Religion booknotes.

At a time when Catholic dioceses in the United States teeter on the brink of insolvency, in part because of the costs of the sexual-abuse crisis, it is worthwhile to remember the enormous charitable work that the church has performed over its history. As Timothy Miller points out in the introduction to this highly instructive book, the church began creating various charitable institutions in the early fourth century, at the end of the Roman persecutions. In both the West and East there arose a network of almshouses for the poor, old-age shelters, medical hospitals, and orphanages. The care given was seen never as some aberrant form of "do-goodism" but as an exigent demand of the gospel.

The Orphans of Byzantium

Child Welfare in the Christian Empire

By Timothy S. Miller

The Catholic University of America Press, $44.95, 340 pp.

One particularly significant ministry of the church was to care for abandoned or orphaned children. In Byzantium, for example, the church modified laws concerning guardianship so that orphaned children would not be physically, sexually, or financially exploited. Those laws also included provisions for adoption. As early as the ninth century, there was a liturgical ceremony ritualizing the act of adoption. The Byzantine Church also established orphanages, the most famous being the Orphanotropheion in Constantinople. It introduced something new into late antique society: a place that assumed care for abandoned babies whose survival previously depended on the whims of nature or persons. Until the fall of Constantinople (1453), the care of abandoned children was largely left to the church, either through orphanages, communities organized by monks, or in episcopal households. Miller's book traces the historical development of these institutions, studies their organization and patronage, and reconstructs their educational programs. He pays careful attention to both historical sources (not ample) and historical asides in literature. For example, Miller notes Gregory of Nyssa's famous tribute to his sister Macrina, who was mourned not only by her ascetic community but by the children in the community's care.

Miller's book ends with a short description of orphanages in the Latin West. A few interesting facts: visitors to Rome can walk from St. Peter's Basilica to the Hospital of the Holy Spirit, and there they can see a receptacle where unwanted babies were placed in order to be cared for by the nuns who staffed the hospital. Most tours of Florence, meanwhile, feature the Hospital of the Innocents, an architectural gem that was a former orphanage built in the fifteenth century. These monuments testify to the care given children in the West, a subject which Miller, in this careful study of the Christian East, is able to mention only in passing.

Discernment and Truth

The Spirituality and Theology of Knowledge

Mark A. McIntosh

Crossroad/Herder & Herder, $29.95, 290 pp.

Mark McIntosh is one of the few contemporary theologians who combine theology and spirituality in a satisfying whole. This book is not about discernment as a discrete act but rather treats it as a manner of living. McIntosh describes five aspects of the discerning life: it is one grounded in faith; it is readily able to distinguish between good and evil impulses; it has a practical sense about what to do in particular situations; it is motivated by the desire to pursue God's will in all things; and it exemplifies a sense of contemplative wisdom.

This book is divided into three parts. The first traces the historical roots of the five themes listed above. In this section McIntosh examines early spiritual writers like Evagrius and Cassian, the writings of Ignatius, and the work of John Bunyan and Jonathan Edwards. Part 2 is a series of case studies on figures such as St. Paul, Bunyan, and John Henry Newman. (The chapter on Newman is brilliant.) The third section ponders aesthetic and contemplative perceptions of truth. These final chapters are enriched by close readings in fiction (Iris Murdoch) and poetry (Thomas Traherne).

McIntosh's approach is unabashedly theological; his argument is that the intelligible structure of reality is "consummated and revealed for humankind in the death and Resurrection of Christ." Or, as he approvingly quotes from Simone Weil, in order to study the supernatural, one must be able to discern it. What McIntosh has done is put a contemporary spin on Origen's idea that if we live the life of virtue (praxis), we will see the world in a new and faith-filled fashion (theoria), which, in turn, prepares us for communion with God (theologia).

Parts of this book originally appeared as articles, but this is a coherent, well-argued, and illuminating work. I only have a few quarrels: It would have been enriched by an examination of St. John of the Cross's writings on discernment. I was also startled that, considering that McIntosh has published a brilliant monograph on Hans Urs von Balthasar, he chose not to discuss this theologian in his chapter on aesthetics. Such criticism, of course, is rather like complaining that you did not get lamb chops at a steak dinner. But it is understandable that one wants to hear more from this perceptive scholar.

Paul

His Story

Jerome Murphy-O'Connor

Oxford University Press, $21, 258 pp.

In 1996, Jerome Murphy-O'Connor published his acclaimed Paul: A Critical Life. His latest book is less concerned with the writings of Paul than with the man himself. In A Critical Life, Murphy-O'Connor wrote about Paul as if he were a disembodied mind that poured out theological ideas. This book attempts to see Paul as a living person. Murphy-O'Connor imagines what Paul would have seen and experienced in his travels, though he does not put words in Paul's mouth.

Murphy-O'Connor is uniquely qualified to write this book. He has studied Paul's writings for over three decades. He is an accomplished scholar of archaeology and geography, and the author of a splendid social history of the city of Corinth in Paul's day. Blessedly, this book is written for a general audience, so it is free of the jargon that can often mar academic studies.

Though Murphy-O'Connor tells a good story, this book is more than a narrative of Paul's travels. It also includes astute analyses of the issues facing Paul. Thus, the author considers Paul's claim to be an apostle; his handling of the vexatious issue of the Jewish law; and his struggle to sustain the lives of the communities he founded when he was absent from them. Murphy-O'Connor provides a close reading of the text while avoiding the temptation to read into the material. For example, when Paul talks about "a thorn in his side" in writing to the Corinthians, Murphy-O'Connor does not speculate that the apostle suffered from mental or physical illnesses. Instead, he makes a strong case that the thorn meant "opposition to his ministry from within the Jesus movement."

In the end, Paul was arrested and escorted to Rome to plead his case before the emperor, as was his right as a Roman citizen. We do not know when he died, but it was most likely in the last months of AD 67. In his epilogue, Murphy-O'Connor writes that Paul's death was greeted with some satisfaction, since he was such a strong opponent of requiring allegiance to the Jewish law. Paul was vilified in the first and second centuries, but eventually his letters were not only accepted, but championed. For Irenaeus, "Paul alone knew the truth" and, along with Peter, was the greatest saint to be martyred in Rome. To this day, on June 29, the feast day of SS. Peter and Paul, Rome is called happy (felix) to have been the site of the martyrdom of these two great apostles.

Creative Fidelity

American Catholic Intellectual Traditions

Edited R. Scott Appleby et al

Orbis, $30, 330 pp.

Creative Fidelities is the first of a nine-volume series of documentary histories called American Catholic Identities. The series is being edited by Christopher Kauffman; this particular volume was edited by R. Scott Appleby, Patricia Byrne, and William L. Portier. It includes nearly one hundred articles, from John Carroll's essays on Catholic education (1787) to Andrew Sullivan on homosexuality (1997). A range of scholars are represented, including Walter Ong, Thomas O'Dea, John Tracy Ellis, John Ireland, and Philip Gleason. Among the topics addressed are Thomism, Catholic education, church and state relations, moral theology, social thought, theology and science, spirituality and art, and Vatican II and its aftermath.

In a blurb for this book, Harvard's Robert Orsi describes it as "fabulous." A more measured judgment would be that it is fairly comprehensive. There is a good amount of important historical materials, such as John Courtney Murray's debates with Joseph Clifford Fenton, and Mary Perkins Ryan's essays on the utility of parochial schools. But other areas of intellectual culture are not adequately represented. I do not understand, for example, why the editors did not include Walker Percy's reflections on faith and literature, or the ground-breaking work of John Noonan (on the history of contraception) and William Lynch (on symbols). There is also no reference to Cross Currents, one of our best intellectual journals, Continuum, the excellent publishing house that has produced numerous important Catholic works, or Jubilee, the prestigious (though now defunct) Catholic magazine.

Of course, it is impossible for editors to include everything a reviewer would like to see. And in the end, there is enough in Creative Fidelity to fuel classroom learning and informal discussion, even if the selections are a bit brief. In short, it is a handy pedagogical tool and should be welcomed as such.

Blessed Pier Giorgio Frassati 

An Ordinary Christian

Maria Di Lorenzo

Pauline Books, $15.95, 147 pp.

Pier Giorgio Frassati was beatified by Pope John Paul II in 1990. The son of an aristocratic couple from Turin (his father was founder of the prestigious newspaper La Stampa), he was born in 1901 and died of polio on July 4, 1925. His life was not like most saints' lives. Consider the following: Frassati's parents were not models of traditional sanctity; indeed, their marriage was not a happy one. His father was not religious and his mother was only conventionally so. Pier Giorgio was a poor student who flunked Latin in high school. He fell in love with a young woman and would have married her had his parents not been opposed. He studied engineering in university and he was well known for his skill on the ski slopes.

In these ways he was a normal young wealthy man. Yet he was also a daily communicant, a social activist who openly criticized Mussolini, and a passionate advocate for the poor, to whom he ministered daily. A member of the third order of the Dominicans, he had the tertiary name of Jerome (Girolamo), in honor of the Florentine zealot Savonarola. When his family lived in Germany--his father was an ambassador in Berlin--he boarded for a time with a family named Rahner, whose most famous member, Karl, would later recall him with admiration.

Frassati comes from a long line of socially committed figures from the North of Italy. Like Joseph Cafasso and Don Bosco, he was a deeply spiritual person who saw the miserable poverty of the urban poor and responded with enormous generosity. What made him unique was his keen political sense. For example, when he was in Germany in the 1920s, he recognized that the country was on the cusp of severe political reaction. Frassati is not well known in this country but has a large following in Europe among young Catholic activists. This book should help raise his profile here, though in the future, I hope, someone will attempt a more comprehensive biography, one that places Frassati in a wider sociopolitical and spiritual context. Too brief and somewhat pious, this book only whets my appetite to learn more about this extraordinary young man cut down in the bloom of life.

Lawrence S. Cunningham is John A. O'Brien Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame.