The Guardian (UK) offers a fascinating obituary on theologian Edward Schillebeeckx:
Edward Schillebeeckx obituary
His influential but low-key theological dissent inflamed the Vatican
From the Guardian (UK) online
For the past three decades, the leadership of the Catholic church has displayed a particular intolerance of theological dissent. Some of the otherwise loyal priest-teachers who have been targeted by the Vatican have reacted to their very public rebukes by courting the press and liberal Catholic opinion. Hans Küng and Leonardo Boff, for instance, have become prominent examples. By contrast, the Flemish Dominican Father Edward Schillebeeckx, who has died aged 95, responded to being hauled over the coals by the Vatican in 1984 with characteristic understatement. Though second to none as a theologian in 20th-centuryCatholicism, he lived out his remaining years away from the limelight out of his enduring loyalty to the church – despite the rough justice handed out to him.
At issue was Schillebeeckx’s questioning, in dense but academically influential writings throughout the 1970s, of a too-literal reading of the New Testament. To the Vatican’s evident irritation, he queried the relevance to the modern age of church teaching on the virgin birth and resurrection. So did many others, but Schillebeeckx (pronounced Schill-e-bex) had been one of the leading theological lights at the great reforming Second Vatican Council (1962-65). So his efforts in Jesus: An Experiment in Christology (1974) and Christ: The Christian Experience in the Modern World (1977) to build on the council’s updating of Catholic thought by relating the gospel message to contemporary experience could not simply be overlooked. “I do not begrudge any believer the right to describe and live out his belief in accordance to old models of experience, culture and ideas,” he once said, “but this attitude isolates the church’s faith from any future and divests it of any real missionary power.”