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The Church possesses a structure and composition that is hierarchical and synodal. This truth of the history and wisdom of the Church is, at the same time, a binomial of tension for which it is necessary to search repeatedly for a balance that is not always simple. The present text begins by showing the absence of structural equivalence between the hierarchical and synodal principle, almost always to the detriment of the synodal constitution, which appears in the Catholic Church as the weak principle in relation to the strong or hierarchical principle; that there has been a clear move forward towards a new balance between the principles mentioned (point II); thirdly (point 3), concrete proposals are presented for a reinforcement of the synodal structural element in the bosom of the Catholic Church.

The Church evangelises through its institutions in a double sense: it evangelises through mediation and as an institution. The ecclesial institutions are in themselves a message to the extent that they convey, mediate and communicate a message. This is particularly true in relation to the synodal institutions. As Pope Francis insists, these institutions aim not so much to organise the Church as to put it in a state of mission. The organs of participation are institutional places in which the faithful take part in decisions that have to do with the proclamation of the Gospel in a locality. That is how the faithful form a body in a “dynamic, open and missionary community”. On the basis of this triple qualification I wish, in the present reflection, to question the text that presents the Councils of the diocesan Church according to the code of Canon Law. This approach and concern is, however, of an ecclesial order and seeks, on this basis, to propose a formulation for the formula Votum tantum consultivum that is canonically more satisfactory, in order to honour the vocation of the faithful and their mission “in the Church and in the world”.

Taking as a starting point the ecclesial experience of the diocesan Synods and the principal documents of the recent Magisterium on the subject, this text aims to make a brief retrospective and assessment on the Synods that have taken place in the different local Churches in Portugal following the 2nd Vatican Council, or are still in progress. The thread of this reflection may be glimpsed immediately from the title: the diocesan Synods are a precious service to the mission of the local Church that promotes them, to the extent that they contribute to projecting its renovation and its evangelising and missionary pastoral action. Communion, renovation, mission, evangelisation and joint responsibility are, among others, incisive words that make the diocesan Synods of this period pulsate with a rhythm.

Taking as a starting point the ecclesial experience of the diocesan Synods and the principal documents of the recent Magisterium on the subject, this text aims to make a brief retrospective and assessment on the Synods that have taken place in the different local Churches in Portugal following the 2nd Vatican Council, or are still in progress. The thread of this reflection may be glimpsed immediately from the title: the diocesan Synods are a precious service to the mission of the local Church that promotes them, to the extent that they contribute to projecting its renovation and its evangelising and missionary pastoral action. Communion, renovation, mission, evangelisation and joint responsibility are, among others, incisive words that make the diocesan Synods of this period pulsate with a rhythm.

In this contribution, I propose to explore the force that remains in the proposal Gaudium et spes with regard to political life, at a time of disenchantment with the democratic model. I shall start by placing the crisis of civic commitment which Europe is living, to propose Christian hope as a way in to a political ethic in times of crisis, particularly because of its critical potential in the face of false hopes. I will then show that the concept of the common good developed at Vatican II permits a new prophetic boldness for which Pope Francis has mapped out the path, thus contributing to restoring the capacity of politics to partake of a perspective of direction that corresponds to the expectations of the contemporary world.

In exegesis and in theology, in the catechism and pastoral mission, the traditional interpretation of Gn 2,4b-3,24 parts from certain presuppositions: that this narrative speaks of Adam and Eve, of an original sin or guilty act committed by them, of a promise of salvation, of the devil in the form of a serpent, of paradise lost… And explicitly links sin to creation. Now, here and in another work quoted, using the exegetic methods recommended by the ecclesial magisterium, reading it within its own context, as offered by the Mesopotamian literatures discovered in archaeological excavations that took place there in the 19th century, a radically new interpretation is proposed. Through the discovery that this is an origin myth and functions like other origin myths, an intense exegesis of the text leads to the conclusion that it aims to give ultimate meaning to the beautiful and painful present – good and evil – of human life but is completely dissociated from the idea of sin.

This article seeks to provide evidence for the essential and characteristic foundations underlying God’s people, making use, to this end, of God’s revelation expressed in the book of Genesis, specifically in relation to what Abraham, Jacob and Joseph tell us. With this in mind, we begin by distinguishing God’s people from the founding event that led to, set in motion and still maintains its life dynamic. In reality, this founding event proves to be decisive and present throughout the testimony of Abraham, Jacob and Joseph, who form their own models of response to the unique vocation of God’s people, whether it be through Abraham’s obedience of God, Jacob’s openness to divine providence, or the wisdom taken on by Joseph, son of Jacob.

This study is divided into two brief chapters: the first, on structure and composition, contributes to its interpretation; following this, I carry out a study of the psalm as such, from a fundamental angle which I have called “Theology of 2 S 7,12-16 and Ps 89”. The parallels between these two texts are drawn in diagrams that offer a joint perspective. The marks on the side of the presentation of the psalm text seek to indicate the principal sections of the same. Furthermore, I study the psalm from synchronical and canonical points of views, not taking into account its diachronical evolution or other aspects of textual criticism.

This article is situated in the midst of the debate on the diversity of Biblical languages. The literary field chosen is the unusual and unexpected language of the Song of Songs, in which the human word of a man to a woman and the human word of a woman to a man are taken as a key to Revelation and to the understanding of the Scriptures. Faced with the question of how a text that is articulated as a loving language between a man and a woman lends itself to the articulation of a dialogue between God and a human being, our concern is not to find an answer but to try to catch a glimpse of the possibilities of intelligibility that this question implies. Our method will be to approach the language of the Song of Songs recognising it as: a door that clarifies the invisible; a language that mirrors what we are; a language that is the echo of a ‘love’ that precedes and redeems all human loves.

In the present article the author adds new elements in the sense of showing echoes of rabbinic tradition in texts originating from the Joanine community. These Jewish motifs come above all from the oral and liturgical tradition, as can be shown in the items analysed in this article: the theme of light; the liturgy of the day of Expiation (Kippourim); the traditions relating to Isaac; the theme of the “tabernacle of God among men” and the name of the covenant (ani hu). A few examples that show the importance of a ‘Jewish’ reading of the New Testament texts. The final aim is to encourage a pluralistic study of Judaism in the first century as a fundamental presupposition for a proper exegesis of the New Testament.

We do not know exactly what kinds of ills those that came to Jesus suffered from. They asked to be cured, purged, consoled, exorcised, reconciled and returned to peace. The usual term ‘unclean spirits’ has a broad range of meanings: illnesses, handicaps, woes, all sorts of conditions that nowadays might be labelled in general terms (in some instances) as psychiatric cases. Jesus also found cases of mental illnesses, despair, psychosomatic diseases, which were regarded by many first-century Jews as stemming from “unclean spirits”. Be that as it may (and, in any case, not in any sense denying the absolute singularity of Jesus’ thaumaturgy), Jesus reestablished many people not only with his very particular noteworthy and astonishing gestures. And in the process of exorcism, Jesus restored a person psychologically, thereby reinstating to the citizenship of Israel and to the religious life of its people those who thus far had been cast aside as impure.

For many centuries as well as in the present, the passage in 1 Cor 1,25 has always aroused the same endless sense of wonder. There the apostle confronts nothing more nor less than the disconcerting theme of God’s fragility. And he does so in a manner that is challenging, demanding and unforgettable, immersing the reader in an agitated ocean of questions. As we shall see, in Paul’s view this question of God’s fragility gains a programmatic character. The contents of 1 Cor 1,25 sets in motion a veritable ‘conversion of the imagination’, not only because it criticises and dismantles the conventional framework of dominant values, but because it offers a new hermeneutic for approaching the world and existence.

The interpretation of the Scripture and its different personages enriched the Christian Tradition but this reception is quite often marked by debates and polemics. Melchizedek, the king and priest who blessed Abraham in the Genesis, is an example of a reception through different perceptions in the Christian Tradition, as Ambrosiaster and Jerome witness to us. This article presents the position of Ambrosiaster and his comprehension of Melchizedek as a personification of the Holy Spirit and the reaction of Jerome affirming that the King and Priest is only a man.

The Book of Job was widely used and commented on by the Church Fathers, in different manners and with varying aims. When the first commentators once more took up the topos Job, it had already enjoyed a long interpretative tradition which, from the version of the LXX to the Testamentum Jobi, prepared the ground for a rich and ‘free’ patristic interpretation. This tradition reconciled the two great representations of Job: on the one hand, the extra-Biblical Job and the legend, on the other, the Biblical patriarch. The symbolic and paradigmatic density of this personality has ended up by weighing heavily on the hermeneutic of the text itself. All of this, in a continuous effort to ‘update’ the figure of Job at each moment and in each circumstance. The aim is to show this in these brief notes on the reception of Job in the patristic tradition.

In Christian anthropology Christ illumines and interprets the whole mystery of Man (cf. Gn 22), including his sinful condition from the outset. From the 1990s onwards, starting from a christological (and soteriological) centrality, contemporary systematic theology has been in the process of revising the doctrine of original sin. The sense of the title, “From Christ to Adam”, seeks to mark out this hermeneutical inversion. It is in the light of Christ, “the last man”, that we are to come to an understanding of the sinful condition of Adam. This article is structured around three points: based above all on the New Testament (especially Paul) and starting from the antithetical parallel between Adam and Christ, the first places particular emphasis on the excellence of Christ; the second presents some of the significant contributions from contemporary theology on the revision of original sin, with particular reference to the latin world; the third echoes this hermeneutic inversion in the recent Magisterium of the Church (Catechism of the Catholic Church, German Episcopate and Benedict XVI).

Myth is one of the cornerstones of Raimon Panikkar’s thought. This dimension should be considered in the broader context of rehabilitation of myth and of the debate around demythologisation. Panikkar actually approaches the issue in quite an original way: (1) by proposing a sui generis notion of myth as horizon of sense and intelligibility; (2) by highlighting the difference between mythos and logos, an essential element in Panikkar’s critique of the logical monism that dominates Western culture; (3) by pointing out the deep connection between myth and symbol; and (4) by recognising the existence of a mobility and plasticity in myth, which makes him talk about “transmythisation” and “remythisation” instead of demythologisation. In this paper, I try to present these four aspects of Panikkar’s understanding of myth.

Starting from the relationship between the concept of devotion and a particular way of relating to reality, even in thought, this article explores the difference between two fundamental attitudes: the one of control and the other of attention. Biblical-Christian spirituality is located within the second, making it possible to overcome a certain controlling tendency in modernity but also new spiritualities concentrated on the affirmation and happiness of the ‘self’. The ultimate aim, in the sense of affirming a devotional attitude as a way of being, recovers the spirituality of Genesis, at humanity’s opening to the free gift on the seventh day or Sunday of Creation. This attitude – which implies acceptance of the mortal and vulnerable condition of being human – leaves behind once and for all any Promethean pretensions of the modern individual and of a Europe centred on itself.

The dissemination of Protestantism in Oporto and Vila Nova de Gaia in the second half of the nineteenth century led to a heated Catholic-Protestant debate in the context of the development of the Oporto Catholic movement. The controversy came to a head in 1878/79 following the pastoral instruction on Protestantism given by the then Bishop of Oporto, Américo Ferreira dos Santos Silva. The Protestant reply issued forth from the pens of Robert Kelly and Guilherme Dias. The Catholic counter-reply relied on the bluntness of Sena Freitas and the argumentative serenity of Manuel Filipe Coelho. The present study contextualises and presents this debate in its fundamental issues, namely with regard to the Holy Scripture, seeing that the sola scriptura and Protestant free examination were not well received in Catholic circles, where the very dissemination of the Bible in the vernacular was a matter for reserve. Rather than a point of convergence between Catholics and Protestants, the Bible was, at the time, a basis for division in public confrontation.

We return here to an old enigma – the reconciliation of faith and reason – which has tormented philosophical argument and theological conscience, from the Church Fathers to the present. Opting for a dialogical rather than conciliar model of faith and reason, this essay follows various lines of reflection: it contrasts the rationality of faith with philosophical and scientific rationality, it focuses on believing subjectivity, it questions living with dogma and accepts an experience of revelation as acceptance of the other.

Saint Theresa has always remembered the singular position of the Humanity of Christ in the way of true union with God. She finds support in the security offered by the great saints of the Christian tradition; but she emphasises the force with which one approaches Saint Paul, and discovers him, not as the thinker who seeks to understand the mysteries of the Christian faith, but as an the apostle in love with Christ, who having Him ever present in his life, opens himself to his mystery derived from faith, understood above all as the key to personal fulfilment in the same way as Christ shows in giving his life for us.