Missed Opportunities: Rethinking Catholic Tradition

Missed Opportunities: Rethinking Catholic Tradition opens up a dialogue between the official teachings of the Roman Catholic Church and the challenges the contemporary world presents to that institution's tradition of moral doctrines. It grounds this dialogue on a re-examination of the foundational issues of church reform and the many ways that the church teaches. Then Missed Opportunities turns its attention to a sequence of complex issues.

Resting his analysis upon research and a half-century's experience with the educational programs of the Roman Catholic Church, Gabriel Moran, a retired professor of educational philosophy, sets the groundwork and then examines a variety of connected issues, including birth and death, abortion, the natural world, suffering and pain, nonviolence, grief and mourning, issues of human sexuality, responsibility, environmentalism, and religious education.

Missed Opportunities: Rethinking Catholic Tradition guides readers through the depths of the societal challenges facing the Roman Catholic Church. By looking carefully at the nature of Catholic tradition and reconsidering how to bring that tradition into conversation with contemporary issues, Missed Opportunities proposes a pathway for the church to follow to undergo an honest and thorough reform, to regain its credibility in the midst of a society grown dubious, and to speak to today's issues in a voice consonant with the best resources in the Catholic tradition.

Gabriel Moran, professor emeritus of educational philosophy at New York University, has worked with the Roman Catholic Church's educational programs for more than fifty years. He has written twenty-five books, including many on religious education. Until her death, his wife Maria Harris was his collaborator in teaching and writing.