panel, we decided to divide Paul's work into three parts, three distinct themes that developed chronologically but are more interrelated than serial sequence. Three topics encompass, first, his basic framework for pursuing the discipline of theology, second, his study of the church, and third, his attention to the laity in the church. So the first theme of the framework of theology, which I'll talk about, was set in works published before 2000 and treated issues that underlie systematic or constructive theology. They deal with a worldview and a philosophy relative to theology with questions of context and relationship of faith and religion to society. The second theme then turns to the domain of theology where Paul's distinctive work was done in the field of ecclesiology, where Massimo Fagioli will focus on this aspect of Paul's work. And then the third theme concerns the members of the church, the laity in contrast to ordained ministers or office holders. And Elizabeth Johnson will highlight Paul's major contributions in this field of the theology of the laity. So you got the framework here. So with that breakdown on the panel's presentation of Paul's work, let me now turn to what I call fundamental issues that define the framework of his theology. Looking back on the corpus of an author, one can find common themes that run through it, of course. They may even function as consistent basic principles for the whole body of the person's writings. And this is true in Paul's case. But in fact, as a matter of fact, writing most often emerges piecemeal. Each work flows from current events, from the invitation of this group or another for a talk, or even from just a bright idea. So this sets up a creative tension between Paul's opinions at any given time, and the deeper convictions are principles that guide his theology. And that's where I want to go this afternoon. So I find in four books he published between 1984 and 1997 four basic principles that characterize his theology consistently from beginning to end and remain crucial for our theology today. Together, they provide a skeleton for a coherent treatise on fundamental, the fundamentals of the discipline of theology. So first, I draw some first principles from Paul's thesis at Vanderbilt, where he published, I ask, quote, the politics of salvation, the Hegidean idea of the state. Whoa. I don't think of Paul as a Hegidean, as I might think of a Thomister, a non-Hunganian, or a white Hegidean, and so on, Heidegarian. In other words, Paul is not in a school that trapped his thought. But doctoral theses often inculcate basic principles with lasting effect. His work gave him the opportunity to study Hegel's view of religion and Christianity and their role in human history and the relationship between Christianity and the state, church and government, church and politics, and theology's relationship to the discipline of philosophy. Basic, basic issues, which if you don't talk about them, they're still operating in your psyche. More particularly, Paul drew out Hegel's view of knowledge and the conception, drew out Hegel's knowledge, Hegel's view of knowledge and the conception of God and analyzed how Hegel thought about God's operation in the secular world. How being a Christian positions a person relative to society and government and more publicly the relationships between church and state, these are basic issues. Paul's thesis thus established an historicist framework of thinking in the sense that the premise of the discussion is movement through time in history. Hegel gave them a perspective, a historical perspective rather than a specific language, one that is quite distinct from neotomism, for example, or neo-aristotillianism. Things are in movement, things are moving. So if you're staying the same, you're not in contact with reality. This is a basic change in theology, which some theologians get and others do not. So the first principle of his theology, which I gather from his thesis, is quote, the framework for theological reflection lies in situating human beings as a community developing across time, always in motion, always new. If you're a certain age, you can witness to things changing. Second, in 1984, Paul published a short book entitled Freedom in Christ, an introduction to political theology. The book sets forth in a personally invested and carefully constructed way the fundamental premises for doing theology in the light of the developments after the Second Vatican Council. It represents Paul's basic stance as a systematic theologian in the mid-1980s. Political theology, the title of the book, does not refer to a theology of politics in our sense of party politics today. In theology, it has a broad abstract meaning of negotiating social life, managing our society with a concern for the common good, politics, generally, running society. Political theology therefore looks at human existence from the perspective of the community rather than the individual. More concretely, political theology, as Paul understands, it's had two distinct sources in the 1960s, one from Germany, which was called political theology, and the other from Latin America, which was called liberation theology. This book then expresses Paul's own personal synthesis of topics that govern a true and relevant theology for American society. Theology must be found, quote, found, understood, and put into practice and validated within human secular experience, end of quote. Although theology should be relevant for life and society, all theology rather should have a relevance for life and society for an ethical component, have an ethical component, and be written with an appeal to service and action. I'll love this quote, quote. Belief without action is empty, but action without belief is thrashing around in the dark. It's beautiful. You must have stolen that from someone. No. It's wonderful, British succinctness, yes. Christian theology thus begins not with awe at a beautiful world, but with a certain indignation that as Christians, we tolerate so much human suffering and abuse in our world. To sum up, I express the second principle of Paul's theology this way. Theology must work within a social liberationist rather than an individualist framework and must stimulate action. In 1990, Paul published Theology and Critical Theory. Critical Theory refers to the analysis of society in an effort to unmask the assumptions underlying life in common and opening a pathway to human emancipation and construction of the good and the just society. I mean, we're very familiar today with opinions with no grounding, and that's what Critical Theory is doing. It's looking to find the hidden suppositions on people's opinions that make it do not correspond with reality. He first appeals to Critical Theory, his school in Frankfurt that was founded after the First World War, with a Marxist-Tinge criticism of society, but actually he appeals more directly to a second generation of Critical Theory, Jürgen Habermas for his own constructive work. Two fundamental ideas of Habermas find their way into Paul's Theology. First, human societies are held together principally by linguistic communication. A set of common ideas or values communicated through language hold communities together. A good example of this would be the Constitution in the United States, for example. What holds unity and difference together, the second principle, is conversation. Exchanged aim at greater harmony and particular goals for the common good. The ideal for strategy for establishing the common good is civil conversation, and we all know what that is by its opposite today. But secondly, social conversation has its own rules. It requires truth and truthfulness rather than the simple desire to gain advantage and win. It also requires in Paul's terms, quote, a willingness to give each member of the community or all partners in the dialogue equal voice and respect and attention end of quote. So this principle translates the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth on a Christian life into social terms, and not just interpersonal terms. So not only love of friends, but love of enemies. Love that builds up the common wheel. So this yields the third principle of Paul's Theology. Quote, theology needs a social anthropology, not just a personal individualist anthropology, and a way of thinking that engender community rather than exclusively attending to personal suffering of individuals. I now turn to Paul's fourth book of this early period in Fundamental Theology, which is entitled Post-Modernity, Christian Identity in a Fragmented Age. Now the term post-identity is a problem because nobody knows what it means. It really doesn't have any content. It says it's after modernity, and that's contentious what is modernity. So it has no determinate meaning in itself other than being after something else, and the meaning of modernity itself is highly contentious. So some people like post-modernity because it means the end of modernity and we go back to the traditionalism. And some people like post-modern because they're worried about it because it means it's throwing out enlightenment values which are the very basis of the American society, enlightenment values. So Paul identifies the basic cause of post-modernity and it's this, Western enlightened reason was too sure of itself in its universal relevance. So the enlightened was a good thing but it was a little too cocksure of itself. Over against this overconfidence, there gradually developed a sense of what I referred to earlier, a sense of time and change that showed that reason itself is always conditioned by the particular circumstances in which a group is reasoning or a culture is reasoning. So it's never reason. It's always somebody's reason or some culture's reason. So the reasoning of the Western enlightenment doesn't mean it's the reasoning of a Chinese or an African and so on. So suddenly the pillars of Christian theology begin to wobble. The very term God does not fit in Buddhist cultures. The place of Jesus Christ seems to be alongside or next to other religious traditions and then what happens to Christian supremacy. We're in a new world here. In response to the new problem of God, Paul does not offer a concept that he thinks everybody is going to accept. Rather, he appeals to the tradition set in the book of Job where God speaks from the whirlwind of chaos. That God transcends and orders God's love towards all things discriminately, particularly towards each one and does not attend to each me by intervention at every difficulty in life, every impasse. Paul puts it this way. Quote, human beings have neither reason nor right to claim to be the meaning of the universe. End of quote. That's changing your mind if you didn't live there already. He then looks inside tradition towards the mystics and the prophets for an answer. God is encountered within and as transcendent. God, always present, does not need to intervene in our history but urges human agency in the pursuit of justice. To formulate the fourth principle of Paul's foundations of theology, I do it this way, quote. In several respects, several respects, theology has to address a new intellectual culture today. Beyond modernity, beyond the modernity the Vatican too reacted to and responded to. We're in a new world. I conclude this with this kind of overview or summary. In his early writings, Paul Lakeland developed a coherent social base for theological understanding and it is as relevant and needed today as when he composed it, which is striking in a rapidly moving culture and society. It presupposes historical consciously, historically conscious thinking, recognizing things are always changing, sets individual concern in a wider social context and is critical with questions that resonate with today's problems and is critical with questions that resonate with today's problems. So my final question is in a question addressed to Paul and it's this. How would he so steeped in our culture throughout the 40 years formulate the most pressing theological question at this moment of history from the perspective of our country? Thank you. Thank you, Roger. Our second presenter is Dr. Massimo Fajoli who is professor of theology and religious studies at Villanova University and internationally recognized authority on the history and theology of the Second Vatican Council. He is widely read too in his frequent contributions on Catholic culture to La Croix International and to Common Wheel Magazine. His books and articles have been published in more than 10 languages. His most recent books are The Liminal Papacy of Pope Francis, Moving Toward Global Catholicity published by Orbus Books in 2020 and Joe Biden and Catholicism in the United States published by Bayard Press in 2021. He is the co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Vatican II published by Oxford University Press this year and he is currently at work on a history of the Roman Curia to be published again by Oxford University Press. Dr. Fajoli lives in the Philadelphia area with his wife and their two children. Please join me in welcoming Professor Massimo Fajoli. Thank you very much. Thank you for this invitation. It's a great honor to be here. I'm very grateful for this opportunity to deepen my knowledge of Paul's work in physiology and to share the panel with Elizabeth Johnson and Roger Ait. Also because this opportunity comes at a momentous time in the Catholic Church and for ecclesiology, especially, for Pope Francis, Synodality and all that. In these brief remarks, I will try to outline and in the ask, ask some questions of Paul about three ecclesiological themes that he has addressed. The first one, Communio ecclesiology and different ecclesiological models. The second, his critique of radical orthodoxy and the third one, the legacy of the Second Vatican Council. So first one, Communio ecclesiology. Paul offered an assessment of Communio ecclesiology when that model was still the model invoked in the institutional church at least since the mid 1980s. And this model has been, if not substituted, at least juxtaposed with other models since the election of Pope Francis in 2013. But already 10 years before Pope Francis' election in his 2003 book, The Liberation of the Lady, Paul offered a nuanced critique of Communio ecclesiology and I quote here. If we, if what we mean by Communio is an inward looking self congratulatory and fearful huddling together against the forces of modernity, the communion of the 19th century church, then mission will mean little more than the periodic exclamation of the outside world. But if communion means a generous and loving association of free and faithful children of God, then the dynamic access of love without which it is not love at all spills over into a mission to the whole human race, one marked by a generous sharing of the knowledge that God wills to save the world. End quote. This nuanced critique is indicative of other important motives of Paul's thought. In an essay published in 2015 in the volume titled A Church with Open Doors, Paul analyzed three models of apostolicity. First, what he called build it and they will come, which he defined holy centripetal and apostolicity of maintenance. The second, the church of the new evangelization and the third one, apostolicity of kenosis. And clearly, his preference is for the third one, a kenotic ecclesiology. Quote, while there is some value to the first maintenance and the second new evangelization, it is in the third kenotic form of apostolicity that a vigorous postmodern physiological posture can be discerned. This may be the only one of the three that demonstrates realistic hope rather than muted despair. And perhaps the only one that follows the Christic paradigm of death to self for the sake of new life. End quote. He came back again to this in his 2013 book, A Council That Will Never End on Numen Gentium. And there, he inserted his preference for a kenotic ecclesiology in his treatment and yearning for what he called an ecclesiology of humility. Quote, the fundamental theological issue in fostering the grace of self-doubt, even among the official teachers in the church is the recognition that the grace of God is spread throughout the world. End quote. So here Paul's fundamental ecclesiological option could be summed up in the title of a section of this book on Numen Gentium, Kenosis in the Church, Kenosis of the Church. And here there's a passage that I find percent of what he defined was the mission of the church to be like the Good Samaritan that was written almost, I mean, many years before Fratelli Tutti, which as you know has a dissenter, that parable. So it's one of the things that I find not just insightful, but saying something before of what was going to happen with this pontificate. Second point, radical orthodoxy. A second theme that is indicative of post-exeology is his critique of radical orthodoxy and alternative theological reading of the history and status of modernity, post-modernity, but also a theological reconstruction of the contemporary that took its name from the title of a collection of essays published in 1999, Radical Orthodoxy and New Theology. In his 2003 book, The Liberation of the Lady, in chapter seven titled Mission in the Post-Modern World, Paul chose, as Exergo, a quote from Joseph Comonczak and that chapter paid homage to Comonczak's physiology and an attempt to go beyond the left and right-wing stereotypes. So there Paul drew from Charles Taylor, his reading of modernity and secularity and engaged in a deep critique of the ecclesiological assumptions of radical orthodoxy, referring to John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock, Ray Moore, and in the West, Stanley Howard, us. Paul invited fundamentally radical orthodox theologians to a rereading of Gaudium and Spass, which I find very, very important. But it was not an all-out uncompromising critique of radical orthodoxy. Paul acknowledged the contribution of some radical orthodox argument for the church's mission in the struggle against the dehumanizing program of global capitalism. Christian mission in the face of global capitalism is a blend of resistance and weakness. On the other hand, Paul identified a certain what I would call essentialism when radical orthodoxy talks about the church. Quote, the mission of the church and the world is primarily conducted through countless millions of individual decisions made by lay people independently of ecclesiastical authority. End quote. This critique of radical orthodoxy and his reading of modernity and postmodernity gives us more than a glimpse into the physiological thought of Paul Lakeland in his 2009 book, Church Living Communion, he advocated for an inductive ecclesiology and empirical ecclesiology, taking from Lonergan's turn from a classicist worldview to historically mindedness, as well as from Germanian's 2007 book on postmodern ecclesiology. Here, ecclesiology intersects with the idea of doctrinal pluralism, drawing also from Lonergan's 1971 Marquette Lecture, not just a development of doctrine but a new kind of development of doctrine. Third and final point, the legacy of the Second Vatican Council. In the book, the liberation of the late Paul identified clearly the limits within the legacy of the Second Vatican Council. End quote here. Beyond the story of the mixed fortunes of Vatican II, there is a pressing need to address issues that were largely untouched by the council fathers. So let us suppose for a moment that Vatican III is about to open and that we are responsible for setting its agenda. What would we want to see the council addressing? And in this list, there is, Paul puts on that list, the nature of ministry, democratization of procedures, church, and capitalism, the role of the lady. A few years later, in 2007, in Catholicism at the crossroads, Paul came back to this problem of what to make of the Second Vatican Council half a century later a new proposed 10 steps toward a more adult church, which is to summarize what we are talking about now in this nodal process, basically. And so here I see very much impulse proposal foreshadowing of Pope Francis Pontificate. In some strange ways, very, very insightful, in 2009, in his book, Church Living Communion, Paul named the problem of elite theologizing and the need to look at the real church together with the need to reread Gaudium and Spass for a more inductive physiology. I haven't read much that is more foreshadowing of Pope Francis Pontificate, honestly. Now, if it's not clear yet what will happen to one of Paul's wishes, democracy in church life, other invitations of Lakeland of almost 15 years ago have become now people language, such as when Paul invited us to be intelligent or practice discernment or talked about the church as hospice, as pilgrim, as immigrant, as pioneer. This belongs not just to the, absolutely not to the discarding of the Second Vatican Council, but to a re-owning, repossessing Vatican II, not just its letter, but also the spirit in theology and what we have seen, I believe, in these last 10 years in the papal teaching. It's important here that when it's about the assessment of what happened of the Second Vatican Council, Paul Lakeland already in 2013 identified the major obstacle in the reception of the Second Vatican Council, not simplistically with the clerical or institutional resistance and conservatism, but with a lack of historical consciousness, quote, the central problem is that of history. There are places in the documents in general and the Lumen Genzium in particular were texts that ignore the element of historicity. In tradition occur alongside those that recognize the doctrinal importance of our historical method. Here, perhaps, is where the business of Lumen Genzium is most unfinished. In the conflicts within the text, we can see unresolved tensions within the council itself, end quote. So here, I believe, I wanna conclude with four questions that I gave Paul in advance because they're big problems with not with his thought, but with our situation in the church. I mean, first question is canotic ecclesiology, canosis. How to imagine a sustainable canosis in this new age of normalization of war, of cultural war, what it means to be a canotic church in Ukraine, for example. Second, democracy in church life. Today, what kind of trust in democracy in the church we can have given what is happening to our democracies in a political system. Third, the problem of elite theologizing has become even more dire, more serious. I believe for a certain crisis over the role of theology, not just in academia, but in the church. I think this is one of these problems with for Francis Pontificate. And finally, fourth, yes, there is absolutely a need for a more inductive ecclesiology, but I think there is also a new and emerging new hermeneutical questions, what these texts of the Second Vatican Council mean. Just think about the liturgical reform, for example. So these are questions that I believe Paul thought has given us already a lot to solve these problems, but I just wanted to take this opportunity to ask him these tough questions and in front of everyone. So I thank you again and see you later. Thanks, Massimo. Our third presenter is Elizabeth A. Johnson of the Congregation of St. Joseph. She is Distinguished University Professor Emerita at Fordham University, where she taught from 1991 to 2018. She is the author of 12 books and more than 100 essays that have been translated into 13 languages. More than any Catholic theologian and arguably more than any theologian, she has contributed decisively toward shaping the genre of feminist theology, which is one of the most exciting and truthful developments in modern theology. Especially noteworthy in this regard is her 1991 book, She Who Is, The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse, which received the prestigious Graumeyer Book Award, fitting recognition for a work that will endure into the very distant future as one of the classics, not just of our time, but of the entire theological tradition. A former president of the Catholic Theological Society of America, she also served as president of the American Theological Society, the oldest theological association in North America. Professor Johnson was awarded the Fordham University Teaching Award in 1998 and the Professor of the Year Award in 2011. She received the Lifetime Achievement Recognition of the Catholic Theological Society of America, the John Courtney Murray Award in 2004. She has received 15 honorary doctorates, one of them from Fairfield University in 2014. So it is a great pleasure for us, Beth, to have one of our own a distinguished alumna return home. Please join me in welcoming Professor Elizabeth Johnson. Thank you, John, for that lovely welcome home. I drove in today and saw the colors on the flags and it just brought back that day of the honorary degree with great joy. So at this festive gathering to honor Paul Lakeland, we could now possibly do justice to all his theological contributions. My colleagues on this panel have already given you some idea of the scope and depth of his work. In the short time allotted to me, I want to zero in on one subject which I consider perhaps Paul's most original contribution and that is his theology of the laity. As we know, the Roman Catholic Church is led and controlled by a small group of clergy, all men, celibate men, as Paul consistently and critically points out. Church structures give this group preeminence not only in presiding over the sacraments and preaching the word, but also in governance and juridical matters, handling finances, making personnel appointments, deciding policies, decreeing what is and is not allowed in doctrinal and ethical matters. So strong is this structure at the present time, Paul notes ruefully that when people hear the word church, they usually think of the hierarchy or the clergy, the Vatican, Rome, the institution in other words, although 95% of the people who comprise the church are not part of that group. So what else can be said about these people besides that they are, quote, not clergy? In numerous works, Paul has been working out a theological answer to that question. He wrote books such as The Liberation of the Laity in search of an accountable church in 2003, which won the Catholic Press Award for Best Book in Theology. He also wrote Catholicism at the Crossroads, how the laity can change the church, 2007. And in numerous probing articles, he has addressed subjects such as raising lay consciousness, lay participation in church decision making, and the maturity of the lay vocation. He builds a rich picture of the positive religious identity, the vocation and the mission of the majority of baptized people who live their lives in the midst of the secular world. Significantly, Paul works with the understanding that a renewed theology of the laity is actually a renewed theology of the church. To put this in context, I would like first to highlight Paul's view of his own role as a theologian, which will frame, I think, why he pursues the question of the laity with such urgency. Then I will present all too briefly four highlights of the theology of the laity. I note at the outset that Paul thinks about the laity from the inside, so to speak, as someone with the experience of being himself a layman, while in younger days, he once was clergy. Very few people have done such serious work on this subject, and Paul's biography gives him a special wisdom. So his role as a theologian. In 2019, Paul was president of the Catholic Theological Society of America. And in his presidential address to members that year, which is always a significant occasion, he emphasized the role of the theologian, which he defined as that of a servant, a servant of the gospel, working to counter forces that dehumanize people in society. It was, I think, an important act of public self-definition. Instead of being wrapped up in academic affairs only, the theologian, Paul, needs to engage in crises where people are being harmed, and walk a path of what he calls spiritual resistance on behalf of the humanity of all people in the name of the God of love. It was very moving to hear him describe how he took this phrase, spiritual resistance, from a group of French theologians, all priests, who resisted the Nazi occupation of France in the 1940s by, wait for it, secretly publishing a journal. An anti-Nazi journal, right? In this view, and in their view, their fight was inspired by the gospel for the very soul of people, so they would not be seduced into collaborating with evil. The effects of this spiritual resistance were daunting. One brave Jesuit involved with the project was captured and executed by the Gestapo, and they all lived in fear. Now, drawing parallels between the psychic force of Nazi propaganda and the strength today of neoliberal global capitalism, which tames those of us who benefit from its safety and luxuries, Paul insisted that the task of the theologian is to engage in a similar kind of spiritual resistance. Quote, when you believe in a God of love and you define love as justice, there really is no other course of action if indeed the individual today, or the whole of occupied France back then, is not to lose their soul. So what is the role of the theologian? Into the breach, be a servant, struggle for humanity under threat with all the vigor of your learning of your mind and your heart. Now, Paul takes his own advice when he mounts spiritual resistance to the malaise in the church by developing a robust theology of the laity. And here I will highlight only four key points and all too briefly. First, the history of the church and the laity, right? Paul has a clear-eyed view of church history and it is radical, and so I quote you. In the first two centuries, there were no lay people, only Christians, think of it. Of course, there were leaders and Paul is clear that while the church did not come full blown out of a blueprint in Jesus's mind, Episcopoy, overseers or bishop leaders in the tradition of the apostles were part of the early organization of the church and should remain so. But these did not function within the system of celibate clerical culture separated from the laity that currently marks the church. In the first two centuries, there were no lay people, only Christians. Then due to historical circumstances, the community began to take on the structure of the Roman Empire, setting up internal top-down hierarchical systems of governance. In subsequent centuries, clerical celibacy was mandated. The papacy was isolated and other changes crept in. The result is that lay people today have little or no voice in the way things are run and no voice and no vote except with their feet. And Paul writes, much of the church's dysfunctionality today is tied to how it squanders lay experience. So with that framework of history, secondly, identity. In resisting this situation and seeking a remedy, Paul is very much a thinker in the spirit of the Second Vatican Council and its theology of the church as basically the community of the holy people of God. Drawing deeply on the theology of Yves Kangar, who greatly influenced the outcome of the council on this point. He argues that the baseline for understanding the people of God is, and I quote, a community of radical equality before God in virtue of a common baptism. This is the starting point for theology of the laity. Each person who was baptized puts on Christ is consecrated by the spirit and is called to the mission of making God's love effective in a world of need. All together, such people form the community of the church. And the core of what binds them is quote, the experience that the loving care of God for us is supremely available in our intimacy with the story of Jesus Christ. So third point, mission. The experience of God's loving care for us through Jesus Christ is not given to the baptized for their own good alone. They have a mission to share and spread the love of God in the world, which Paul writes quote, means to call the world to its own deepest selfhood as a human community. And here is where a theology of the laity begins to reshape understanding of the church. Because unlike the clergy, the life of the laity is oriented toward the world. Their lives are enmeshed in the stresses of everyday life, the joys and struggles of family, finances, employment or unemployment, parenting, neighbors, politics, education, business, healthcare, sports, entertainment and on and on. In these secular settings, lay people are the ones who carry out the mission of the church, which is to be the loving presence of God in the world, spiritually resisting the forces that dehumanize people and promoting human dignity. Now Paul knows that this happens today in a pluralistic and complex society where many people get along just fine with no religion at all. The mission of the laity is not to make everything all churchy. Rather, acting with mature independence and practical self-direction, they are called to enact the love of God precisely in a secular world. And betraying a very Catholic sensibility, Paul argues that the secular world does not necessarily mean a godless world opposed to the sacred. He draws on Bonhoeffer, Habermas and others to show that the secular world has its own integrity and basic goodness, although sin is ever present. He recalls, for example, that regretfully the institutional church did not speak out against but encouraged slavery, anti-Semitism and the subjugation of women, thereby failing catastrophically in its mission. The church learned the demands of the gospel in tandem with the growing human wisdom of the secular world. So this is the world created by God and suffused with the presence of Christ and the spirit while fully operational by its own natural and social laws. A lay spirituality locates the primary mission of the church conducted daily by lay people squarely within this secular world loved by God, which leads to the fourth point structure. Here Paul articulates a vital principle. Leadership must always be imagined as a function of the identity of the community being led never the other way around. Thus the ordained leaders whose ministry is focused within the church on sacraments, preaching and pastoral care should be seen as support staff. I couldn't believe when I first read that, Paul. That was, their work is vital, but it is in service to the church's mission which is carried out mainly by laity. And in turn, the laity are not the simple faithful, obedient to their pastors, informed by the gospel, they carry out the mission of the church independent of ecclesiastical oversight, exercising their baptismal status as peace prophets and servant leaders in the spirit of Christ. Millions of their individual decisions in everyday life make Christ present in the world and further the coming of the reign of God. Together with their pastors, they form the community of faith. Paul's radical revisioning of the lay clergy relation only barely touches on what he has written on this whole subject, but it leads him to argue that we need new patterns of ministry to match the idea of church as a communion of the people of God first rather than as an institution first. And we need new structures to express the growing adulthood and maturity of the laity. If you are inclined to disagree with this analysis, Paul has one more argument to offer. In the eschaton at the end of the world in heaven, there will be no more Vatican, no more Roman Coria or church bureaucracy, no more institutional church. These are means to an end. Just as in the first two centuries, there were no laity, only Christians, so too at the end. What will endure is the communion of faithful people amid a world redeemed. So to conclude, Paul's view of the role of the theologian as servant of the gospel intertwines with his theology of the laity. Into the breach lay people. Inspired by the gospel and nurtured by the Eucharist, engage in spiritual resistance against the greed, the lust for power, the violence that so harms human beings and the natural world we inhabit. Make God's love real in the world. All else in the church should get arranged to make this happen. With this theology of the laity, a new world is possible. Whether there will be a vibrant church at all in the future, I think, might well depend on Paul's theology of the laity being taken seriously. And here is the point for reflection and my question. The word laity is a collective noun. Like team or company, it encompasses different kinds of people while making their specifics invisible. For myself as a theologian with feminist leanings, when reading Paul's work, every time he writes laity, I see women. Men too, of course, but women are there as the majority of the 95%. Now the current clerical system is cemented into place by a theology of gender complementarity that defines man by nature as one who leads and decides and woman by nature as one who nurtures and supports. In fact, the current clergy lay structure, as Paul describes and criticizes it, precisely mirrors the traditional male-female relationship for the knows best. To argue theologically that those ordained to preside at Eucharist, who are all men currently, should be seen as support staff and service to the church's mission, which is carried out by the laity, a majority all women, is to completely flip gender roles. The issue is further complicated by those today who either reject complementarity in favor of equality or do not identify with the gender binary at all. So my question for Paul today asks, how he might further develop and deepen his powerful theology of the laity, both theoretically and practically, in view of gender theory and the very real gendered persons who are the church? Or to put it in other words, is it possible that we will never have a fully functioning laity until women participate fully in all the ministries of the church? Thank you. I'll introduce our friend and colleague, Paul Lakewood. Our visiting theologians have offered commentary on his published theological work, but I must begin with an in-house testimony that Paul has always been a very fine teacher. For the past 42 years, he's nurtured a couple of generations of students, many of whom have become trusted friends, grateful for his wisdom and guidance when they were undergraduates and even thereafter. And some of them are in the room today. He is the author of 10 books, has edited three more and has published dozens of journal articles and book chapters. His most important book, The Liberation of the Laity, received the 2003 Catholic Press Association Award for the best book in the field of theology. More recently in 2018, his book, The Wounded Angel, Fiction and the Religious Imagination was awarded the best book in theology prize by the College Theology Society. In 2018 and 19, he served as president of the Catholic Theological Society of America. He was visiting professor at Yale Divinity School from 2008 to 2013. And in 2020, he received the association of Catholic colleges and universities, Monica Hellwig Award, for contributions to Catholic intellectual tradition. Paul is the inaugural holder of the Aloysius P. Kelly SJ Chair in Catholic Studies, an appointment that he's held since 2004. And most importantly, in those same 19 years, he has built from scratch the universities program in Catholic Studies for our undergraduates and interdisciplinary minor and for the Fairfield community and the community at large, an annual slate of engaging lectures, panel discussions and even concerts devoted to, as he occasionally puts it, all things Catholic. I could spend much more time cataloging your achievements, Paul, but like everyone else, I'm really eager to hear what you have to say in response to our distinguished guests. So ladies and gentlemen, Paul Lakeland. How long do you have? Grateful to see you all here. And I'm very grateful from what I've heard from my esteemed colleagues here. And as I listen to their questions, I don't think you should expect me to be answering all of them. But now I know what I'm supposed to be doing when as so many of you have asked me already, what are you going to do when you retire? I'm going to answer those questions. So a few thoughts, right? So, you know, in some ways, I blundered into this life of four decades as a Catholic theologian, the last two as an ecclesiologist. My first love was literature. And if I'd not been a Jesuit at the time that I completed my Oxford degree reading English as they quaintly like to put it, I would probably have continued on that path. Instead, I spent a couple of years working in religious journalism and then went on to theological studies at London University. By the time I left the Jesuits during my doctoral studies in theology at Vanderbilt University, I was well and truly trapped. Trapped. And then I got lucky when Fairfield University's first choice for a spot in the religious studies department declined their offer. And they turned to this Englishman who had never actually applied for the job. That was done for him by his Dr. Vater, Professor Peter Hodgson, to whom I am permanently grateful. And they invited me to come and interview. Though I would have to put my own way from London to Fairfield for the interview. So I stumped up the money and here I am. My friends and colleagues who've spoken so generously have found a pattern in path in my career that one can of course only recognize in retrospect. Did I know that my academic interests would develop the way they did? I don't believe so. And yet, and yet the one book that none of them mentioned was my first book. Not much more than a large pamphlet really. Still a Jesuit, I was sitting in my room one evening and a senior Jesuit stuck his head around the door and said, is there anything you would like to write a book about? Yes, I said. And thus was born my first literary child. Can women be priests? One of the first such books in English and dedicated to the argument that there were and still are, no genuine theological obstacles to the ordination of women to the priesthood. And by the way, it had an imprimatur in those days, if you were clergy, you had to get one. It had an imprimatur from the diocese of Cork in Ireland, something it could not receive today. What I think this shows is that the servant theologian role that Beth Johnson identified was there from the beginning, even if I didn't know it then, because the little book blended theology and a concern for the life of the church moving forward. No, it wasn't about the laity exactly, but to respond to Beth's question at the end of her remarks, it shows that from the beginning I had some sort of sense that gender identity had little to do with any roles within the church. Today, the sense of the faithful is way ahead of the magisterium on many issues, including gender. And whatever work I do in the future, it will honor those intuitions and seek to further their acceptability. I think the early work that I did, including the heavy lifting in the Hegel book and the books on critical theory and post-modernity were probably, as Roger acutely sensed, propagutic to the five books I've written in the last 20 years. My friends are kind, and I suppose I have, to a degree, led the charge on developing a lay ecclesiology. But in the end, these books are works of what the French call haute vulgarisation, the classy French term for popularization. Because I have mostly been writing, not just about the laity, but for the laity. They should be seen as taking complex theological arguments and putting them into plain English. So if I am a servant theologian, then perhaps so in the model of what the late lamented Adam Maria Isasi Diaz called the theologian as a professional insider. Any further work I do to respond to Roger's question will continue to try to take the temperature of the grassroots church and suggest a path of action to assuage whatever fears I discern there. My guess is that it might involve contributing to overcoming the polarization of American society by addressing the false dichotomies that bedevil discourse about religion and secularity. One thing that has graced my final decade at Fairfield is that we got ourselves a pope who said all the things I have been saying for at least 20 years. It would be nice to imagine he had read my books. But the truth is that much of my own theological inspiration like his comes from his native Latin America. I have taught liberation theology for 40 years. The first 30 of them under occasional Episcopal suspicion, the last 10 with what I like to believe is a kind of papal blessing. And I think it's here that I first began to think about the need for a humbler church distinguished by what I have called kenotic discipleship whose method is inductive, thought out from below, among the laity. I just have zero tolerance for ecclesiastical cant. And I'm grateful to Massimo for pushing me to think this through a bit further. For now, I can only say that I expect to write at least one more book. And this one will pursue the ecclesiological significance of kenosis, which I think is worked out most fruitfully in Simonvet's analysis of the parable of the Good Samaritan. But it is also possible that I may instead come full circle to my Oxford days reading English. My latest book has, sorry, I lost my place. My latest book has started me off in that direction and I've included a few lines from that book on the little event program that you all have in front of you. What I'm trying to do in that last book and what I hope to be doing in this next one, whether or not it focuses on the kenotic is to try to argue for the fundamental importance of imagination in doing theology. All that you're missing, because I lost that half a page, is half a page from a well-published book which is available in our local bookstore. So if you really want to know what I was going to say there, what I was going to read to you, actually it's pretty much what's inside of the program. So to conclude, I know what I was going to say to conclude. What I was going to say to conclude is that I am so grateful for all of your presence here. The people who are here in this room and lots of people beyond this room I know have contributed enormously to how fulfilling my time has been at Fairfield. And I hope to continue that relationship with many of you if only from a different and less professorial standpoint. Thank you all. To close our program, I invite to the podium Dr. Melissa Kwan, Director of Fairfield Center for Social Impact who organized our event. Melissa. Well, I only have four quick points. The first is thank you all for being here with us to celebrate Paul. Thank you, John, for all of your work and thoughtfulness in helping to plan this event and pull it together. Thank you to our panelists for your thoughtful reflections and helping us to celebrate Paul. Please another round of applause for our panel. And of course, thank you Paul for your gifts to all of us throughout these years.