SANCTIFYING OFFICE

Eucharistic Theology

Angelo Scola has conspicuously underlined the importance of Eucharistic theology in his writings.

In his relatio delivered at the 2005 Synod of Bishops, organized to discuss the Eucharist in the life of the Church (and which bore fruit in Benedict XVI’s Sacramentum Caritatis, the post-synodal apostolic exhortation on the Eucharist as the source and summit of Christian life), Scola emphasized that the Eucharist is the locus of the revelation of God’s love for humanity. In the Eucharist, he added, the believer is allowed access to the living and personal Truth who saves. Similarly, in 2008, Scola gave a conference to the Italian Federation of Spiritual Exercises titled, “Christian Spirituality in Light of the Post-Synodal Exhortation Sacramentum Caritatis.” He explained, “Spirituality is not to take oneself away from life. At its root, there is the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of the Son Incarnate, who died and rose again.” Hence, spiritual exercises cannot but have the Eucharist as their center, such that life itself should have a “eucharistic shape.”

Liturgy

Although liturgy has not been a focus of Scola’s thought, he was one of the few Italian bishops supportive of Benedict XVI’s 2007 Motu Proprio Summorum Pontificum, which granted greater license to priests and bishops to celebrate the Mass and other liturgies and sacramental rites in the forms used prior to the Second Vatican Council. Scola defended the document, saying that the “Latin Mass is not in contradiction with the liturgical reform of the [Second Vatican] Council,” and that certain parishes in Venice were dedicated to the Extraordinary Form without any tension thereby in the diocese.He even placed a chapel under the care of the Fraternal Society of Saint Peter (FSSP), formally inaugurating their care by personally assisting at a Mass in the Extraordinary Form as bishop in 2010 in Venice. In Milan, he allowed for a community to have a chapel in which the traditional Ambrosian Rite would be offered weekly. Himself not given to celebrate the Extraordinary Form, he was known to celebrate the Novus Ordo in Latin from time to time.

Importance of Prayer

Prayer has been an important focus for Angelo Scola throughout his life. In his early days, his commitment to prayer was manifested in how he joined young people for sessions of encounter with Communion and Liberation. As a sign of his confidence in prayer, when Scola was about to enter Milan as its new archbishop, he wrote the people: “I need you, all of you, your help. I ask in particular for the prayer of children, of the aged, of the sick, of the poor and marginalized.”¹Andrea Tornielli, Il futuro e la speranza: vita e magistero del cardinale Angelo Scola (Milan: Edizioni Piemme, 2011), 16. In his latter days, he led many spiritual exercises for diverse groups, including, for example, the Association of Friends of the Seminary of Milan, in which he described the importance of being rooted in the life of Christ.

Another example of Scola’s spiritual sense is how he led the Rosary in the Duomo of Milan to encourage the diocese to dedicate the month of May to the Blessed Virgin Mary. On that occasion he said, “We feel the desire and the charm of gathering together in prayer under the Madonna. The Virgin Mary, who rushed into heaven to enter into glory, persuades us to raise our eyes, to reinvigorate our hope, to confirm us in the belief that, if we do all that Jesus tells us, we will once again see joy flow through the streets of this troubled and wounded metropolis, the center of the world and the existential periphery that invokes [her] consolation.”

Mary, the mother of the Lord, is the archetype of every human being and the archetype of women, according to Scola.²Tornielli, Il futuro e la speranza, 54, 55. He cites affirmatively certain passages from John Paul II’s 1987 Encyclical Redemptoris Mater, in which John Paul says that Mary is the model for women of the “self-offering totality of love” (no. 46).

Vocations

Encouraging vocations of all kinds, Scola wrote the people of the Diocese of Milan in 2015 a pastoral letter titled, “Educate Yourself in the Thought of Christ.” In this synthesis of his personalism and pastoral commitment to Catholic teaching, Scola wrote, “In the Church through communion, at the school of Scripture, Tradition and the Magisterium, we make Christ’s thoughts and feelings our own, which grow progressively in us by generating a mentality. The encounter with Jesus for the believer is the source of a new way of thinking about affections, work, rest and celebration, education, pain, life and death, evil and justice.” He insists that Christian spirituality is not a generic religious sense, or some mere practical outcome, but “is rooted in the Incarnation of the Son of God and therefore in the inhabitation of the Spirit in us as the Generator of communion.”

GOVERNING OFFICE

Grosseto

Angelo Scola’s first pastoral assignment was to the Diocese of Grosseto, situated on Italy’s western coast between Florence and Rome. Scola’s chief concerns there included the education of children and youth, vocations and clergy formation, pastoral care for laborers whose job security was threatened due to the dismantling of mines in Grosseto, and family culture. During this time, Scola wrote and published a book addressed to young people and focused on the subject of the Church’s educational mission, titled And Who Am I? A Bishop Speaks to the Young. His first pastoral letter, “You Will Be Truly Free,” was published in 1992 not long after he was ordained a bishop. In it, Scola focused on the connection between beauty and hope. Scola founded a choir, “Gaudete,” during his years in Grosseto. When he had arrived, diocesan schools were in poor shape: only a few nursery schools and one grammar school were operational. As a result of his efforts, the Mother of Grace middle school opened its doors in 1994.

Italian journalist Andrea Tornielli devoted a chapter in his 2011 book The Future and Hope: The Life and Teaching of Cardinal Angelo Scola to Scola’s pastoral ministry in Grosseto.³Tornielli, Il futuro e la speranza, 83-97. In that chapter Tornielli notes that Scola’s name was unknown to the people of Grosseto when he was announced on July 20, 1991, as the successor to Adelmo Tacconi. Scola quickly won his new flock over by his attentiveness to the youth, for whom he regularly celebrated special Masses, whom he accompanied on pilgrimages, and whom he encouraged in their discernment of priestly or religious vocations. His encouragement of vocational discernment found institutional footing in the creation of the Gruppo di verifica, a supportive community for young men and women discerning calls to religious and consecrated life. Tornielli also recounts how Scola reopened the diocesan seminary — which had been closed for twenty-three years — in response to a group of young men from the Gruppo di verifica who said that they wanted to become priests. Scola also started a theology school in the diocese so that seminarians would not have to travel to take their studies. He oversaw the creation of a Christian radio station, Toscana Oggi. A diocesan priest in Grosseto with whom Scola collaborated closely in the course of energetically pursuing his vision for a renewed local church stated that, even after Scola was recalled to Rome by John Paul II, he always replied quickly and helpfully to requests for counsel and advice.

When Pope John Paul II in 1995 wanted Scola to take up academic positions in Rome, he resisted. Scola wanted to continue his pastoral work at Grosseto, where he had served for fewer than four years.⁴See Angelo Cardinal Scola, with Luigi Geninazzi, Ho scommesso sulla libertà (Milan: Solferino, 2018), 141. Quotations in the text are translated from Italian.

Patriarch of Venice

Scola’s next pastoral assignment was announced in 2002: he would be the next patriarch of Venice, a see that three twentieth-century popes had occupied prior to their election. The announcement surprised Scola. In his 2018 autobiography, Ho scommesso sulla libertà (I bet on liberty), he relates that John Paul II had personally assured him earlier that year that Scola would not be nominated for the See of Venice because John Paul II thought it more important that he remain the rector of the Lateran.⁵Scola, Ho scommesso sulla libertà. When the pope invited Scola to dinner and informed him of his looming appointment, Scola immediately said yes.⁶Scola, Ho scommesso sulla libertà, 163.

In 2004, Scola founded an integrated educational system that spanned from primary school to university, the Fondazione Studium Generale Marcianum. The Marcianum comprised a theology faculty, a canon-law faculty, university courses, and primary and secondary schools. Its curriculum was interdisciplinary, spanning bioethics, religion, and cultural-heritage courses.⁷Scola, Ho scommesso sulla libertà, 178-79. Scola asserts that his primary reason for founding the Marcianum was to effect the “unity of the subject.” ⁸Scola, Ho scommesso sulla libertà, 176. The fragmentation and specialization of disciplines in contemporary education, he said, entailed the fragmentation of the knowing subject who learns and appropriates what he is taught. The Marcianum, which was free of cost and open to Christian and non-Christian students alike, was an effort to restore the original vision of the university: to bring all knowledge into a harmonious whole, a single “subject” in the learning of which the thinking “subject” (the pupil) can achieve intellectual integration.⁹See Scola, Ho scommesso sulla libertà, 176. Scola’s successor, Cardinal Francesco Moraglia, downsized the foundation, but its canon-law faculty, created by Scola and currently the only one in Northern Italy, survives. Scola believes that his major mistake in administrating the Marcianum was in not identifying someone with stable roots in Venice who could administer the Marcianum once he, Scola, was no longer patriarch.¹⁰See Scola, Ho scommesso sulla libertà, 181.

Oasis: Christian-Muslim Dialogue

In 2004 then-Archbishop Scola founded Oasis, an international journal published in English, French, Italian, Arabic, and Urdu, devoted to Christian-Muslim dialogue and to strengthening the bonds of understanding and support between Christians in the East and the West. Scola says that he began thinking of a project like Oasis in the aftermath of a meeting, organized by the Vatican nuncio in May of 2000, with seven representatives from diverse Eastern Catholic rites. At this meeting, Scola, who was then still at the Lateran, came under fire from members of the Eastern churches for doing nothing to help them in their plight, for failing to understand their churches, and for being completely ignorant of Islam. If it were not for this experience, Scola reports, he would not have thought to found Oasis, a primary objective of which is to overcome what Scola calls the “abysmal” reciprocal ignorance between Christians and Muslims.¹¹See Scola, Ho scommesso sulla libertà, 182-83. Ninety percent of Christians, if asked to explain what Islam is, could not do so, Scola surmised — and vice versa.¹²Gerard O’Connell, Scola: “A Certain Faith Paves the Way to Open Dialogue,” La Stampa, 30 June 2011“Oasis was founded,” Scola wrote in 2013, “because we realized there was a substantial mutual ignorance in terms of the two faiths. Ignorance causes fear to grow and hinders people from being able to interpret the processes that take place throughout history. We cannot stop these [phenomena from occurring], but we can try to influence their direction.” Scola remains the president for life of the Oasis foundation.

Scola describes Venice as “the city of religions.”¹³Scola, Ho scommesso sulla libertà, 171. It is home to one of only two European sees for Latin Church patriarchs. It has a small but vibrant Jewish community, and its rabbi and Scola maintained good terms while Scola was patriarch. In Scola’s view, moreover, Venice generally exhibited the kind of interreligious public relationships that undergird and make possible a healthy democratic life.¹⁴Scola, Ho scommesso sulla libertà, 172. Interreligious dialogue, Scola says, is “not something additional to the act of faith but is a constitutive element of it.”¹⁵Scola, Ho scommesso sulla libertà, 146.

Parish and Cultural Outreach, Evangelization

In 2005, Scola began a tour during which he visited every one of the 128 parishes in the diocese. This undertaking took him a full six years. He traveled every weekend except for some in the summer and during certain liturgical seasons.¹⁶Scola, Ho scommesso sulla libertà, 167. Scola said of this prolonged pastoral experience that it made him appreciate more deeply the importance of living the Faith in community. He also founded a “school of the method of Christian life,” a community educational program that, in two cycles, gave three hundred groups within the diocese the opportunity to work through texts on themes of Christian community, faith, and culture.¹⁷Scola, Ho scommesso sulla libertà, 169.

While in Venice, Scola fostered close practical relationships with political and cultural leaders, especially with Venice’s mayor, Massimo Cacciari. He teamed up with them to address the problems that can beset any large, popular city and that beset Venice in a particular way as a hugely popular tourist site.¹⁸Scola, Ho scommesso sulla libertà, 173-74. On one occasion, Scola took the initiative to gather thirty or so leading political figures for an informal colloquy in which everyone was invited to speak freely and everyone was forbidden from publicizing anything that was said during the weekend-long gathering.¹⁹Scola, Ho scommesso sulla libertà, 174.

Scola has been credited with the idea for creating the Pontifical Council for Promoting the New Evangelization, which was founded by Pope Benedict in 2010. The author of dozens of books and many dozens of academic articles, Scola is also generally reputed to have raised the academic profile of the Lateran University while acting as its rector.²⁰Gerard O’Connell, Scola: “A Certain Faith Paves the Way to Open Dialogue,” La Stampa, 30 June 2011

YouCat Controversy

During his time in Venice, Scola was publicly criticized by Christoph Cardinal Schönborn of Vienna about the Italian translation (from the German original) of YouCat — a youth catechism that distilled the 1997 editio typica of the Catechism of the Catholic Church. Schönborn cited deviations from doctrinal orthodoxy. The Italian manuscript included errors, such as the provision of an affirmative answer to the question of whether married couples can licitly practice contraception under some circumstances. It does not appear Cardinal Scola publicly responded to the rebuke.

Archbishop of Milan: Pastoral Letters

In 2011, Scola was appointed archbishop of Milan, Italy’s most important financial and cultural center. With more than one thousand parishes and five million baptized Catholics, it is one of the world’s largest dioceses. Scola quickly published a short pastoral letter in anticipation of 2012’s seventh World Meeting of Families, focusing on the theme “Family, Work, and Celebration.” (The meeting would include a visit by Pope Benedict XVI to Milan in the late summer.) In this pastoral letter Scola praises Pope Benedict’s ministry, recalls the importance of the Petrine ministry in and for the Church, underscores the importance and role of family in society, and encourages the faithful of his new archdiocese to participate with open hearts in the meeting, especially by showing hospitality and renewing the education of children in the context of the home.

Scola’s second pastoral letter was published in 2012, during the Year of Faith proclaimed by Pope Benedict. In it, Scola invited the faithful to renew their commitment to Christ and to rediscover the richness of faith, flowing forth from an encounter with the Christ who saves. He urged them also to root themselves in community with the Church of today, and also with the Tradition that transmits the Faith through generations.

Scola’s third and by far the longest pastoral letter of his time in Milan, “The Field Is the World,” is a reflection on the parable of the sower from Matthew 13. The entire world is the field — in Italian, the campo — of God, who, like the sower in the parable, initiates the entire drama of human freedom with His loving invitation to communion. God’s Word calls forth our freedom, not only presenting us with but necessitating a choice to open ourselves to, or close ourselves off from, His love. Scola also reflects on the transition from Benedict to Francis in the midst of the Year of Faith, calling Benedict’s resignation un gesto umile di profonda fede, “a humble gesture of profound faith.”

Communion and Liberation

In Milan, Scola has sought to distance himself from the Communion and Liberation movement and was applauded for not bringing in friends from the movement to serve in Milan’s curia, instead filling positions with members of Catholic Action, another Church movement — but one that has had public disputes with Communion and Liberation. The way he managed the diocesan curia was taken as proof that he could govern, according to his supporters. Being an Italian but outside the Roman Curia, Scola is believed to be in an ideal position to cleanse it of malpractice and corruption.

From 2015 to 2017, Scola undertook a pastoral visit program that involved all the deaneries (canonically sanctioned organizational combinations of parishes) of Milan in a series of visits and discussions between Scola and members of the deanery parishes.²¹See Scola, Ho scommesso sulla libertà, 240. The heart of his message, Scola said of the preaching and teaching he would dispense during these visits, was the necessity for the faithful to place themselves into intimate contact with the life and history of Jesus Christ and the necessity of testifying boldly that Christianity is the most captivating way to live a properly human life.²²See Scola, Ho scommesso sulla libertà, 240. While acknowledging the lasting fruits of this pastoral visitation program, Scola rued the failure of his discourses on the fundamentals of the Faith really to take root in the Milanese faithful. ²³See Scola, Ho scommesso sulla libertà, 241.

Carlo Acutis

Scola also presided over the close of the diocesan phase of the canonization process of Carlo Acutis, a Milanese boy who died of leukemia at age fifteen but who had practiced a deep devotion to the Eucharist and inspired many Catholics in Milan to grow in their faith. Scola spoke warmly of Carlo’s influence on the diocese and on him. Acutis was beatified in October 2020 and the College of Cardinals has approved his canonization on July 1, 2024, after a second miracle attributed to him was recognized.

TEACHING OFFICE

On Sexual Identity

Sexual difference for Scola is a fundamental datum of human existence. In an article he published in anticipation of the controversial 2014 Extraordinary Synod on the Family, he asserted that “every human being is situated as an individual within the difference between the sexes. We must recognize that this can never be overcome.”²⁴Angelo Cardinal Scola, “Marriage and the Family between Anthropology and the Eucharist: Comments in View of the Extraordinary Assembly of the Synods of Bishops on the Family,” Communio 41 (Summer 2014): 208-25, 211. Scola helpfully explains that difference is not diversity. Diversity, he says, is when two autonomous subjects choose different paths while remaining in their autonomy. Diversity is interpersonal. Difference, however, is intrapersonal.²⁵Scola, “Marriage and the Family,” 212. “Every individual finds himself inscribed within this difference [between the sexes] and is always confronted with this other way of being a person, which is inaccessible to him.”²⁶Scola, “Marriage and the Family,” 212. Scola speaks of the “insuperable” and “primordial” character of the difference between the sexes and says: “The original character of sexual difference indelibly marks every person in his or her singularity.”²⁷Scola, “Marriage and the Family,” 212, 215. As such, Scola rejects the claim that the human person can exist as both male and female, simultaneously or alternately, or that one can decide what sexual identity one has or will have: “Man exists always and only as a masculine or feminine being. He always has before himself the other way of being human, which is to him inaccessible.”²⁸Angelo Cardinal Scola, “The Dignity and Mission of Women: The Anthropological and Theological Foundations,” Communio 25 (Spring 1998): 46. In his book The Nuptial Mystery, Scola asserts: “The [human] body (as sacrament of the whole person) is defined all the way through by its insuperable sexual difference.”²⁹Angelo Scola, The Nuptial Mystery, trans. Michelle K Boras (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2005), 374. This edition combines what, in the Italian, had been two volumes. This remark is made in the context of a section on “androgyny,” by which Scola means the claim that man is “‘capable’ of both sexes” — in other words, capable of asserting himself as either male or female, depending on his psychological self-understanding.

The elimination of sexual difference from human relationships is a violation of the nature of the human person. Scola thinks that a culture that does not accept the revelation of the trinitarian God makes itself incapable of understanding sexual difference in a positive sense. Hence, Scola comments that “not for nothing does the open acceptance of homosexuality belong both to classical paganism and to the paganism of the present day.”³⁰Scola, “Dignity and Mission of Women,” 52. He stated in a 2013 interview, “I am convinced that a family based on marriage between a man and a woman and open to life is good for society.” Asked about the growing civil recognition of same-sex unions, Scola said: “To guarantee individual rights to everyone is one thing. To attack the family either directly or indirectly is quite another.”

The Nuptial Mystery, Women’s Ordination, and Life Issues

Scola’s fullest treatment of the nuptial mystery is in his book of the same name, published in English in 2005. In the book, Scola broaches several controversial moral issues and gives his “nuptial mystery” perspective on them. This book thus furnishes a very helpful insight into his thought.

Appendix 1 of the book is a brief treatment of recent magisterial teaching, by Paul VI, John Paul II, and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), concerning the male priesthood.³¹All citations in this paragraph are from Scola, The Nuptial Mystery, 307-13. Here Scola makes very clear that he completely affirms the Church’s teaching concerning the inadmissibility of women to the ministerial priesthood. He characterizes John Paul II’s teaching in the 1994 Apostolic Letter Ordinatio Sacerdotalis thus: “the Catholic Church in no way possesses the faculty of conferring priestly ordination on women”; the Church has made “a definitive pronouncement on the impossibility of the admission of women to the ministerial priesthood.” He affirms the CDF’s classification of this teaching as “infallibly proposed by the ordinary and universal magisterium.” He agrees with the argument of one Catholic scholar who avers that by restricting his appointments to the college of apostles to males, Jesus “expresses his positive intention to reserve the ministerial priesthood only to men.” Scola says that the Church does “not have the power to make [women priests], if she wishes to remain faithful to herself.” Finally, he affirms that “the definitive character of the magisterial pronouncement on the question of the inadmissibility of women to the ministerial priesthood is based, in its turn, on the proper nature of freedom and power in the church.”

In the same book, Scola says of abortion: “When human life is no longer a sacred and inviolable right, but a consumer good which can be appraised in terms of usefulness or pleasure, a ‘culture of death’ [citation to Evangelium Vitae, no. 95] develops, threatening both man and his civilization.”³²Scola, The Nuptial Mystery, 169. He also states that artificial fertilization “transforms the child into the object of a process of production.”³³Scola, The Nuptial Mystery, 170.

Appendix 3 of the book touches upon the 1987 CDF instruction Donum Vitae, the “Instruction on Respect for Human Life in Its Origin and on the Dignity of Procreation.” Scola defends the document, accepts its teachings, and seeks to explicate the anthropological-theological underpinnings of its two central norms, which are, first, “from the moral point of view, procreation is deprived of its proper perfection when it is not willed as the fruit of the conjugal act”; and second, “the procreation of a human being must be pursued as the fruit of a specific conjugal act of love between spouses.”³⁴Scola, The Nuptial Mystery, 331.

Appendix 5 is on Humanae Vitae, which Scola calls “profoundly coherent with the tradition of the Church”; there can be no doubt, he says, that “the doctrine of Humanae Vitae belongs to the ordinary universal Magisterium of the Church [note omitted].”³⁵Scola, The Nuptial Mystery, 357, 361. Its essence Scola summarizes and affirms thus: “The life of a new human being,” he says, “is willed and sought after rightly when it is awaited and welcomed as a ‘gift from a gift,’ when medical intervention aids but does not substitute the physical and spiritual gift that the spouses make of themselves in the conjugal act.”³⁶Scola, The Nuptial Mystery, 359. Scola pins a host of problems on a scientific mentality fostered by the advent of technical methods for manipulation of conception. “It [the scientific mentality according to which practices such as contraception, nonmarital sex, artificial reproductive technologies should be engaged in since they can be engaged in] is the idolatrous expression of a utopian madness, to which, particularly in the popular understanding, the achievements of science and technology remain exposed.”³⁷Angelo Cardinal Scola, “The Nuptial Mystery: A Perspective for Systematic Theology?,” Communio 30 (Summer 2003): 217. Elsewhere in the book he writes that “a human being must always be conceived in an act of love-gift constituted by the conjugal union of a man and a woman.”³⁸Scola, The Nuptial Mystery, 135. Scola speaks of the “objective inadequacy of every act of human procreation which is not the fruit of the love expressed in the conjugal union of man and woman.” Ibid., 137.

On Communion for “Remarried” Divorcees

Scola has been unflinching in his defense of the teaching of John Paul II and Benedict XVI that persons party to a sacramental marriage who divorce and then civilly remarry may not be admitted to the Eucharist unless they obtain a decree of nullity for their first marriage. He affirms the indissolubility of marriage, grounding it in the nature of the sacrament’s relationship to the Eucharist, which is the bond that unites Christ indefectibly to His Church; again, Ephesians 5 surfaces often in Scola’s treatments of marriage and indissolubility.

For example, Scola has written: “Indissolubility is ultimately what makes Christian marriage a sacrament. In fact, only by its being indissoluble does marriage participate in the nuptial sacrifice that the Word Incarnate makes of himself on the Cross to his Immaculate Bride.” And in his statements leading up to 2014’s Extraordinary Synod of Bishops, Scola unequivocally affirmed the indissolubility of sacramental marriage.³⁹Vatican insider Sandro Magister notes that Scola’s opposition to the Kasper Proposal was known at the time of the synods. See Sandro Magister, “Figments If Instead of Bergoglio They Had Elected Cardinal Scola Pope,” L’Espresso, 6 September 2018. See Scola, “Marriage and the Family,” 210, 216, 217, 222. See also Scola, “Dignity and Mission of Women,” 52: “Indissolubility constitutes the destiny and the very core of the relation of man and woman in marriage.” He states that the state or condition of persons who have entered a second bond while the first is still valid is what makes it “impossible” for those persons to receive the Eucharist worthily . “This condition [of the second ‘marriage’] is one that needs to be changed in order to correspond to what is effected in these two sacraments [marriage and the Eucharist].”⁴⁰Scola, “Marriage and the Family,” 219. Scola points out that the Eucharist is not a sacrament of healing . It is not, contrary to what some Catholics assert, just there for those “who need grace.”⁴¹Scola, “Marriage and the Family,” 220. What the Eucharist effects and signifies is of its nature such that those who inter alia persist in second “marriages” that are objectively adulterous are not in a state to receive it worthily.

Scola testifies that in his pastoral ministry he has come to know couples in “second marriages” who, with the grace of God, have come to live as brother and sister in complete continence. As such, he affirms the possibility of this “solution” to the problem of the divorced and “remarried,” affirms John Paul II’s commendation of it, and encourages Christians to attempt it.⁴²Scola, “Marriage and the Family,” 221. Scola also suggests a new canonical model for handling annulment cases. He proposes that a bishop or his delegates, instead of a tribunal, could exercise authority, following the example of canonical administrative procedures currently governing the process of dissolving non-consummated marriages (CIC 1697-1706) or dissolving consummated marriages for reasons of faith (CIC 1143-1150).⁴³Scola, “Marriage and the Family,” 223.

Scola reaffirmed his view on divorce, remarriage, and the Eucharist in Ho scommesso sulla libertà, alleging that he also expressed this view of his privately to Pope Francis. In sum, Scola’s sexual ethics are remarkably consistent with those of John Paul II and Benedict XVI.

Scola affirms that the Magisterium is competent to teach authoritatively on matters of morality and natural law. Scola states that “the Encyclical Veritatis Splendor, in the doctrinal core of its teaching, affirms ‘the universality and immutability of the moral commandments, especially those which prohibit always and without exception intrinsically evil acts’ (n. 115).”⁴⁴Scola, “The Nuptial Mystery,” 360. On page 361, Scola again affirms that the Magisterium is competent to offer authentic interpretation of the moral law. Here he also cites favorably on the subject of moral absolutes the work of the American moral theologian William E. May, who, together with the Australian legal philosopher John Finnis, was the first layperson ever appointed to the International Theological Commission, for the 1986 quinquennium (five-year appointment term). “It belongs to the nature of the Magisterium,” Scola has written, “to enunciate Christian doctrine by affirming its contents and marking its parameters.”⁴⁵Scola, “Dignity and Mission of Women,” 45.

Cardinal Scola reiterated his position in a book length interview in 2018 in which he defended the Church’s traditional teaching, namely that the divorced and remarried cannot receive Communion unless they resolve to live “in complete continence” — teaching Pope St. John Paul II presented in his apostolic exhortation, Familiaris Consortio. 

Priestly Celibacy

As mentioned above, Scola is a staunch defender of the all-male priesthood, but he also defends the Roman Catholic Church’s discipline of mandatory celibacy for those who receive Holy Orders. In a 2010 speech at the end of a large Mass in St. Mark’s Basilica in Venice, responding to recently surfaced allegations of pedophilia among priests and consecrated persons, Scola told the congregation: “It is misleading and unacceptable to question, from cases of pedophilia in the ecclesiastical environment, the holy celibacy that the Latin Church asks for, in full liberty, of the candidates to the priesthood in the light of a very long tradition.”

Universalism

Human freedom is a leading theme of Scola’s work. To his mind, the encounter with Christ is what elicits human freedom and sets it off on its path. Scola would then presumably countenance the prospect of eternal damnation for those who grossly abuse their freedom. But Scola does not often preach or write about damnation, let alone as a reality (not merely a possibility that may well go unrealized). He is also a fervent disciple of Hans Urs von Balthasar, who strenuously argued in his later years that the hope that nobody will be lost is theologically well founded.

Scola has praised the Second Vatican Council’s 1965 Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation Dei Verbum for stressing the “event” nature of revelation, which is not merely the transmission of information (propositions) but a personal self-disclosure appropriated only by a personal assent, the yes that initiates one into the relationship being held out as an invitation. Scola was very favorable toward Verbum Domini, the Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation on the Word of God in the Life and Mission of the Church promulgated in 2010 by Pope Benedict, which cites many passages from Dei Verbum, though not those most central to its treatment of the Gospels’ historicity. Scola commends Verbum Domini’s clarity and precision in dealing with thorny questions of Scripture and revelation, praising its accessibility even to non-theologians.

Migrants and Refugees

The meeting in Damascus organized by the Vatican nuncio between Scola and representatives of Eastern Catholic rites in the year 2000 left a mark on Scola’s thinking and led him to found Oasis. In his 2018 autobiography, Scola is asked several questions about his work with Oasis. These questions touch upon immigration policy, religious freedom, and the compatibility of Islam with Christian civilization.

Scola believes that it is incumbent upon political institutions to direct and govern mass migration. But he believes European governments have not done a good job of this. Citing a 2017 report indicating that more than 250 million persons had left their country of origin that year — Scola points out that this is about 50 percent higher than the number from the year 2000 — he speaks of a “gross naiveté” of which the West is guilty — namely, the mass media’s presenting Western life as being so wonderful that it has attracted many migrants who seek those places where the world is “better” than where they are.⁴⁶See Scola, Ho scommesso sulla libertà, 185-86. “We have been blind and deaf for many years,” Scola says, to the plight of the immigrant and to the conditions that foster it.

Scola rejects the relevance of a distinction between refugees and economic immigrants for purposes of immigration policy.⁴⁷See Scola, Ho scommesso sulla libertà, 186. “How can one think of welcoming only the former while rejecting the latter?” he asks.⁴⁸See Scola, Ho scommesso sulla libertà, 186. Such thinking, he states, lends itself toward a caste-system mentality proper to the Middle Ages.⁴⁹ See Scola, Ho scommesso sulla libertà, 186.

Islam

Scola acknowledges that Islam needs to initiate a transformation with respect to its doctrines on liberty of conscience. Recalling a meeting in Amman, Jordan, sponsored by Oasis, Scola notes that while his interlocutors — members of an Islamic institution noted and respected for its openness to dialogue and led by Prince Ghazi bin Muhammad bin Talal — were “in principle favorable” to liberty of conscience, they nevertheless would not consent to subscribe to a clear recognition of freedom of conversion.⁵⁰See Scola, Ho scommesso sulla libertà, 191. Asked directly whether Islam needs to accept the principle of the laicity, the secular status, of the state, Scola replies: “In principle it is correct to recall the distinction between the religious and civil spheres, but in the concrete doing so risks becoming an abstract discourse that does not make contact with how Islam was originated and how it has developed.”⁵¹Scola, Ho scommesso sulla libertà, 191. Scola points out that laicization efforts by Turkey’s president Recep Erdoğan had an “inverted result” from what Westerners would want from Islamic state laicization, and he points to France as an instance of a country in which the separation of religion and state has been implemented in an extreme way. Scola also accuses Westerners of being disingenuous when, on the one hand, they exhort Muslims to submit to the “purifying bath of secularism” while, on the other, they bemoan the negative effects of the advanced secularism in the West on Christianity and society.⁵²See Scola, Ho scommesso sulla libertà, 192.

Scola asserts that Muslim countries should make real the respect for the liberty of every believer living in their jurisdictions. He acknowledges that “it is undeniable that the expansion of Islam by way of Muhammad’s activities happened by use of violent force,” and states clearly that “Islam must also do this [recognize freedom of conscience]”: “The fact remains that the Muslim world is called to reflect in a new way on the theme of liberty.”⁵³See Scola, Ho scommesso sulla libertà, 193-94. Similarly, Scola said in 2011 that “it is necessary to foster an evolution in Islam so as to arrive at a distinction between the religious dimension and the civil dimensionB.”⁵⁴ Gerard O’Connell, Scola: “A Certain Faith Paves the Way to Open Dialogue,” La Stampa, 30 June 2011 In a 2010 interview, Scola stated that suicide bombing is “intrinsically an evil.” And he has written: “There exists a violence that is perpetrated in the name of God. Religions must remove all legitimacy from these criminal acts.”

Religious Freedom

In a December 2012 speech given shortly before the seventeen hundredth anniversary of the Edict of Milan, Scola noted that because bedrock anthropological institutions and experiences such as marriage, childbirth, and death have been shorn of their Christian religious significance in Western liberal democracies, religious freedom has become an increasingly important and vexed topic.⁵⁵Much of Scola’s speech was recorded in the Italian-language edition of L’Osservatore Romano, a copy of which was furnished to the author by a source in Rome. Referring to the U.S. bishops’ resistance to the Obama administration’s health-care mandate that required religious employers, including hospitals and schools, to provide free contraceptives, abortifacients, and sterilization services to those employees whose health care these institutions covered, Scola noted that unless religious freedom is considered to be the first and most important of human rights, the whole edifice of human rights will crumble. He reflected that when religious freedom is construed as indifference on the part of the state to religious phenomena — he adduced the French model of laicity as an example — what happens is that the state adopts a “neutrality” toward religion simpliciter that is, practically, an enshrining of one controversial worldview, secularism, over others (religious worldviews). In that situation, religious worldviews are de facto evacuated from the public domain and relegated to the realm of the private, mythological, and folkloric. Alleged “religious neutrality” often results in the official promotion of an atheistic culture.

Scola on Being a Papal Contender

Notwithstanding his long and deep friendship with Joseph Ratzinger and the widely held view that he was Benedict’s anointed successor (when Benedict presented him with the pallium in a separate ceremony after Scola’s appointment to Milan, it was taken as a clear sign), Scola states that he, like everyone else, was “absolutely surprised” by Benedict XVI’s announcement on February 11, 2013, that he was resigning.⁵⁶Scola, Ho scommesso sulla libertà, 259. Scola was a leading “favorite” papabile for the ensuing conclave. The Italian Bishops’ Conference even erroneously published a communiqué when white smoke was spotted at the Sistine Chapel, congratulating Scola on his election as the new pope. It is said that Scola garnered the highest tally of votes during the initial round of voting in that conclave.⁵⁷Sandro Magister, L’Espresso, 2018 Despite the media’s consistent presentation, before, during, and subsequent to the conclave, that he was the favorite, Scola claims never to have believed it: “I never believed in the possibility of becoming pope,” he writes in his 2018 autobiography.⁵⁸Scola, Ho scommesso sulla libertà, 262. Scola confesses to having felt “marginalized” by the media’s presentation of him as the “loser” of the “contest” with Bergoglio, who was depicted as representing the “Church of the future” in contrast to Scola’s more traditional and thus, in the eyes of some, backward-looking outlook on Church life.⁵⁹Scola, Ho scommesso sulla libertà, 262.

Coronavirus Reflection

During the 2020 coronavirus pandemic, Cardinal Scola advocated a dual attitude: to remain united by following the government’s instructions, even when it involves some sacrifice, and to reflect on the meaning of life. He said the suspension of the Mass was an opportunity to develop more of a hunger for the Eucharist and the Word of God.

He disagreed with those who said the virus was divine punishment. “God wants the good,” he said. “The idea of divine punishment, especially with a dramatic situation like the one we are experiencing, is not part of the Christian view.” The proper Christian view, he said, is one that does not involve God’s having “recourse to the practice of punishment in order to convert.”

Loyalty to the Pope

In a couple of interviews in 2019, Scola strongly supported Pope Francis, urging an end to criticisms of the pontiff. “It’s a very strong sign of contradiction and denotes a certain weakening of the people of God, above all of the intellectual class,” he said of the criticisms. “It is a profoundly wrong attitude because it forgets that ‘the pope is the pope.’”

He added that the Pope “is the ultimate, radical and formal guarantor—certainly, through a synodal exercise of the Petrine ministry—of the unity of the Church.”

Scola did not enter into the merits of any of the criticisms, but said instead said that he considered them, especially when they make “irritating comparisons with previous papacies, a decisively negative phenomenon that is to be eradicated as soon as possible.”

He said what he admired about Francis was his “extraordinary capacity” to be “close to everyone, and especially to the excluded, to those who are subjected to ‘the throw-away culture’ as he so often reminds [us] in his keenness to communicate the Gospel to the world.”

Writing in his autobiography Betting on Freedom published in 2019, he said Pope Francis was like a “healthy punch in the stomach” and that he sought to “shake up consciences by calling into question consolidated habits and customs in the Church, each time raising the bar, so to speak.”

“This can cause some bewilderment and upset,” he said, “but the ever harder and more insolent attacks against his person, especially those that come from within the Church, are wrong.”

Synodality

Also in his memoir Scola recalls that when John Paul II called him to the episcopate at the age of 49, he knew he had to accompany the life of the People of God. “I liked working together with people, my method was synodality!” he wrote.

In a 2021 interview with America magazine, he said he therefore immediately thought Pope Francis was on the right track by pushing the whole Church onto a synodal path. “His idea of synodality is proven by his style of exercise of the magisterium, which is based on gestures that reach out to people, a magisterium that also draws on his personal life and arrives to dogmatic formulation when the need presents itself.” The Pope should be supported in this, he said.

At the same time, he confessed that he had “some fears” about how the synod will unfold. “In Europe, at least, we have been too accustomed to set up commissions and committees, where we talk and talk, but too often we do not arrive at this walking together.”

Nevertheless, he said, “I hope things can go well, that synodality can generate a new style of Church…[and] arouse a capacity to remotivate all of us together—lay people, both the young and the elderly, as well as priests and bishops. But I think it is not going to be easy, especially after this period of Covid.”

Ahead of the Synod on Synodality’s first assembly in October 2023, and perhaps detecting how synodality had become a largely sociological and humanistic experiment, Scola released conversations he had had with Henri De Lubac and Hans Urs von Balthasar in 1985.

He wrote: “From secularization to de-Christianization up to the crisis of vocation and testimony: much more is needed than a ‘new humanism’ that frames the need to ask the profound questions of existence in a single great ‘religion.’ He added, recalling the theses of Von Balthasar and De Lubac, that “the religious sense is ineradicable. You can bury it under piles of debris but, like blades of grass in spring, it will spring back. Therefore, speaking of exclusive humanism to describe the current state of things, as the philosopher Charles Taylor does, can at most identify a sociological category of some use, but it does not get to the heart of the problem.”

Communio Theology

Tracey Rowland is a member of the ninth and current quinquennium of the Vatican’s International Theological Commission (ITC). The ITC consists of leading theologians worldwide tasked with publishing documents on topics of contemporary import to the Church. In her book Catholic Theology, Rowland describes the school of thought sharing the name of the international journal founded by “conservative” theologians not long after Vatican II ended in 1965.⁶⁰Tracey Rowland, Catholic Theology (London: Bloomsbury, 2017). One characteristic of this Communio school is fidelity to the Magisterium and an emphasis on a philosophical personalism utilized to interpret Scripture.

Having described the Communio school, Rowland writes:

The leading proponent of the Communio approach to theology in contemporary times is Cardinal Angelo Scola, the Archbishop of Milan and the alleged runner-up in the last papal conclave, described by The Tablet as the Crown Prince under the papacies of John Paul II and Benedict XVI. He developed John Paul II’s ideas contained in his Catechesis on Human Love in conjunction with Balthasar’s ideas on Trinitarian theology, and the combination of the two produced his [Scola’s] proposal for a Nuptial Mystery perspective for systematic theology.⁶¹Rowland, Catholic Theology, 129-30.

Here some background is necessary. Following the close of Vatican II in December 1965, a group of theologians, many of whom had been very influential at the Council, founded an academic journal, Concilium, devoted to continued exploration of the “spirit” of Vatican II’s aggiornamento reforms. These theologians included Yves Congar, Hans Küng, Johann Baptist Metz, Karl Rahner, Henri de Lubac, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Joseph Ratzinger, and Edward Schillebeeckx. But de Lubac, Balthasar, and Ratzinger resigned before long from Concilium’s board and, in 1972, founded an alternative and, as it is commonly thought, rival theological journal, Communio, whose editors and contributors were less keen on instigating “Vatican III” and who interpreted the Council through its texts, not its “spirit.”

Communio, meaning “communion,” was chosen as the title by its founders because, whereas a council (the meaning of the Latin concilium) is an act within the life of the Church — an occasion on which the Church pauses and deliberates about particular issues — communion is what the Church is: a communion of persons in the one Lord Jesus Christ. As such, the founding editors of Communio believed that the enduring bond of persons united in communion in Christ — in the Trinity, in the communion of saints, through the Eucharist, through the nuptial mystery of marriage, and so forth — was the proper locus for basic theological reflection.

Scola was and is an admirer of Balthasar, Ratzinger, and de Lubac. He published a book-length interview with Balthasar (published in English in 1989) and constantly cites him in his writings. Scola’s thought takes its decisive orientations from Balthasar’s work. Rowland’s identification of him as the quintessence of the Communio school is well founded.

In a 2011 interview, Scola stated that the most important question confronting the Church today is whether we are living in a postmodern world.⁶² Gerard O’Connell, Scola: “A Certain Faith Paves the Way to Open Dialogue,” La Stampa, 30 June 2011 A year earlier, Scola had defined what he meant by “postmodern” in reference to three characteristics. First, there is widespread advanced secularization, which Scola defined in reference to the third of the three meanings of “secularization” that Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor furnishes in his 2007 study A Secular Age: namely, faith in God is but one valid option among other valid options. Relatedly, Scola states in the same interview that the problem besetting the modern world is the divorce between life and faith. The Faith seems irrelevant; its practice does not seem to have purchase or import for life in the modern world, especially for the young. Second, freedom of choice is now construed as unbounded by any objective standard of right decision. Third and finally, truth is now reduced to the technically feasible: if you can do something, you must.

In the same interview Scola suggests that the crisis for the Church in the third millennium is the question “Who is man?” This is a question of anthropology. And it is in the context of theological anthropology that Scola has developed and defended the “nuptial mystery” perspective of which Rowland writes.

The nuptial-mystery perspective on systematic theology, Scola once wrote, places the themes of marriage and family at the heart of the knowledge of the Faith.⁶³Scola, “The Nuptial Mystery: A Perspective for Systematic Theology?” For Scola, the nuptial mystery is located at the intersection of sexual difference, love, and procreation.⁶⁴Scola, “The Nuptial Mystery at the Heart of the Church,” 630-62. It is the perfect identity in difference, the unity-in-duality, that finds its paradigm in the one-flesh communion between man and wife but which also expresses the relationship between the Father, Son, and Spirit; Scola often has recourse to Balthasar’s thought that the relationship between husband, wife, and the child who is the fruit of their love is the most apt natural analogue for the trinitarian relations and for Christ and His Church.⁶⁵Scola, “The Nuptial Mystery at the Heart of the Church,” 655. “The mystery of the Trinity is the ultimate foundation of dual unity,” he writes.⁶⁶Scola, “Dignity and Mission of Women,” 51 and cf. generally 42-56.

For Scola, who here follows Balthasar, the loving procession of Father and Son generating the Spirit is the ontological basis for the possibility of the Incarnation, in which divine and human natures in Christ are “married.”

The Incarnation is in turn the basis for the Church poured forth from Christ’s side, making Christians brides to the Bridegroom. This mystical union, in turn, grounds Christian marriage as the human paradigm of (but not exhaustive of!) the nuptial mystery; Ephesians 5, wherein Paul, in verses 21 through 32, compares the union of man and wife to the union of Christ with the Church, is a leitmotif threading through all of Scola’s writings.

 By “nuptial mystery” Scola means, first of all, “the concrete experience of the man-woman relationship that lies at the very origin of the phenomenon of nuptiality in all its various types, and thus forms its constitutive nucleus.”⁶⁷Scola, “The Nuptial Mystery at the Heart of the Church,” 639. Nuptiality manifests an asymmetrical reciprocity between the “I” and the “other.”⁶⁸Scola, “The Nuptial Mystery at the Heart of the Church,” 643. There is another modality, another irreducible way, of being human than the way I experience: if I am a man, that other way is existing as human as female (and vice versa). She is identical in her being qua person possessed of a human nature, but different in her being qua sexed. Thus, the nuptial mystery and communio are connected insofar as both are about man’s creation in God’s image and likeness, a characteristic in virtue of which man is called to communion: “Communio as an essential dimension of man is part of his being in the image of God.”⁶⁹Scola, “Dignity and Mission of Women.”

• 1
  Andrea Tornielli, Il futuro e la speranza: vita e magistero del cardinale Angelo Scola (Milan: Edizioni Piemme, 2011), 16.
• 2
  Tornielli, Il futuro e la speranza, 54, 55.
• 3
  Tornielli, Il futuro e la speranza, 83-97.
• 4
  See Angelo Cardinal Scola, with Luigi Geninazzi, Ho scommesso sulla libertà (Milan: Solferino, 2018), 141. Quotations in the text are translated from Italian.
• 5
  Scola, Ho scommesso sulla libertà.
• 6
  Scola, Ho scommesso sulla libertà, 163.
• 7
  Scola, Ho scommesso sulla libertà, 178-79.
• 8
  Scola, Ho scommesso sulla libertà, 176.
• 9
  See Scola, Ho scommesso sulla libertà, 176.
• 10
  See Scola, Ho scommesso sulla libertà, 181.
• 11
  See Scola, Ho scommesso sulla libertà, 182-83.
• 12
  Gerard O’Connell, Scola: “A Certain Faith Paves the Way to Open Dialogue,” La Stampa, 30 June 2011
• 13
  Scola, Ho scommesso sulla libertà, 171.
• 14
  Scola, Ho scommesso sulla libertà, 172.
• 15
  Scola, Ho scommesso sulla libertà, 146.
• 16
  Scola, Ho scommesso sulla libertà, 167.
• 17
  Scola, Ho scommesso sulla libertà, 169.
• 18
  Scola, Ho scommesso sulla libertà, 173-74.
• 19
  Scola, Ho scommesso sulla libertà, 174.
• 20
  Gerard O’Connell, Scola: “A Certain Faith Paves the Way to Open Dialogue,” La Stampa, 30 June 2011
• 21
  See Scola, Ho scommesso sulla libertà, 240.
• 22
  See Scola, Ho scommesso sulla libertà, 240.
• 23
  See Scola, Ho scommesso sulla libertà, 241.
• 24
  Angelo Cardinal Scola, “Marriage and the Family between Anthropology and the Eucharist: Comments in View of the Extraordinary Assembly of the Synods of Bishops on the Family,” Communio 41 (Summer 2014): 208-25, 211.
• 25
  Scola, “Marriage and the Family,” 212.
• 26
  Scola, “Marriage and the Family,” 212.
• 27
  Scola, “Marriage and the Family,” 212, 215.
• 28
  Angelo Cardinal Scola, “The Dignity and Mission of Women: The Anthropological and Theological Foundations,” Communio 25 (Spring 1998): 46.
• 29
  Angelo Scola, The Nuptial Mystery, trans. Michelle K Boras (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2005), 374. This edition combines what, in the Italian, had been two volumes.
• 30
  Scola, “Dignity and Mission of Women,” 52.
• 31
  All citations in this paragraph are from Scola, The Nuptial Mystery, 307-13.
• 32
  Scola, The Nuptial Mystery, 169.
• 33
  Scola, The Nuptial Mystery, 170.
• 34
  Scola, The Nuptial Mystery, 331.
• 35
  Scola, The Nuptial Mystery, 357, 361.
• 36
  Scola, The Nuptial Mystery, 359.
• 37
  Angelo Cardinal Scola, “The Nuptial Mystery: A Perspective for Systematic Theology?,” Communio 30 (Summer 2003): 217.
• 38
  Scola, The Nuptial Mystery, 135. Scola speaks of the “objective inadequacy of every act of human procreation which is not the fruit of the love expressed in the conjugal union of man and woman.” Ibid., 137.
• 39
  Vatican insider Sandro Magister notes that Scola’s opposition to the Kasper Proposal was known at the time of the synods. See Sandro Magister, “Figments If Instead of Bergoglio They Had Elected Cardinal Scola Pope,” L’Espresso, 6 September 2018. See Scola, “Marriage and the Family,” 210, 216, 217, 222. See also Scola, “Dignity and Mission of Women,” 52: “Indissolubility constitutes the destiny and the very core of the relation of man and woman in marriage.”
• 40
  Scola, “Marriage and the Family,” 219.
• 41
  Scola, “Marriage and the Family,” 220.
• 42
  Scola, “Marriage and the Family,” 221.
• 43
  Scola, “Marriage and the Family,” 223.
• 44
  Scola, “The Nuptial Mystery,” 360. On page 361, Scola again affirms that the Magisterium is competent to offer authentic interpretation of the moral law.
• 45
  Scola, “Dignity and Mission of Women,” 45.
• 46
  See Scola, Ho scommesso sulla libertà, 185-86.
• 47
  See Scola, Ho scommesso sulla libertà, 186.
• 48
  See Scola, Ho scommesso sulla libertà, 186.
• 49
  See Scola, Ho scommesso sulla libertà, 186.
• 50
  See Scola, Ho scommesso sulla libertà, 191.
• 51
  Scola, Ho scommesso sulla libertà, 191.
• 52
  See Scola, Ho scommesso sulla libertà, 192.
• 53
  See Scola, Ho scommesso sulla libertà, 193-94.
• 54
  Gerard O’Connell, Scola: “A Certain Faith Paves the Way to Open Dialogue,” La Stampa, 30 June 2011
• 55
  Much of Scola’s speech was recorded in the Italian-language edition of L’Osservatore Romano, a copy of which was furnished to the author by a source in Rome.
• 56
  Scola, Ho scommesso sulla libertà, 259.
• 57
  Sandro Magister, L’Espresso, 2018
• 58
  Scola, Ho scommesso sulla libertà, 262.
• 59
  Scola, Ho scommesso sulla libertà, 262.
• 60
  Tracey Rowland, Catholic Theology (London: Bloomsbury, 2017).
• 61
  Rowland, Catholic Theology, 129-30.
• 62
  Gerard O’Connell, Scola: “A Certain Faith Paves the Way to Open Dialogue,” La Stampa, 30 June 2011
• 63
  Scola, “The Nuptial Mystery: A Perspective for Systematic Theology?”
• 64
  Scola, “The Nuptial Mystery at the Heart of the Church,” 630-62.
• 65
  Scola, “The Nuptial Mystery at the Heart of the Church,” 655.
• 66
  Scola, “Dignity and Mission of Women,” 51 and cf. generally 42-56.
• 67
  Scola, “The Nuptial Mystery at the Heart of the Church,” 639.
• 68
  Scola, “The Nuptial Mystery at the Heart of the Church,” 643.
• 69
  Scola, “Dignity and Mission of Women.”