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Did your catechists tell you there is some office in the Vatican somewhere with a frazzled sister answering the phone saying, "Office of the Magisterium. How may I direct your call?"

The Magisterium is not the sort of thing that has meetings and writes books. That's why it hasn't written one.

This may be hard to believe, but also the Vatican is too humble and too aware of its proper role to write a theological rule book or authoritative text.

I'd venture to say that theology as such arises in the context of dispute. Certainly that's the case with most conciliar acts. Trent only 'defined' the OT because your side was advocating a problematic definition.

Then more in the Spirit of the so-called "enlightenment" than in any other Spirit, your side decides in needs systematic works and statements to anticipate subsequent problems and disputes.

We, as a body, are happy to bumble along worshipping God and rejoicing in His Love and whatnot, UNTIL somebody raises an issue. THEN we respond.

Encylicals and whatnot are in a certain sense "occasional." The pope knows he is, in a way, writing for the ages. But it is the current state of thought, either academic or popular, or a current social problem which prompts the encyclical.

And I think that's completely reasonable. I simply cannot imagine "the last word" on Faith and Reason. But I can see the usefulness and helpfulness of a new look at the matter.

I believe that God is sovereign over life and death..ya have to wonder why God did not want that work finished??

Well God is sovereign and yet there seems to be a war on "out there." And God's sovereignty and our understanding why what happens happens are two different things. The events taking place right now and around us are certainly indications of God's plan. But to think that the infinitesimally small fraction of the totality of what's happening right now is enough to give us an insight in to the Will of God is to court madness. It becomes a "projective technique," an inkblot splattered across current events from which we read not what's out there but what's in us.

It's not clear and I would hesitate to say that God killed Aquinas. But it's also at least the legend, told with varying details, that he had some kind of apparition or vision when he was celebrating Mass, and afterwards his output declined steeply. I think there was a certain "passing the torch" quality to the whole thing.

I think that even when he's wrong, Aquinas's thought is so clear that you can see where he went wrong and why. Luther singled him out for special ridicule.

I think most of his detractors have not even tried to read him sympathetically (I havenot read nearly so much as i would like) and most of them also have the problem of ending up in the position of sawing off the branch they are sitting on -- they try to use reason to debunk reason and to draw conclusions from reason's debunking.