A Faithful Critic

L adislas Orsy is a sly fox. He is also a distinguished Jesuit who was in Rome throughout the Second Vatican Council and who has made it his life mission as both theologian and canonist to stay faithful to the council’s call to conversion. As he puts it in this new collection of essays written over the last 10 years, no one who has not undergone this process of conversion can appropriate the message of Vatican II. The language of conversion recalls that other distinguished Jesuit, Bernard Lonergan, to whose influence Orsy pays lavish praise in the acknowledgments. The book is dedicated, no surprise, to the memory of John XXIII, the “pope who made you feel like a person.” But if these warning signs encourage anyone to dismiss Orsy’s new book as just another liberal call to follow the spirit rather than the letter of the council, it would be a big mistake to give in to the temptation.

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