Father John L. McKenzie, who died one...

Father John L. McKenzie, who died one week ago in Claremont at age 80, was remembered this week as an American leader among post-World War II Catholic scholars emboldened by a 1943 encyclical that opened the gates to methods of modern biblical criticism that had previously been held suspect by the church.

“He was largely an Old Testament scholar and very influential in the beginnings and orientation of modern biblical scholarship in the ‘40s and ‘50s,” according to Father Raymond Brown, who now teaches at St. Patrick’s Seminary in Menlo Park.

Brown, considered the current dean of Catholic biblical specialists, said McKenzie’s work helped to make respectable among Catholic bishops and scholars what had previously been regarded as largely a mainline Protestant enterprise.

“In my mind, ‘The Two-Edged Sword’ was his greatest book,” Brown told Religious News Service. “He had a tremendous influence in orienting Catholic scholars to the Old Testament using modern biblical scholarship and tools.” The mid-1950s introduction to the Old Testament was still controversial enough at the time to be held up for three years by church authorities.

The Jesuit scholar was also an outspoken pacifist and critic of the powerful, be they ecclesiastical or civil. McKenzie accused the church of tampering with the literal intent of Jesus’ words in order to accommodate violence. In 1972, he told an adult education convocation in Moorhead, Minn., that Jesus never talked about a just war. “He simply said the use of weapons can be fatal,” McKenzie said.

He defended the general press and its coverage of Vatican II-era Catholicism when conservatives often blamed the media for the church’s “authority crisis.” Journalism is the messenger doing its job, not the cause of whatever bad news it may have delivered, “in spite of the alarm and indignation expressed by many Catholics who do not believe that dirty linen should be washed in public,” McKenzie argued in an essay in the early 1970s.

McKenzie moved to Claremont 13 years ago in retirement and often assisted the priests at Our Lady of the Assumption parish where his funeral was held Tuesday. His body was sent to Chicago for burial. McKenzie had taught for most of his academic career at Loyola University of Chicago, University of Chicago, Notre Dame and DePaul University.

PEOPLE

Renowned theologian Hans Kung, professor of ecumenical theology at Germany’s University of Tubingen, will give a series of lectures next week in the Southland. The University of Judaism is sponsoring identical lectures by Kung on Jewish-Christian relations from the Holocaust to the Reunification of Germany at 8 p.m. Sunday at Valley Beth Shalom, Encino, and 8 p.m. Monday at Sinai Temple, Westwood. Kung will also give talks Tuesday at Congregation Ner Tamid, Rancho Palos Verdes; Wednesday at Congregation Beth El, La Jolla, and Thursday at the Jewish Community Center in Palm Springs. On Friday at 8 p.m., Kung will speak at UC San Diego’s Price Center Ballroom on “No Peace Among Nations Without Peace Among the Religions.”

CONFERENCE

Religious, scientific and political perspectives on the ecology will be discussed for three days starting at 9:30 a.m. Thursday at Loyola Marymount University’s Fifth Annual Casassa Conference. The free series of talks includes titles such as “Catholic Social Thought and the Environment,” “Emerging Visions of an Ecological Christianity” and “Ecofeminism and Christian Theology,” the latter being given at 9 a.m. next Saturday by Rosemary Radford Ruether of Chicago.

DATES

The Rev. Earl F. Palmer, minister of First Presbyterian Church of Berkeley, will give four lectures Monday and Tuesday at Pepperdine University, including a 7:30 p.m. talk Monday in Stauffer Chapel on “A Possibility of Miracles.”

A six-week series of workshops on critically evaluating the influence of mass media will be conducted at Immaculate Heart College Center near downtown Los Angeles, starting at 7 p.m. Wednesday, under the co-sponsorship of the Center for Media and Values. The cost is $75 for the full series.

Philosophy Prof. Santiago Sia of Loyola Marymount University will lead a seminar on “What Kind of God? The Challenge of Suffering to Theism Today” in the Butler Lounge of the School of Theology at Claremont at 3:30 p.m. Tuesday. Mary Elizabeth Moore, professor of Christian Education at the seminary, will give the response.