"Rahner's creative genius expanded, not divided, the worldwide scope of church-sourced spirituality."

From ................ National Catholic Reporter

January 17, 1997

page 21

DREYER'S SPIRITUALITY

There is a needless demeaning of church in Art Winter's handling of Elizabeth Dreyer's approach to spirituality (NCR, Dec. 13), rendered no less annoying by a similarly unwarranted slant in the feature's headline ["Spirituality more easily found in the world than in churches"].

The piece unwittingly exposes Ms. Dreyer's misreading of Rahner's theory of a worldwide dimension of faith as an argument for a Holy Spirit independent of Christ's church. This is nonsense.

Rahner's creative genius expanded, not divided, the worldwide scope of church-sourced spirituality. The Holy Spirit still emanates from the Father with, repeat with, the Son through his church.

It also doesn't help Ms. Dreyer's image of maturity to insist on using the rhetorical "we" to infer a broad and inevitable acceptance of a diminished church sprung from Jesus. The lady has been taken in by recurring trends in world religion, which are a phenomenon as old as ancient myths but not all of them equally profound.

JOHN P. LEICHT Mundelein, Ill.

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