The Deacon's Bench
Fr. Richard McBrien, who as a scholar brought distinction to a university theology department and who as an author and often-interviewed popular expert explained the Catholic church to the wider world, died early Sunday morning. He was 78.
McBrien had been seriously ill for several years and had moved recently from South Bend, Ind., to his native Connecticut.
It would be difficult to find a figure comparable in making understandable to a broad public the basic beliefs and traditions of the Roman Catholic church.
For more than three decades, he was the star of the theology faculty at the University of Notre Dame and the go-to voice on all matters Catholic in the popular press. His books, particularly Catholicism, Lives of the Popesand Lives of the Saints, were staples of libraries, Catholic and non-Catholic alike.
At his peak in the 1980s and ’90s, it is arguable that McBrien had a higher media profile than anyone in the Catholic church other than Pope John Paul II. He was the ideal interview: knowledgeable, able to express complex ideas in digestible sound bites, and utterly unafraid of controversy.
“I don’t hold things back,” McBrien said in a 1990 profile by the Chicago Tribune, adding in a rare moment of understatement: “I’m outspoken.”
Unabashedly on the progressive side of most Catholic debates, McBrien advocated the ordination of women priests, an end to mandatory celibacy for priests, moral approval of artificial birth control, and decentralization of power in the church. In so doing, he helped to define the battle lines within Catholicism over the legacy of the Second Vatican Council (1962-65).
Eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon him…
Photo: Richard McBrien / University of Notre Dame website
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