Making (a) Space for Interfaith Encounter on a Catholic Campus

Today, my Catholic university community will ask God’s blessings upon our new Assisi Interfaith Prayer and Meditation Space. The room that houses the Assisi space sits just to the side of an entrance to one of the buildings on our West Campus, itself the former global headquarters of a major corporation. I remain astounded by such layers upon layers of meanings, histories and possibilities. I enjoy visiting all sorts of sacred places because they are set apart for reasons unlike any other. An interfaith space is, by definition, one that makes a room for encounter. Asking God’s blessing upon an interfaith prayer space goes beyond interreligious tolerance or even interreligious acceptance. It testifies to the reality of our world shared by people of different faith traditions; it testifies to a shared commitment to nurture the spiritual life that is rooted in a shared humanity. I also think that it demonstrates the best of what it means to celebrate a particular religious identity.

For Catholics, faith should not be shaken when we honor and support the spiritual lives of those in other religious traditions. On the contrary, I believe real faith commitments can only be deepened by the encounter with beliefs different from one’s own. A few weeks ago, I had the privilege to facilitate a roundtable discussion between the spiritual leaders who serve our University community through our interfaith chaplaincy program. Alongside one of my former students, I sat in the presence of great wisdom refracted through the lived experience of Protestant and Catholic Christianity, Hinduism, Judaism, Buddhism and Islam. The conversation included much laughter and hope. Our interfaith leaders highlighted students’ deep need for silence and accompaniment, the power of their representation and presence to our diverse student community on a Catholic campus, and the capacity for interreligious dialogue to be a pathway towards robust pluralism. The chaplains agreed time and again on their common witness to the importance of our shared humanity beyond words. These leaders from religions whose teachings disagree about the ultimate nature of reality, the status of God, and the proper destiny of humankind nevertheless demonstrated the delights of friendship, conversation and learning.

Pope Francis challenges Catholics to let the Church be in a modern world that prizes rather than reviles diversity and works for just peace rather than conquest. He expresses that challenge in the call to synodality, to be a Church that journeys and listens together as the people of God. He expresses that challenge in his leadership through significant gestures of physical closeness to the poor, the wounded, the imprisoned and the suffering. The Holy Father expresses that challenge through his travels to far corners of the globe and public and personal meetings with leaders from non-Catholic religious traditions. He expresses it through his teaching about integral ecology and integral spirituality. The human creature cannot be sealed off from the rest of creation and flourish: “For this reason, the ecological crisis is also a summons to a profound interior conversion.” A similar idea turns up in the Pope’s letter on human fraternity: “As silence and careful listening disappear, replaced by a frenzy of texting, this basic structure of sage human communication is at risk. A new lifestyle is emerging, where we create only what we want and exclude all that we cannot control or know instantly and superficially. This process, by its intrinsic logic, blocks the kind of serene reflection that could lead us to a shared wisdom.” But Pope Francis also calls for us to turn our spirit around when it comes to the migration crisis, the temptation to despair, political and ecclesial polarization, war and the constant troubles at play in the life of the Church.

Pope Francis’ call for ongoing spiritual renewal highlights an undersold element of Catholicism’s contribution to the world stage; interfaith work does not need to dilute our own religious practice, commitment or ideas. Catholic institutions must support the risks and hard conversations of interfaith encounter because of Catholic identity. Like his namesake from Assisi, whom the Church commemorates today, Pope Francis has consistently and unequivocally placed interreligious and ecumenical dialogue at the center of Catholic ecclesial and spiritual renewal. Making room to support another’s journey of faith is a gesture of hospitality and confidence in God’s love. To sample some words attributed to Saint Francis remixed through the insights of our interfaith chaplains: interreligious dialogue is a gesture that preaches the Gospel, only using words when necessary.

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Charles A. Gillespie is an assistant professor in the department of Catholic Studies and director of Pioneer Journey at Sacred Heart University.

Hungry Hearts

We see on Catholic college campuses two converging phenomena. The first is a decline in enrollment and a disparagement of the humanities as disciplines that bring no revenue and have no practical value. At the same time, we are witnessing something of a religious crisis—an increasing number of young people who are disaffiliated from institutional religion and for whom God is absent in their lives.

We see these phenomena dramatized in students whose world overwhelms them with materialism, fills them with feelings of anxiety and depression, and breaks their trust in political, educational and religious institutions that should support and guide them. These students arrive on campus motivated to gain an education that promises professional success. They have been taught that they need to develop resumes that are populated with credentials, awards and activities in order to accelerate their drive to get to the top.

The culture has stuck them in a market-driven, return-on-your-investment understanding of what attending college means. It does not fill them with a desire for an authentic fullness of life; instead, the culture impoverishes their humanity with reality television and millionaire influencers. And despite their resentment towards social media because of how it burdens them, social media is the platform they use to fill their lives but not their hungry hearts.

When they come to college, they do not think about learning with curiosity, wonder and awe. They do not understand that studying everything from literature to economics is an intellectual and spiritual journey that can bring them closer to the fullness of their humanity. They do not realize that their human reason, which can be open to studying all humanity and all reality, is speaking about God or that it can reflect deeply on experience and look deeply into their heart’s desire and need for love, truth, beauty and good.

Like Augustine, they carry an aching emptiness in their souls, and though the desire is buried deep within them, their hearts are hungry for meaning and purpose in their lives. They yearn for love, connection and community; and they search for an experience of transcendence that will move them out of the mundane numbness of their world.

So, what is the responsibility of the Catholic university? How can the Catholic university awaken in them the ultimate meaning and purpose of their education? What curriculum and pedagogy can be used to show them what Pope Francis describes as our deepest reality: “The heart is the core of the internal transcendence where the roots of truth, beauty and good are planted”?

In an essay in America Magazine, Cardinal Blase Cupich states that the task of the Catholic university is to engage students in an understanding of the Catholic intellectual tradition. While that tradition reaches across all disciplines and professional studies, it was built upon a study of the humanities. This tradition is defined as a dialogue between faith and culture, studying everything human, whose writers and texts bring students an appreciation for truth, beauty and goodness, and whose assumption, as Cardinal Cupich writes, is that, “the universe can be fully intelligible only in reference to God as its ultimate origin and end.” I would only add that how we engage our students in this ongoing tradition is as important as the curriculum we teach.

At Sacred Heart University, we engage students in two core seminars: The Human Journey Seminars: Great Books in the Catholic Intellectual Tradition. Students spend two semesters reading, reflecting upon and discussing the great works of this tradition. We frame these seminars with ultimate questions of meaning and we use a synodal seminar pedagogy to bring our students into this 2,000-year-old ongoing conversation of great Catholic thinkers asking questions about God, humanity, society and nature.

This synodal seminar combines reading, intentional reflection and courageous conversation that becomes a search for truth. We encourage students to keep their minds open, to listen intently, to discuss courageously and to become enriched by the larger reality that the conversation unfolds for them. As students relate these texts to their lives and the world in which they live and engage with their peers, they connect in a small community where they feel safe enough to express their ideas, feelings and perspectives.

Asking students to consider ultimate questions raises in them an attitude of awe and wonder at the mystery that these questions pose. We have found that as students reflect upon and discuss questions concerning faith, freedom, love, identity, truth, justice, happiness and evil, they awaken to an awareness of the mystery of ultimacy. The seminar may not have solved the “God crisis” or prevailed against the culture in which they live, but students are reading texts from the humanities; and the seminar pedagogy, asking ultimate questions of truth and meaning, has opened and responded to students’ hearts yearning for meaning. Our seminars in the Catholic intellectual tradition do not aim to catechize or teach doctrine; rather, they aim to engage students with all reality more intentionally, including engaging with the reality of mystery that brings them to “The heart … the core of the internal transcendence where the roots of truth, beauty, and good are planted.”  

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Michelle Loris is the director of Center for Catholic Studies and associate dean of the College of Arts & Sciences at Sacred Heart University.

Is Francis About to be Undone by His Greatest Creation?

The Second Session of the Synod on Synodality will formally open in the Vatican this October and it promises to be a deciding—perhaps the deciding—moment in the papacy of Jorge Mario Bergoglio, Pope Francis.

Synodality in the Francis lexicon defines a new way of being an ecclesia or assembly of believers. It involves, as he said in Quebec City, a “restructuring of the spiritual life with ‘new ways of seeing.’” To that end, he convoked a synod or assembly of representatives drawn from across the Catholic landscape—bishops and laity alike—with the intention of creating an inclusive, free and dialogue-friendly gathering where delegates speak their minds without fear of a punitive response from the senior authorities when they go off script. 

As he said in his encyclical Fratelli tutti, “a healthy openness never threatens one’s own identity.” This papal maxim was tested to the limit at the First Session of the Synod on Synodality held in October 2023. Certain hot-button issues were either shelved or referred to a specific study group charged with the responsibility of exploring in greater depth the multi-dimensional aspects of a controverted matter in the church. This is especially true of debates around women in ministry. Two commissions created by Francis to study the ordination of women to the diaconate have the status of a suspended life in the musty corridors of Roman bureaucracy.

The words of war correspondent Martha Gellhorn can serve as a cautionary warning for Francis and his church: “a wonderful New Year’s resolution for the men who run the world: get to know the people who live in it.” The women who live in the Catholic Church are by every measure the largest and most productive component of its life and outreach; the men who run the church must get to know them in ways that don’t reduce them to a holy mystery in need of their own justificatory theology, to an abstraction rather than an encounter, to a principle rather than an enfleshed reality.

Mary McAleese, the former President of Ireland, a civil law professor and a canon lawyer as well, is unsparing in her view of the synod: “it got uplift from a posse of hagiographers and Pollyannas [but] the kite trails the ground and is likely to be in ribbons by the end of October 2024.” Tina Beattie, a leading British Catholic theologian, is even more blistering in her assessment: “delays, deferrals, further reflections, unpublished reports—while the platitudinous waffle about women’s charisms and gifts drone on year after year … I no longer have the slightest interest in the chunterings of a celibate male hierarchy when it comes to women.”

Ouch.

In addition, originating on the other side of the Catholic spectrum, Francis has yet to win over the majority of the current episcopate. Most are not overly resistant to his idea of a synodal church, the product of a paradigm shift that inverts the normative model of distributed power, but they are cautious and worried. After all, it involves some significant adjustment to how they as bishops govern a church that moves beyond a univocally hierarchical mode of operating. For these bishops, and for many traditionalist Catholics, the Jesuit pope as disruptor is not a consolation but a desolation. One Francis critic, Thomas Weinandy, a Capuchin friar with the disposition of an inquisitor, accuses the pope of “using high-sounding words that are very ambiguous. … There can be no authentic paradigm shift without being faithful to upholding and promoting what the church has authentically taught through the centuries.”

But the disruptor pope has done precisely that: inaugurate a paradigm shift by being faithful to the organic tradition. He has disrupted the established pattern of doing things as the premier occupant of the Vatican; he has disrupted the protocols that are the mainstay of institutional life on the Tiber; he has disrupted the way we see the church operating in the world; he has disrupted the pattern of church priorities by centering the believing community on and with the poor; he had disrupted the settled questions by introducing a new perspective, replacing a magisterial with a synodal way of being church.

And he has managed to hold to the tradition he has sworn to protect as the Successor of Peter and as the Bishop of Rome by refusing to alter church teaching by either papal fiat or parliamentary consensus; by refusing to disregard forms of devotion or expressions of popular religiosity; by refusing to dismiss the work of his predecessors and instead building on their scaffolding.

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Michael W. Higgins is a senior fellow at Massey College, University of Toronto. His book on the Bergoglio papacy, “The Jesuit Disruptor: Francis Takes on His Church” is available in bookstores and his book on the Synod, “The 60 Days that Shook the Church: The Synod on Synodality,” will be published in 2025.

On Fratelli Tutti and Hurricanes

Back in 2020, I co-led a Fratelli Tutti reading group with a Jesuit friend of mine. The encyclical had come out just weeks before New Orleans, my city, received a direct hit from Hurricane Zeta—so named because the number of storms that year had exhausted the Latin alphabet and now had to borrow the Greek.

This was the lens through which I re-read and discussed Fratelli Tutti later that year. Its Laudato-Si-like braid of calls for greater human cooperation to combat wealth disparities and climate change, among many other issues, spoke presciently to me of the local crises we in New Orleans confront, in particular, during hurricane season. But it also spoke to me of the extravagant displays of community support I’d seen in the wake of hurricanes here—after Zeta in 2020, the much more powerful Ida in 2021, which brought a tree crashing through part of our roof and crushed our A/C unit, displacing us for two weeks  and, this week, Hurricane Francine.

Every hurricane season, I think of Zeta, my first real hurricane, and how it was an example to me of exactly what Pope Francis was talking about in Fratelli Tutti when he described communities that work together for the sake of something greater than their individual selves.

Like Francine this week, Zeta was easy. (These are relative terms, of course.) But unlike Francine, Zeta was bizarrely magical: the eye of the hurricane passed directly over our neighborhood. Zeta was a relatively weak Category 3—the same as Katrina, but everybody knows the real damage from Katrina came from the flood afterward, not the wind—where we sat in the dark after the power went out and I learned for the first time what “howling wind” sounded like, and transformers exploded with green flashes. But we were alright, and we made tacos by candlelight because the gas stove still worked.

The eyewall was the scariest bit: Darker and louder than even the leading “dirty side” of the storm, as they call it down here, had been. Although I am sure I was afraid, I have a hard time conjuring the memory of that fear now because it was so eclipsed by the sudden and unbelievable relief of the eye. Over the course of maybe five minutes, the rain stopped, the sky grew light and peaceful and the clouds cleared enough to show us a gorgeous pink sunset. All at once, the neighbors emerged, all of us standing on our front porches, all of us holding beers (which made me laugh—the universality of storm-drinking, because what else was there to do?), all of us in disbelief that we were standing in the eye of a hurricane.

Everyone trickled out into the street, surveying the damage. A fence had fallen on our car but not done any damage—a couple of neighbors helped me pull it off and then somebody moved their car to make room for mine elsewhere. When I came back, my husband was in the front room with the door wide open playing a Cajun tune on the accordion, the music drifting out into the gloriously peaceful street where we all drifted around in the pink light, chatting, drinking, knowing what was to come—what was, in fact, all around us—and in no hurry to get back to cowering in the dark.

It was a microcosm of the community that would unfold the next day—and in the case of Ida, over many days. Neighbors pooled their groceries and invited one another to meals; those with generators offered others a cool place to charge their phones; those with chainsaws offered to chop up the fallen trees. It was a glimpse of the world we could have in the absence of individualist consumerism, toxic media consumption and our desire to mind our own business and hide our vulnerabilities. As Pope Francis wrote in Fratelli Tutti, “Unless we recover the shared passion to create a community of belonging and solidarity worthy of our time, our energy and our resources, the global illusion that misled us will collapse and leave many in the grip of anguish and emptiness.”

Sometimes it takes a crisis to bring people together. But it’s up to us to continue to nurture those bonds after the storm has passed. As Francis said more simply in his extraordinary Urbi et Orbi address during the Coronavirus lockdown, “We are on the same boat, all of us fragile and disoriented, but at the same time important and needed, all of us called to row together, each of us in need of comforting the other. On this boat … are all of us. Just like those disciples, who spoke anxiously with one voice, saying ‘We are perishing,’ so we too have realized that we cannot go on thinking of ourselves, but only together can we do this.”

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Colleen Dulle is a writer and producer at America Media, where she hosts the weekly news podcast “Inside the Vatican.” Her forthcoming book on grappling with faith while covering the Vatican will be published by Penguin Random House in spring 2025.

Living Witness

When my father, Daniel Ellsberg, died of pancreatic cancer on June 16, 2023, the first person I called was Randy Kehler. Hearing my voice from my father’s phone, he said, “I hope this doesn’t mean what I think it means.”

My father’s and Randy’s lives were connected by deep ties. When Randy died on June 20 this year, his obituaries highlighted that connection. “Randy Kehler, 80, Dies; Peace Activist Inspired Release of Pentagon Papers” was the headline in the New York Times. This was true. As often as people lauded my father’s courage in risking prison to oppose the Vietnam War, he always credited Randy’s witness. As for Randy, he humbly cited his experience to encourage others in their small protests or acts of conscience. You could never know the consequences of such acts, he said. “All I did was give a speech…”

That consequential speech occurred at a conference of the War Resisters International in the summer of 1969 at Haverford College. My father, a former Marine and high-level defense analyst who had recently returned from two years in Vietnam, was an unlikely member of the audience. Despite his background and top-secret security clearances, he had turned sharply against the war and was eager to hear from those who were protesting against it.

Randy, a 25-year-old staff member for the War Resisters League, had been organizing resistance to the draft. As he concluded his speech, he cited a number of friends who had gone to prison and mentioned that he was proud to be joining them soon. He had been sentenced to two years in prison for his own refusal of induction.

At this point, my father rushed from the hall and retreated to a restroom where he sank to the floor and wept for a long time. And then a question arose in his mind: “What could I do to help end this war if I were willing to go to prison?” The answer came in his decision to copy the top-secret history of the Vietnam War in his office safe and give it to Congress. Eventually, released to the press in 1971, it became known as the Pentagon Papers. My father was arrested and faced 115 years in prison.

His case was eventually dismissed on the grounds of “gross governmental misconduct,” but in fact, with its connection to Nixon’s payoffs to the Plumbers/Watergate burglars, it played an indirect role in helping end the war. My father always said, “No Randy Kehler, no Pentagon Papers.” With that speech at Haverford, he said, “It was as though an ax had split my head, and my heart broke open. But what had really happened was that my life had split in two.”

Randy lived a life of deep meaning and consequence, quite apart from his influence on my dad. After prison, he taught, and later helped organize the Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign in the 1980s. For their refusal to pay taxes for war, he and his wife, Betsy, had their house seized by the IRS. At his memorial service in August, the packed church attested to his deep impact on the community in western Massachusetts, where he and Betsy raised their daughter.

In his last years, he was steadily laid low with severe chronic fatigue syndrome. In light of his illness, I was amazed just months before his death to receive a long letter from him in which he tried to express his spiritual intuitions, and mentioned that every night before going to sleep, he read an entry in my book All Saints—a book of daily reflections on “saints, prophets and witnesses for our time.”

“I wrote that book because of you,” I told him. In the introduction to a recent 25th anniversary edition, I wrote: “I have seen and felt the impact of living witness—how one lamp lights another. Dorothy Day’s life was built on this conviction: the power of small gestures, the protests, the acts of charity, which, even if no more than a pebble dropped in a pond, might send forth ripples that could encircle the globe. As she wrote, ‘We must lay one brick at a time, take one step at a time; we can be responsible only for the action of the present moment, but we can beg for an increase of love in our hearts, that will vitalize and transform all our individual actions, and know that God will take them and multiply them as Jesus multiplied the loaves and fishes.’”

Randy was not conventionally “religious,” any more than my father. But he understood what I meant. In words cited on the program at his memorial, he said, “Don’t ever, ever assume that anything you do, particularly if it’s an act of conscience, won’t make a difference.”

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Robert Ellsberg is the Publisher of Orbis Books. He writes a daily reflection on “Blessed Among Us” for Give Us This Day. His new book is Dorothy Day: Spiritual Writings.

The Eucharistic Congress: Who is the U.S. Church For?

Last month, the U.S. Catholic Church witnessed its first national Eucharistic Congress since 1976. Attendees of various stripes had positive things to say about the event, which comes in a rich tradition of such unifying events. Yet it has come under just criticism about the expense spared for it particularly when the leaders of the Bishops’ Conference have cynically cut funds from social justice initiatives after the body of bishops voted not to eliminate them. Its speaker lineup and overall ethos, as well as the sponsorships by schools and organizations, also highlighted the selective engagement of the U.S. bishops and their leadership with the church in the U.S.

The highlighted speakers at the event represented what might be termed, fairly or unfairly, a broad “center right” of the U.S. Church. Rev. Mike Schmitz and Bishop Robert Barron exemplify this example both in their approach to evangelism and their shared interest in outreach to young men through activities like bodybuilding. The overall speaker list was more diverse in various respects, including figures such as Gloria Purvis, who has spoken out against racism within and without the church at the cost of her job for an EWTN-owned radio station. A few academic theologians, such as the excellent Hosffman Ospino of Boston College, were featured. The overall approach nevertheless seemed geared to avoid ruffling feathers in conservative-leaning sectors of the church. The LGBTQ community was not publicly represented (and not for lack of interest), with a group of priests attempting to bring forward a message of inclusion denied a booth at the congress. As Rev. Bruce Morrill pointed out in an essay about the Congress for Outreach, there is no inherent tension between “traditional” devotional practices and “progressive” social causes within the church.

The most notable exception to the general tendency of featured speakers was Dorothy Day’s granddaughter Martha Hennessy, following in the footsteps of Day herself who spoke alongside Mother Teresa of Calcutta (and protested a Mass for the military in what turned out to be her final public appearance) at the 1976 Congress. It was very good that she appeared, although the invitation and association of the congress with Day’s legacy may have been a sign of precisely the taming of holiness that Day remarked upon when she famously asked not to be called a saint because she did not want to be dismissed that easily. Hennessy’s presence and talk emphasizing the connection between the Eucharist and the works of mercy brought a small touch of radicalism to what was essentially an upper-middle-class event in its cost ($360 per person to attend, $99 even to listen to podcast versions of the talks in retrospect) and aesthetic (specially-produced craft beers and other foods at the “Eucharistic café”).

The Eucharistic Congress brought an intensive focus on the liturgical-devotional practice of Eucharistic exposition and adoration. This practice, which has been on the rise since the 1990s after a period of relative de-emphasis following the implementation of Vatican II, is certainly a positive one with spiritual benefits as Morrill’s essay mentioned above points out. Yet it is as central to Eucharistic theology or devotion as its emphasis at the congress might lead one to believe. Certainly, the Mass was also heavily featured as it ought to be, but the overall atmosphere had more of a devotional and catechetical emphasis than that of a “church that goes forth” as Pope Francis has repeatedly called for. On this note, the dynamics around the Eucharistic Congress were also not helped by the naïve catechetical language about the real presence that surrounded the congress; speaking of the Eucharistic Host and “Jesus” interchangeably might be appropriate for a small child but is bad sacramental theology when presented to adults.

Why was the Eucharistic Congress so selective in who it engaged and how it engaged them? Barron’s reflection on the congress, in which he includes a critique of liberalism, gives a good sense of this. For many bishops, “real” Catholics are conservatives, particularly on social issues surrounding gender, sexuality and family, and they have shaped a church whose appeal tends in this direction. On one level they are not wrong—surveys have shown an increased correlation between religiosity and conservatism. Yet their activities have leaned into this correlation rather than complicated it. Questioning such an approach is not a matter of making the church safe for liberals but rather seeking an open church that actively works at including all who come in good faith.

The most durable contribution of the 1976 Eucharistic Congress—and a reminder of the shift in emphasis from then to now—was Omer Westendorf’s “Gift of Finest Wheat,” still a staple of the musical repertoire at numerous parishes across the country. That congress was a demonstration of the continuing (perhaps false given the rampant clerical sexual abuse and coverup in that era) vitality of the U.S. church even while post-Vatican II divisions rocked it. This year’s congress may serve as an epitaph to a period in which the bishops sought to consolidate a declining church suffering from the self-inflicted wounds of the sexual abuse scandal and alienation of many Catholics by politics inside and outside the church. They have sought to do so on their terms, with their preferred institutions, and with disregard for Pope Francis and his agenda. While the Eucharistic Congress succeeded by many lights, their overall agenda has flailed. May there be a new one soon.

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Daniel A. Rober is a systematic theologian and Catholic studies professor at Sacred Heart University.

Go, Rebuild ... with Mercy and Empathy

"... our love for our brothers and sisters is the measure of our love for God ... For the Christian, there is no ‘strange human being.’ He is in every instance the ‘neighbor’ whom we have with us and who is most in need of us. It makes no difference whether he is related or not, whether we ‘like’ him or not, whether he is ‘morally worthy’ of help or not...if the love of Christ lives in us, then we do as He did ..."

—Sr. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross [Edith Stein]

Immigration has been one of the most impassioned topics in the United States, not only for communities along the southern border but even in the northern regions of the U.S. As a lifelong New Englander, I cannot presume to understand fully the experiences of people who live in those southern border states; however, on this platform, it does seem fair to reflect on immigration briefly from a broadly Catholic perspective and as an example of societal conflicts in the pews as much as in the pulpits. More significantly, the rhetoric expressing those conflicts reveals a soberingly cheerless dimension of contemporary American Catholicism.

For example: a recent report in the National Catholic Reporter details the indefatigable efforts of the governor of Texas, Jim Abbott, and his attorney general, Ken Paxton, to close Annunciation House, a non-profit, all-volunteer-staffed, center in El Paso, Texas. It was founded by lay Catholics to offer care and assistance to the most vulnerable (i.e., undocumented) immigrants, notably families. Paxton is not Catholic, but Abbot boasts that he is a practicing Catholic. As governor, he has worked closely with Paxton to prevent immigrants from entering (and remaining in) Texas and, more widely, the United States, employing the rhetoric and acts of racism, classism and fearmongering. Some news accounts have even referred to the efforts of Abbott and Paxton as a “crusade” against immigrants. In a recent report about their attempts to shutter Annunciation House, Paxton was quoted as saying that the Catholic teaching of the “works of mercy” (based on Matthew 25:31f.), which informed the religious foundation of Annunciation House, are little more than “bohemian ideas” and constitute ideological problems. Abbott did not disagree: mercy and empathy for the plight of others are the problems.

In response, the Texas bishops (rather remarkably!) issued a fulsome statement that critiqued the immigration narrative and policies of Abbott by basing their remarks on Scriptural evidence and the tenets of Catholic Social Justice Teaching. However, in regrettable contrast, a majority of lay Catholics in Texas, as one report documented, did agree with the efforts and ideology of Abbott and his government, just as a near-majority of U.S. Catholics (with the exception of 18-34 yrs.) reject programs of mercy or conciliation for refugees and immigrants (and other marginalized communities).

The question then must be: whence the hardness—the exclusionary mentality—so many lay Catholics seem willing to embrace, even in a Church that is itself a church of immigrants? Of course, the topic of immigration is but one example: harsh language, cruel invective and mean-spirited rejection of any “other” are becoming characteristics of Catholic thinking and Catholicism, at least as has become evident in popular media. If being “Christian” means to “take on the Christ,” then mercy and empathy, not callousness and insensitivity, must flourish in the Christian soul.

In meditation on that truth, let us remember that the feast day of Edith Stein/Sr. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross is August 9, the day in 1942 when Nazis murdered her, her sister Rosa and thousands of others, mostly Jewish, in Auschwitz death camp. Prior to her conversion and taking vows as a Carmelite, Stein was a brilliant philosopher of phenomenology who wrote passionately about the virtue of empathy and the “logic” of living mercifully in the world with others and warned against an excessive individualism that can destroy such feelings of mercy and empathy. She wrote, “If we take the self as the standard, we lock ourselves into the prison of our individuality. Others become riddles for us, or, still worse, we remodel them into our image and so falsify historical truth.” For Stein, rampant individualism—so valued today—is more like a prison, separating the self from the other, and making the other an enigma and thus, someone to be feared. The empathic soul—the necessary condition of the Christian soul, following Christ—is open to the other, is willing to learn about the other, and so to dignify the personhood of the other. The merciful do not seek to win every contest, to vanquish others (by words or deeds) in every battle, but, as Stein taught, to acknowledge the reality of the other to be as worthy as one’s own.  

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June-Ann Greeley is a medievalist and professor of Catholic studies, theology and religious studies at Sacred Heart University.

It Could Happen to a Bishop

July in Ireland is the time we have our All-Ireland football and hurling championships, a bit like a Super Bowl occasion. One of the hurling stars of the Clare team who won in a thrilling final this year, Shane O’Donnell, was interviewed in the runup to the semifinal against Kilkenny. He spoke about a dark experience of concussion earlier in his career that led him to change from being a kind of spectator of sporting politics to more active involvement: “But since then, I’ve been less willing to be like, ‘Aw, you know, it’s okay…’ Or even just to go, ‘Someone else will deal with that.’”

Substitute most bishops for O’Donnell with regard to what’s going on in today’s synodal Catholic Church, and you get a surprisingly close fit. For all the encouragement to speak out candidly (parrhesia), what most bishops, in fact, seem to have done is listened patiently and generously (hypomene) but forgotten the responsibility of also speaking out about what they themselves think and believe. How else can we account for the continuing timidity of the Church around the role of women, scathingly critiqued by Tina Beattie in this blog (a redacted version was also published in The Tablet): “And so the process goes on—delays, deferrals, further reflections, unpublished reports—while the platitudinous waffle about women’s charisms and gifts drones on year after year.”

The role of the bishops may be a key to unlocking some of this institutional constipation. Back in the day, when contraception was the big issue, it was said that the then-Bishop of Killaloe Willie Walsh (now emeritus) used to annoy his colleagues with occasional newspaper interviews where he would simply note the concerns of married people he knew about Church teaching in areas of sexuality and his inability to give clear answers to their questions from current Church teaching. While he received much acclaim from the general public, it is reported that his reception at the next Episcopal Conference meeting was a lot cooler. Esprit de corps had been damaged, the Church had been criticized in public, and fellow bishops felt they themselves were being shown up in a bad light.

And that habit of deferential silence was the default institutional common sense of the day, which, as Lonergan astutely observed many years ago, has a habit of becoming nonsense when a new situation arises that needs a different explanation. Once the pope had called for a more synodal Church, with dialogue and open speech at its core, there was bound to be new cultural demands on us all in the Church, whatever our role. Many bishops have responded generously to the first part of the demand: to listen, in particular, to the “sense of faith of the faithful.” But they have been slower to speak out honestly, as if they do not remember that they are also part of the “faithful,” called to be open, and that, in their role as bishop, they are not merely passive conduits of teaching from “on high,” with a mission to maintain unity at all costs, but active, intelligent, critical interpreters of the tradition, the current teaching of the Church and the voices of the faithful and signs of the times. They are called, in other words, to integrate their humanity as critical and searching subjects with their leadership role as bishops.

A bishop, as Vatican II made it clear, has responsibility both for his own diocese and for the Church Universal. He is a collegial actor, with and under the Pope. At a time when the Pope himself has called for a healthy decentralization, when the current synod is urging more episcopal responsibility and effective authority, it would be a real contribution if individual bishops, or groups of them, were to propose that the ordination of women to priesthood be included as part of the material for the study groups accompanying the synodal process. Ordination, on whichever side one stands, is a totemic issue that affects all else with respect to women’s role in the Church. It is past time that the Church dealt with it by submitting it to theological scrutiny, in a synodal spirit.

Some bishops and groups of bishops (the German church in particular comes to mind) are already doing this. I would encourage others to be less cautious. I am quite sure that so many of these good men harbour doubts in their own minds about the validity of current teaching. We are all aware from so many historical instances how silence can become a kind of co-complicity. The failure to tackle this issue head-on is a scandal, using that term in its original meaning of “stumbling block” or “obstacle”—an obstacle to mission, the raison d’etre of synodality. As Tina Beattie puts it in The Tablet version of her blog: “I fail to understand how the Church can be a missionary, synodal Church when more and more women are walking away and taking their families with them, tired of being treated as second-class Catholics or as irrelevant to the main business of mission and evangelisation.”

Please, dear bishops, look inside and consider the call of the Holy Spirit.

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Gerry O’Hanlon is an Irish Jesuit theologian and author.

How, Indeed?

The second session of the XVI General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops, known as the Synod on Synodality, is due to gather in Rome from September 30 to October 27. It will move from considering the many issues emerging from the consultation of the global Catholic Church to ask how, concretely, the practice of synodality might become the way of being and doing—the modus vivendi et operandi—at every level of ecclesial life. While these considerations may not be the sexiest aspects of the Instrumentum Laboris entitled, “How to Be a Missional and Synodal Church” (emphasis in the original), its discussion of needed structural changes portends the most consequential reform of the Church in our time. Many journalists continue to focus on the “hot button” issues of inclusion or the restoration of a permanent diaconate for women. Yet the role of the synod is not to arrive at their definitive resolution; its primary task is to determine the ways of discerning the path forward on these and other questions.

At the outset of his pontificate, in his 2013 Apostolic Exhortation, The Joy of the Gospel, following on the Synod on the New Evangelization, Pope Francis issued a call for “the reform of the Church in her missionary outreach.” To accomplish this much-needed “pastoral and missionary conversion,” he urged the bishops and all the faithful in every diocese “to undertake a resolute process of discernment, purification and reform.” He took upon himself, in collaboration with the college of bishops and the members of the Roman Curia, a conversion of “the papacy and the central structures of the universal Church.” The present Synod reflects a desire on the part of the world’s bishops to carry forward this reforming impulse in a renewed reception of the Second Vatican Council.

The Instrumentum Laboris notes the “great importance and urgency” of engagement on the part of local churches “to implement all the possibilities of giving life to authentically synodal decision-making processes” in each context, insisting, “Without tangible changes, the vision of a synodal church will not be credible.” It is at the level of parish and diocesan life that ordinary Catholics, many of whom continue to navigate life with a dormant or inchoate awareness of their baptismal dignity and responsibility, “most immediately experience the missionary and synodal life of the whole church.” In the absence of vital structures for participation and shared discernment, their many gifts and competencies, to say nothing of their wisdom and experience, are lost or not received.

Thus, the working document notes the necessity of establishing or renewing “the different types of Councils—parish, deanery, diocesan or eparchial—as essential structures for the planning, organization, execution and evaluation of pastoral activities.” It envisions the “reshaping” of these councils in a synodal style so that they might become “subjects of ecclesial discernment and synodal decision-making and places for the practice of accountability and the evaluation of those in positions of authority, without forgetting that they, in turn, will have to account for how they perform their duties.” The renewal of these structures must entail an affirmation of their “mandatory” character and ensure that their composition is truly representative of the diversity of the local church with greater attention to the inclusion of women, youth and marginalized persons. To accomplish this, the Instrumentum Laboris advises that members not be chosen “by those in authority (parish priest or bishop),” but be designated in some other way.

If these bodies are to fulfill their stated task of enabling local communities to discern together appropriate ways of life and witness, Church leaders must deepen their understanding of “consultation.” In recent times we have seen an increasing number of cases where the people of a local church have effectively appealed decisions taken by bishops who neglect required processes of consultation. The Instrumentum Laboris recalls that in matters of importance, consultation cannot be omitted or reduced to a simple formality. Genuine consultation, it observes, goes “far beyond listening, because it obliges the authority not to proceed as if it had not taken place.” Bishops are really bound by the consensus or general agreement or consensus of the community and ought not to go against it “without a convincing reason,” as canon law states. In a truly synodal Church, the exercise of authority is not arbitrary, and consultation is not inconsequential. Structures, processes and procedures for ongoing consultation must enable all the baptized in each place to arrive at a “shared decision in obedience to the Holy Spirit.” 

The Synod envisions the development of a more robust culture of participation and practice of synodality in every parish and diocese. Further, it urges the gathering of comparable assemblies at provincial, national and continental levels to provide spaces for broader dialogue and the sharing of resources in response to pastoral needs. The stakes are very high. As the working document acknowledges, failure to carry out necessary reforms “will alienate those members of the People of God who have drawn strength and hope from the synodal journey.”

The second session of the Synod on Synodality has a heavy agenda. But the reception of its work need not wait for the close of its deliberations, a subsequent exhortation from the pope, or the pending revision of canon law. Nothing precludes parish pastors and bishops, together with the People of God in each place, from beginning today to undertake the reform called for from the outset of Francis’ pontificate and now envisioned in concrete form. The credibility of the church and its witness depends on it.

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Catherine E. Clifford, is a professor at Saint Paul University, Ontario.

“Catholicism” for Our Time

The great French Jesuit Henri de Lubac (1896-1991) is a theologian whose writings I have dipped into with the episodic passion of the autodidact and the prowling eye of the journalist on the hunt for the mot juste to toss into an article with ostentatious ease. The rigor and depth of the academic? Not me. Which explains why I had never read de Lubac’s foundational first book, Catholicisme, now translated as Catholicism: Christ and the Common Destiny of Man. Its length seemed to reflect the breadth of its topic, and the footnotes alone! Where to start?

But in chatting with a Jesuit friend about the state of the Church in these days of polarization and schism he recommended de Lubac’s Catholicism as a form of spiritual reading. It was a work, he said, to digest in small bites, for inspiration more than research. I heeded his advice, at least initially. The problem is that I found Catholicism so engaging and relevant that I ploughed through it. I failed the marshmallow test (again) yet found both solace and knowledge so apt for an age that could use de Lubac’s unitary vision more than ever.

The volume is an ambitious work of ressourcement that relies on patristic and early medieval writings to elucidate the fundamentals of the Church’s nature that have been obscured over time, especially by a constrained notion of “tradition.” Despite the sweep of such an undertaking de Lubac regularly delivers epigrammatic insights that frame the central themes and fix themselves in the mind.

The one that stood out for this first-time reader is also the book’s most consistent and powerfully argued theme, namely the effort to “bring out the singular unitive power of Catholic Christianity and its capacity to transcend all human divisions,” as Avery Dulles wrote in his appreciation of de Lubac at his confrere’s death in 1991. The Church, de Lubac writes near the end of Catholicism, “is the very opposite of a ‘closed society’” and “the very opposite of the harsh exclusiveness which characterizes the sectarian spirit … The Church is at home everywhere, and everyone should be able to feel himself at home in the Church.” 

At the heart of this vision is a Christian humanism, one that echoes the famous line of the second-century B.C. Roman playwright Terence: Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto. Or, as de Lubac adapts it, “Nothing authentically human, whatever its origin, can be alien to [the Church].” That will find a later echo, thanks to de Lubac, in the documents of the Second Vatican Council. Such an orientation means engaging with people rather than abstractions—all people, believers or atheists. “Catholicism is essentially social,” he declares at the outset. “It is social in the deepest sense of the word: not merely in its applications in the field of natural institutions but first and foremost in itself, in the heart of its mystery, in the essence of its dogma.”

Undergirding this essence is a generosity of spirit which is the gift of the Holy Spirit: issue anathemas all you want, Catholics. Even if you score points against your foe or find vindication in a passage of canon law or a paragraph in the catechism, if you lack charity, you are already guilty of a much graver sin. “Charity is the unity of the Church,” Hugh of Saint Victor says in one citation. “Whether we call it charity or unity it is all the same, because unity is charity and charity is unity.” In de Lubac’s gloss: “The charity that depreciates unity is never authentic, there is only a seeming unity where charity does not reign.”

In other words, the excuse that, “I’m doing this mean thing to you out of Christian love because you broke a rule” doesn’t hold up. For de Lubac, “the poison of dissension is as baneful as that of false doctrine.” And he blames the overemphasis on “ecclesiastical authority”—what today we just call clericalism—for undermining the spirit of unity by turning Catholicism into “a system of limitations.”

De Lubac’s work is so “Catholic” that he can inspire popes as diverse as Benedict XVI and Francis. But he can also be cherry-picked to support a range of views, and conservatives have often done so with great relish and some justification. That’s because de Lubac was so dismayed by many trends in the aftermath of the council that in 1972 he helped found, along with Joseph Ratzinger, the conservative-tilting journal Communio. Ratzinger, in the prime of his career as the Vatican’s chief doctrinal enforcer, in 1988 also wrote a brief foreword to Catholicism.

In that foreword, the cardinal pays moving tribute to the formative influence de Lubac’s book had on his own theology. But in a sign of how much Ratzinger—or the times, or both—had shifted, he said that the “social dimension” of the faith that de Lubac stressed and that was so important in earlier decades had been “simplified and flattened” and that the dangers today were a “merely sociological” view of faith rather than the “narrow-minded individualistic Christianity” that originally concerned de Lubac. It was a left-handed compliment from a rightward-leaning churchman, and not out of character for Ratzinger, who was always anxious to rationalize his own evolution.

But if Ratzinger was correct, or if he was just using the foreword to talk about what he wanted to talk about, it seems clear that the Church and the world today are so divided and atomized that de Lubac’s focus on the universal over the tribal, the social over the individual, is needed more than ever. Perhaps that is why this work from the late 1930s—a few years before de Lubac would find himself in the French underground working against fascism—seems so fresh to me. It presents Christianity as it was to the classical world, and ought to be now, “a radiant novelty in the midst of a world grown old in its divisions.”

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David Gibson is a journalist and author and director of the Center on Religion and Culture at Fordham University.