Repositório RCAAP

This text is built around Jesus’ affirmation “You have received with grace, give gracefully”, recorded in the Gospel of St. Matthew 10,8. It draws from the OT and the NT, which shows the maternal distress of an attentive and caring God, who looks with a love of his children and towards his children, and who, in the face of our selfishness, self-sufficiency, exclusiveness and self-centredness, sets forth new horizons of openness, of inclusion and of sharing. He also challenges our world of possession with a new model of receiving and giving. Thus a new concept of family and brotherhood is born. The life of Saint Francis of Assisi is put forward as a model of reception of the precepts from the Matthew text.

It is well known that Luke gives considerable attention to the singular status of Jesus, having recourse to a considerable range of narrative typologies. A curious example, and one that encapsulates them all is, however, lexical in nature: the inflections of the verb love. Within the Synoptic Gospels, it is this Evangelist who makes the most frequent use of this verb. Moreover, whenever this verb is significant, it occurs in Jesus’ discourse. Without a doubt its sense extends as far as it was already fixed in Old-Testament tradition, where an experience of love unites the God of the Covenant to the chosen people, through faithfulness to the concrete requirements of the Law (Ex 19, 3-8). But in Luke, the verb love is furthermore inflected in an absolute sense. And this originality functions as an intensifying device (verbal and theological), announcing not only the unheard-of authority with which Jesus develops his prophetic programme, but also permitting a recognition, in Faith, of his identity and of his power to Save. Even for those placed ‘outside the Law’.

Fellowship is a fundamental and permanent challenge in the pastoral work of the Church and, after all, a structuring experience in the life of all: the social sciences endlessly repeat that the giving and receiving of fellowship, loving and feeling loved, is what brings greatest balance to humanity. This text begins by examining the theological basis for fellowship, that is to say the fellowship that has God as subject, in particular through the fundamental characteristics of "condescension" and of "mercy". This is followed by a series of important notes concerning the praxis of fellowship of Jesus, taking three very concrete texts from the Gospels. Lastly, stress is placed on a number of areas and perspectives where fellowship is particularly pressing in our pastoral work in the parishes, movements and other realities.

Mention is regularly made of the difficulty of uniting Christian experience and the dimension of contemporaneousness. Quite often – too often – the impression we gain is that one reality is opposed to the other. Is it in fact viable to build a Christian identity while at the same time assuming the condition of being a citizen? The choice of being a Christian implies ipso facto the dimension of incarnation, which demands the building of the human city at every moment in the historical course of humanity. It is not possible to fulfil Christian commitment without also accepting a commitment and a joint responsibility for the building of human history.

The birth of bioethics represents an ethical growth on the part of humanity. It is a sign of a society which seeks to reach a post-conventional moral level, to use Lawrence Kohlberg’s terminology. This text seeks to justify this statement and to go further, in interpreting this same phenomenon from a theological perspective: when humanity becomes more responsible and creates better conditions for the protection of what is most fragile in life, this seems to correspond to the divine purpose of associating human beings with his creative and redeeming purpose.

The objective of this article is to undertake a reading of Heidegger’s Brief über den Humanismus, taking into account the fundamental meaning of what the philosopher proclaims and, by way of comparison with an existentialist perspective , the humanitas of the homo humanus. It is from this concept that we set out towards an understanding of the Heideggerian Humanitas, in the light of the method of phenomenological Destruktion, so as to be able to understand the ekstatic Existenz of the Dasein, which places the “humanitas of mankind in a sufficiently high position”. For its complete realisation, Heidegger likewise seeks, also in the light of Christian thinking, to think of the essence of humanitas, through the ek-sistência ekstática of mankind, inclining towards the truth of Being and of ‘Care’, open to the deitas and to the Transcendent.

To think of the Church and its History is an exercise inseparable from the naming of the figures involved in them. And arguably one of the most fertile in the art of doing and of founding in 20th-century Portugal was Monsignor Miguel de Oliveira (Válega, 1887-Lisbon, 1968), whose biography and academic writings are sketched here. His multi-faceted research brought him together with a notable group of historians of his time; with them he founded a Study Centre and a thematic periodical, Lusitania Sacra; he also produced a series of studies that to this day constitute solid points of departure for research.

The building of the moral subject seems to be difficult in our democratic societies. The so called moral autonomy is far from being a given there. People can always adopt a behavior of under age. Besides, the will is conditioned by affections it does not control. There are difficulties of an external order in addition. The constant flow of information generates conformism. Besides, the contradictory solicitations throw the subject into confusion and lead him to entrust himself to his own impulses. In this cultural scenery, the North American communitarians come forward with a solution for the problem of the subject. They maintain that tradition and narrativity have a role in his structuring process. But they forget that their proposal encourages isolation in a particular social belonging and considers this one as a refuge promoting a too easy identity. In fact, there is only one way to build the moral subject: to convoke him permanently to himself, in confronting the different realities that life presents to him.

It is to J. Jeremias that we owe the merit of having put the problem clearly: did Jesus’ Last Supper take place within the framework of the Jewish Passover meal, or did it not? The answer to this question is of the utmost relevance. Does the Eucharist have Jewish roots or does it transmit solely the new Christian message? This is the area of the present inquiry. As is widely known, the view of J. Jeremias was not consensual and different solutions have been put forward and successively placed in perspective. Here a new possibility is aired, showing that the Passover Feast, in the light of the final event in Jesus’ life, constitutes the most important hermeneutic criterion.

Following the 2nd Vatican Council, the various liturgical rites in use in the Western Church underwent reforms. Contemporaneously with this, a new interpretative category applied to liturgical action came to be used widely, that of anàmnesis. Liturgy came to be described as the anàmnesis of the work of salvation. The fortune of this conceptions is well-deserved, if we bear in mind the problems it helps to avoid, especially in ecumenical contexts, but that is not to say that it is not open to questioning. Recent studies, which need to be taken into account, raise the question: is it possible or not to be explicit about the sacramental nature of the Eucharistic rite and, by extension, of the Christian liturgy without recourse to be notion of anàmnesis?

“The Braga liturgy” is an excerpt from a doctoral dissertation made up of a study and edition of MS. 870 of the Braga District Archive, defended in June 2007 at the Saint Anselm Pontifical Liturgical Institute, Rome. The a quo and ao quem limits of this de luxe Braga-Roman pontifical have been fixed at 1485-1516. Assembled for the Archbishop of Braga, this codex was used by him when he came to the cathedral to celebrate the principal solemnities of the liturgical year. The present text corresponds to the first part of Chapter II, dedicated to a historical study, both diachronic and synchronic. The results of its application indicate that the history of the liturgy of this particular Church is complex, and that the factors incolved in its evolution are primarily external. The inorganic discountinuities introduced in printed books throughout the 16th century, largely ignored up to the present, provide ample proof of this and enable us to modify our knowledge of this local liturgy.

The concrete experiences of Christian faith are susceptible of ambiguity in the context of our modern societies. The believer, who inhabits these ones, tends to claim a space of assertion of his own vis-à-vis the ecclesial reality. As a consequence, the individual features of faith become diversified. The church searches a way to include them in her midst. Thus, the truth of Christian faith is considered not to exist out of the first person singular. But it is also required that each appropriation of faith be examined by the ecclesial community. Discernment is the means appearing to be able to link these two poles. It inquires to which extent the individual experiences of faith agree with the objective, Christian ‘given’ proclaimed by the church. It considers experience as the necessary mediation of faith, while respecting, at the same time, the scriptural and ecclesial normativity that guides this one.

This text focuses on biographical data, on the content of the Author’s poetry, on the theme that gives it its title and, lastly, on two cycles of numbered poems, one concerning verticality, the other horizontality. While always seeking to speak for the poet, attention is drawn to the quality and originality of the Work, the manner of its composition, placing emphasis on intertextuality, in relation to both biblical texts and spiritual authors, on the one hand, and to Portuguese poets, on the other.

Without betraying itself, how can the truth of the faith be formulated in the public forum of other competing words? In this agoric and agonic condition the conviction of the faithfull individual (fides qua) and its communicable expression (fides quae) have to passe the hardest of tests: to become involved in the forum not of truth, but of verisimilitude, not of reality, but of appearance; not of dogma, but of doxa. The Confessions of Augustine of Hippo constitute one of the most successful expressions of this willing involvement of faith in the pluralistic forum of rhetoric. Conscious of the divides character of the word, Augustine himself confesses having been “a word salesman”; professional orators and their apprentices are no more than “sellers and buyers of grammar”. But in distinguishing «rhetoric at the service of error and lies”, pure “bartering of chatter”, from “rhetoric in the service of truth”, Augustine redirects rhetoric to the neutral place of organon and agrees to involve the reasons of christian existence in the forum of persuasion and verisimilitude, for it is not sufficient for truth to be true; it must also seem true, be verisimilar. Thus, the intimate truth of the word a faith can and shoud be expressed with eloquence and beauty, so “that it teaches, that it delights, that it moves”. And the result of this rhetorical criticism of rhetoric is the unparalleled work Confessions and its innumerable mises en scène within the ‘theatre of self’, in search of itself and of God, through the “vast palaces of memory”. But it is precisely there that the idolatrous pretensions of annexing God to the “experiences of self” are denounced.

Taking as a starting point the recurrent theme in many of the new religous movements – the figure of Jesus and this relation to the cosmos – this article seeks to reflect on the cosmic Christ. Who is the cosmic Christ? Is he different from the Christ of the Incarnation? Will he substitute the crib of Bethlehem, the cross of Golgotha and the empty tomb? Jesus Christ, God made man or God made cosmos? What is to be done with the cosmic Christ? Is he the Christ of the age of the “religion of the exit from religion” (Marcel Gauchet), or the Christ of “desecularisation” (Peter Berger)? A new incarnation of God? A new paradigm? A cosmic desire of a human being? The present text seeks to re-examine this line of questioning in the light of a presentation and critical analysis of two non-converging studies on the cosmic Christ, produced by two thinkers who marked the second half of the 20th century – the French Jesuit Teilhard de Chardin and the American Dominican Matthew Fox.

This text is an approach to negative theology in the broader framework to which it relates: the apparent silence of God in the history of the world, and the drama of human existence which faces the frontiers of the enigma, of the mystery and even of the making no sense. Negative theology appears as an attitude of those who believe, but finds no adequate linguistic form to express the mystery, in the face of both the ineffability of God and his undeniable incomprehensibility, and the ineffability of the human condition. It not only proclaims linguistic limits before the ineffable immensity of the mystery of God, but also before humanity’s greatness and misery. Negative theology is another manner the theological question as an anthropological problem, and vice versa.

The frequency with which Paul has recourse to affective, family language as well as showing one of his typical configuration models for the evkklhsi,a, at the same time reveals a controversial context: the congregations that the apostle created had no family ties, but sought to be one single family and one single house, yet retaining other characteristics similar to a public organisation. This ambiguity is easily detected in the actual places of meeting, which had features that were both private and public. The present text seeks to shed light on this ambiguity, supported by criteria relating to domestic spaces and the difference between private and public. And we will see, in due course, how these criteria emerge in the Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians in both directions: reflecting the ambiguity and seeking a greater public and political dimension for the evkklhsi,a.

To understand the conditions under which Paul travelled, it is necessary to compare the Book of Acts and Paul’s Epistles with our knowledge of the Ancient World (its institutions, culture, means of transport…); this data clarify the text unexpectedly. It is necessary to take into account the contribution of archaeology, and particularly naval archaeology, which provides us with a knowledge of embarkation procedures, routes and ports, as well as maritime activity in the Mediterranean Basin,in the 1st century of the Christian Era. It is ultimately useful to compare Paul’s Epistles and The Books of Acts with other written sources, be they Greek or Latin narratives or other texts from ancient literature, especially geographical works, which testify to itineraries and travel conditions in general.

In 1934, Teixeira de Pascoaes (1877-1952) brought out a biography of St.Paul, which was widely disseminated. In it he creates an interpretation of the figure and work of the Apostle as the true founder of Christianity. This, however, is interpreted by him in a gnostic key, within and dependent on his poetic philosophy of nostalgia: the Christ of true Christianity lives (only) as a mythical personification of the sentiment of the fall of God to the material world, in his positive reaction of spriritualist elevation or of hope. And this is the means to redemption or salvation, while through it is brought about the reintegration of mankind and the world in what was originally divine in both.Paul was the one who first understood Christ in this manner and transformed him into an object of belief for the world.

At the threshold of the third millenium, when the Catholic Church is rethinking the boundaries of its own responsibility, the year dedicated to Saint Paul constitutes a challenge that permeates the contexts in which the Church is called upon to communicate the Gospel. Will the Church survive beyond the second millenium of Christ? Christianity – it would seem – will undergo profound change. Will it be ever more popular, black (or certainly predominantly non-white), much more synchretic in style, more charismatic and, at times, more sectarian. These are the current questions being lived in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa. Then there is the big question of Asia, which contains many different worlds within it: the Near East with its Christian communities, of great antiquity and undergoing great suffering; Southen Asia and the Far East, where cultures going back thousands of years and great religions would seem to impede the spread of Christianity; China and India, dynamos of today’s world economy. Still today – as in the time of the very first generations of Christians – the world lives in expectation. Its rapid transformations and its conflicts place new questions before the Church.