Ecclesiology

Reflecting on the Church

Fenton, Joseph C.  The Church of Christ: A Collection of Essays by Monsignor Joseph C. Fenton.  Edited by Christian D. Washburn.  Takoma, WA: Cluny Media, 2016.

Really just a quick note about this.  Cluny media has brought us a very wonderful selection of texts.  I recently became aware of Fr. Fenton while trying to understand the nature of theological science according to the old Dominican way of seeing things.  He was a student of Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange.  Somewhat lionized by the world of traditionalists today, he was indeed conservative.  Indeed, indeed, he even seems to have had some problems against my dear Jacques Maritain on political matters.  Such were things, I guess.  I should like to read the correspondence related to that.

In any case, he was a lucid writer.  It is sad that the quality of theology fell to the lows that it did later on in the American Church.  For whatever technical gains we had, it lacked the faithful soul that one found in a Fenton.  This is a wonderful little volume that I am reading in a kind of intellectual quasi-devotion.