Bérulle's Spiritual Theology of Priesthood

The crisis facing the Catholic priesthood has brought into question the theology of ministerial priesthood. The spiritual theology of priesthood forged by the founder of the French school of spirituality, cardinal Pierre de Bérulle (1575–1629), had a major influence on seminary formation as late as the era leading up to the Second Vatican Council. Reflected, in part, in St. John Paul II’s exhortation Pastore Dabo Vobis, it again enjoys a worldwide dissemination.
This monograph is an in-depth appraisal of Bérulle’s possible influence on the development of the theology of priesthood, through his use of concepts adapted from the realm of speculative mysticism, that is, philosophical speculation regarding mystical experience, and shaped into an applied metaphysic. Key notions related to the Christological debates of the Reformation and Counter Reformation eras include such concepts as subsistence, relation, substance, obediential potency, person, causality, image, being, and more.
The author’s thesis is that Bérulle’s spiritual theology created a sea change in the theology of priesthood, heretofore unrecognized, as his ideals survived mainly in formation literature and have long been underexplored by theologians and philosophers, who have passed over the pertinence of this category of work in particular and spiritual theology in general.