Topics and Guidelines of Contemporary Croatian Theology Reflected in Bogoslovska smotra

Abstract

This work presents and analyzes the topics and guidelines of contemporary Croatian theology reflected in the Theological Review (Bogoslovska smotra) in the period from the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965) up to present day (2011). The period is divided into two, or three, smaller periods that correspond with a specific social-political context. While during the first period, up until the fall of the Berlin Wall (1989), first the Council documents, and later the documents of the Synod of Bishops, as well as ecclesiastical letters of the Pope and Papal encyclicals were an almost exclusive source of theological studies and analyses in Croatia, from that period onward, questions and topics that arise from immediate and specific social events gradually came into the centre of theological interest. In light of the Council renewal and social study of the Church we observe, analyze and evaluate key events and occurrences connected with the complex transition and transformation of the Croatian society, with a special sensitivity to questions linked to the Croatian War of Independence and post-war restoration. Social-religious research begun in the least decade of the 20th century continued with greater frequency in the first decade of the 21st century and thus strengthened and deepened the interdisciplinary cooperation between Croatian theologians and scientists from other humanistic and social sciences. In this last decade Croatian theology was, with its topics and interdisciplinary and international cooperation, involved more intensely and more directly with European theological issues, and has been more defined through its joint future in the family of European nations. Discussions dealing with the crisis of values, solidarity, questions of bioethics and genetics, the relationships in general between religion and modern science, religion and culture, ecumenical and interreligious dialogue, preservation and improvement of the environment, go beyond Croatian linguistic and theological boundaries into a much broader European and global political, social, religious and theological space, and from that wider global space they pour with increasing intensity into our local social and religious space so that contemporary theological thought in Croatia is being integrated with increasing speed and strength into European and global religious theological reality. This process of integration presents Croatian theology with questions about its own identity, its particularity and recognisability that, it seems, have yet to be (if it is not too late) more clearly defined and formulated, and as such have to be connected to the joint European and global theological heritage, where diversity and particularity do not threaten unity and commonality, but enrich and strengthen them.