In May of this year, Christian churches around the world will celebrate the 1700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea. Health and politics permitting, Pope Francis will travel to what is now the city of İznik in Turkey to commemorate the event with the Patriarch of Constantinople and other Christian leaders. Way back in 325 A.D., the Council of Nicaea, responding to the Arian heresy among others, hammered out a definition of the Trinity that more or less all Christians accept today: that God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit, three in one.
Trinitarian scholars don’t have it easy—there’s a reason why the church likes to throw around the word “mystery”—and so it isn’t always the most popular topic for preachers or theologians. One historical artifact of the old Catholic calendar is that seminarians are still usually ordained on what used to be the “ember days” after Pentecost—meaning that the first Sunday homily for many newbie priests is on Trinity Sunday. Good luck, Padre!
That might be why, noted Patrick Henry in a 2017 essay on Catherine Mowry LaCugna, many contemporaries of LaCugna when she was a resident scholar at the Collegeville Institute in 1985 were stunned into silence when they asked what the 32-year-old theologian was working on: “The doctrine of the Trinity.” Most theologians, wrote Henry, the executive director of the Collegeville Institute from 1984 to 2004, “reacted with embarrassment at the mention of this ‘most venerable’ and ‘most crucial’ of Christian doctrines.” But LaCugna didn’t shy away from the topic, the implications of which she saw as important for other areas of church life.
“Getting the doctrine of the Trinity right, she insisted, would go a long way toward authentic renewal of theology and church. Implications of this trinitarian view extended to the role of women in the church,” Henry wrote. “LaCugna was a leading feminist theologian, believing that the ‘doctrine of the Trinity insists that relationality, not solitariness and least of all biological sex, is at the heart of what it means to be a person.’”
A stronger emphasis on the relationship among the three persons of the Trinity (“the household of God”), LaCugna taught, brought relationality to the fore, pushing back against the theology of other 20th-century thinkers like Rahner and Barth—and Augustine 16 centuries before. It also returned Trinitarian theology to relevance in pastoral theology, LaCugna wrote, making it “an eminently practical teaching” instead of relegating it to a metaphysical cul-de-sac and reducing many Christian believers to de facto monotheists. (Warning to readers: I was swimming significantly past my depth when writing the above.)
Born in 1952 in Seattle, Wash., LaCugna attended Holy Names Academy and Seattle University, from which she graduated in 1974. She earned her doctorate in theology from Fordham University in New York in 1979. After teaching stints at Fordham and Vassar College, she joined the faculty at the University of Notre Dame in 1981. In 1993, the university recognized her with the Frank O’Malley Undergraduate Teaching Award; three years later, she received the Charles E. Sheedy Teaching Award and was appointed the Nancy Reeves Dreux Professor of Theology.
She was the author of two books, The Theological Methodology of Hans Kung and God For Us: The Trinity in Christian Life. She also edited Freeing Theology, The Essentials of Theology in Feminist Perspective.
The publication of God For Us in 1991 further developed the Trinitarian theology she had been working through in some of her many academic articles. The book won a first-place award from the Catholic Press Association. In addition to its frequent citation in systematic theology, it has also had an impact in other areas: The contemplative theologian Richard Rohr credited God For Us with inspiring much of his work in recent years. “Yes, yes! This is it! This sums up everything that I think I’ve experienced,” he wrote of the book in his own The Divine Dance.
In a 2016 essay on God For Us for the National Catholic Reporter, the theologian Richard Gaillardetz wrote that “LaCugna offered us a profoundly contemplative, compelling and eminently pastoral account of the triune God who comes to us as Word and Spirit and draws us into divine communion through the life of the church. Hers is a vision of God who is, at the heart of the divine being, God for us.”
Not all the reviews at the time were positive. America’s reviewer of God For Us, Edward T. Oakes, S.J., didn’t much care for the book’s critiques of traditionally held Trinitarian theology, but he did allow that it “will set the terms for the debate on the Trinity for years to come. Above all, its depth and command of the literature will ensure it a lasting influence.”
LaCugna wrote for America several times in the 1990s, including a long 1992 article on “Catholic Women As Ministers and Theologians” and a 1994 essay, “Reflections on Preaching the Word of God.” In 1995, then-associate editor James Martin, S.J., asked her to participate in a compendium of responses from theologians and prominent American religious figures on the question of “How Can I Find God?” Part of LaCugna’s response was often later quoted, including in obituaries after her death less than two years later:
One “finds” God because one is already found by God. Anything we would find on our own would not be God. If we think that by our own efforts, or our own ideas, we have found God, we may have “found” just a product of our own imaginations, or needs or wishful thinking. But it might be difficult to tell the difference between the true, living God and the God whom we have devised for ourselves, a God enshrined in expected religious symbols and ritual gestures. God who dwells in light inaccessible exceeds every concept and image we have of God; else, God would not be God.
Several years after the publication of God For Us, LaCugna began work on a sequel of sorts—with a greater focus on spirituality—in collaboration with the theologian Michael Downey, but she was diagnosed with cancer in 1993. Downey eventually published the book (dedicated to LaCugna), as Altogether Gift: A Trinitarian Spirituality, in 2000.
LaCugna died of cancer in 1997. She was only 44 years old.
In a 2007 reflection for America, LaCugna’s longtime friend and colleague, Robert A. Krieg, C.S.C., noted that LaCugna continued teaching until the end of her life: She taught her last class four days before her death.
In her honor, the Catholic Theological Society of America created the Catherine Mowry LaCugna Award in 2005, given each year to a “new scholar for the best academic essay in the field of theology within the Roman Catholic tradition.” (Check out the list of winners: Many are now prominent theologians in their own right.)
On LaCugna’s grave in Cedar Grove Cemetery at the University of Notre Dame is chiseled a phrase from God For Us:
We were created for the purpose of glorifying God by living in right relationship as Jesus Christ did, by becoming holy through the power of the Spirit of God, by existing as persons in communion with God and every other creature.
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Our poetry selection for this week is a reflection by Jayme Stayer, S.J., on Emily Dickinson. Readers can view all of America’s published poems here.
Members of the Catholic Book Club: We are taking a hiatus while we retool the Catholic Book Club and pick a new selection.
In this space every week, America features reviews of and literary commentary on one particular writer or group of writers (both new and old; our archives span more than a century), as well as poetry and other offerings from America Media. We hope this will give us a chance to provide you with more in-depth coverage of our literary offerings. It also allows us to alert digital subscribers to some of our online content that doesn’t make it into our newsletters.
Other Catholic Book Club columns:
- The spiritual depths of Toni Morrison
- Doris Grumbach, L.G.B.T. pioneer and fearless literary critic
- What’s all the fuss about Teilhard de Chardin?
- Moira Walsh and the art of a brutal movie review
- Father Hootie McCown: Flannery O’Connor’s Jesuit bestie and spiritual advisor
Happy reading!
James T. Keane
