Interview: James Carroll

By ADAM REILLY, The Boston Phoenix   April 1,

The Phoenix's Adam Reilly recently spoke with Globe columnist James Carroll about his new book, Practicing Catholic (Houghton Mifflin), and his critical but durable relationship with the Roman Catholic Church. An edited transcript follows.

Start by telling me what the genesis of the new book was.
A decade ago, I was working on a book on the history of Christian anti-Semitism, and I published the book in 2001. It's a very negative story; it's a sad, tragic story of how, century in, century out, Christians — Catholics in particular — have betrayed the message of Jesus by attacking Jews. And that tradition is part of what led to the Holocaust. How much more negative can you get?

And one of the great questions that I faced everywhere I went, and still face, was: knowing this history, and clearly being so affected by it, how can you still be a Catholic? And it wasn't just a question I had to field; it's a question I had to ask myself. I'm not just a Catholic. I take it seriously. I go to mass regularly because I need to and want to, it's a source of consolation and support and strength in my life that I can't live without. And I felt like I owed myself and my readers an explanation of what this is.

Why does it matter so much to me? I'm not the kind of Catholic I was as a child, or a young man, or even a middle-aged man. I'm 66 years old, and I'm actually able to imagine the end of my life in a way that I didn't used to be able to. So the meaning of this tradition is different now — and I knew that I would only be able to actually understand that meaning if I wrote this book. So I wrote it to answer the question: Why am I still a Catholic?

And I had a similar experience to the one I had with Constantine's Sword. By the time I finished Constantine's Sword, I was more committed to the church than ever, even as I was more aware then ever of its fallibility and tragic flaws. And I hope that readers find, in this book, a description of this flawed institution that will help them understand it better, and be less offended by it. I'm not looking to get anybody to sign up for the Catholic Church, but the church's flaws are not its problem. Its flaws are its solution, really, because what the church is about is proclaiming that God loves humans the way we are, not the way we wish we were. And I find the love of God in this flawed institution, which is a way that I have of living with my own flawed character.

Did Benedict's ascension to the papacy play any role in your decision to tackle this particular subject?
Well, I think Benedict's ascension to the papacy is the end of something, not the beginning of something. He's the last gasp of the medieval, monarchical papacy, which is not central to the Roman Catholic tradition. The church has been having an argument with itself about the authority of the Pope for a thousand years — but only for a thousand years! This kind of papacy is an invention of the Middle Ages, and it got a new lease on life in the 19th Century, in the revolutionary period. The church threw itself firmly against liberalism and against revolution, and the Vatican reinvented itself as a bulwark against democratic liberalism, which was one of the few firmly positive things to come out of the Enlightenment.

The Enlightenment's a mixed bag: it gave us contemporary hyper-nationalism, and it gave us the tyrannical despotisms of the 20th Century. It gave us a lot of nihilism. But it gave us democratic liberalism, which is a very precious mutation of political evolution — and the Catholic Church stood solemnly against it, and Pope Benedict is the end of that. So what Pope Benedict actually gives a Catholic liberal like myself is the perfect foil. He enables me to actually affirm my convictions as a liberal Catholic. And since I've been writing this book, and since I've finished writing it, Pope Benedict has put on display, again and again, exactly what I'm talking about.

The question to be put to Pope Benedict at this point is, why does he find it necessary to apologize so often? This is a man who temperamentally is not given to apologizing. And yet, just speaking from his gut and acting from his gut, he displays the political — and I would say religious — limits of his vision

He's not sufficiently attuned to the legacy of anti-Semitism, which is why the story around Bishop Richard Williamson took him so by surprise. He's not sufficiently attuned to the centrality of the Holocaust as a moral event — not in the life of Jews, but in the life of Christians. If the Holocaust doesn't change the way Christians think about their tradition, people are not paying attention. And he's a Holocaust minimizer. Williamson is a Holocaust denier, but Benedict is a Holocaust minimizer. He thinks the Holocaust was the work of — as he put it in Auschwitz — a small group of gangsters who took control of the German nation. No. It was the work of the German nation in collaboration with western civilization. So Benedict, for all of his good intentions — and he's clearly a man of good intentions — is a manifestation of the ways in which the church still needs very much to be reformed.

I also can't help thinking of his bizarre statement about condoms making the problem of AIDS worse.
I talk about this in the book. Pope Benedict is clearly a gentle, kindly, lovable man. If we were in the room with him, we'd feel positive energy. And yet the effect of his positions — his doctrinaire commitment to extreme manifestations of what he would call the tradition, but I would argue is not the tradition — his attention to those things has the effect of terrible cruelty. He really hurts people. When he excommunicated, as head of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, a loyal, lifelong servant of the church like Tissa Balasuriya, the Sri Lankan theologian — when he excommunicated a man like that over an argument over dogma, and the meaning of Jesus, the effect of it was terrible cruelty. And it was frivolous, because the excommunication was lifted after a brief time; it was only enforced long enough to break this old man's heart.

So Benedict goes to Africa, and brings up the subject of the church's position on condoms. Frankly, no one expected him to go to Africa and say he was changing that position — but why did he have to bring it up? Why does he have to go in front of mill of Africans, many of whom are HIV-positive, and who are inflicting the disease on their sexual partners — why does he have to bring up condom use?

Why do you think he does?
It's — it's bizarre. It's like, why does he have to go to Cologne, as he did, and blame the Holocaust on neo-paganism? Why does he do these things?

Why does he, on the anniversary of 9/11, which could mark the beginning of a world-historical conflict between what we call the West and the world of Islam — why does he choose that occasion to trash Islam in a way that's so outrageous he has to back off it? Why does he do these things? Well, this is a man who has — what — the visceral reactions of a frightened, pre-Enlightenment traditionalist, who knows that the page of history has turned, and he's on the wrong side of history.

So whyare you confident that heis on the wrong side of history?
Well, it may be a bit of optimism on my part — and I don't mean to say any future return to reform in the Catholic Church is automatic or inevitable. I don't mean to say that. But there are plenty of signs of life in the Catholic Church, which show that the reform movement begun at the Second Vatican Council, under Pope John XXXIII, is still vital among Catholics.

We saw that most powerfully in the way lay Catholics — in America, but not only in America — responded, over the last seven or eight years, to this scandal of priest sexual abuse. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of lay Catholics found it possible to really reject the corrupt authority of the bishops. Remember that the scandal was defined not only by a relatively small number of priests abusing children, but also by the vast majority — almost all — of bishops protecting the priests instead of the children. There's the defining scandal. And the Catholic people saw through that.

Some of them threw in the towel, and said, 'Enough of this institution,' and either gave up on religion or found another religious home. But a lot of Catholics have stayed with the church. Catholic parishes, many of them — the ones I attend — are full of people; they're full of thoughtful, critical, well-educated people who have begun to take for granted their own moral authority on large questions. So, for example, Catholics make their own decisions on matters of sexual morality; they do not pay attention to the teachings of the bishops.

Condom use is a good example. We know from a generation's worth of reliable polling that Catholics do not take seriously the church's teaching on contraception, but do take church teaching on abortion seriously. It's one of the reasons we don't take church teaching on contraception seriously, because if you're seriously opposed to abortion, you have to be seriously in favor of contraception and sexual education.

That's a paradox that I've never been able to wrap my head around. As someone who's not particularly invested in the church, I just don't understand how you can make those arguments add up.
Well, it shows the moral bankruptcy of the church position on this — because the church's teaching isn't about sexual morality. It's about papal power. The popes and their supporters among the bishops find it impossible to change the church's position on contraception, as I explain in this book.

Can you expand on that a bit? The argument that the teaching on birth control is really about power?
It is about power. Let's talk about condoms for a minute. You know, what the pope would tell you is that the church has been against condoms since the time of Jesus. Well, hello? Condoms are a modern invention. It was only with vulcanized rubber, and then the invention of latex in the late 18th, 19th, and 20th Centuries that anything approaching reliable contraception has been an option for human beings. So to suggest that the church has an ancient position on contraception on its face is absurd.

The church took a firm position against what it called artificial contraception, by which it really meant the rubber, in the 1930s, with a papal encyclical, Casti Connubii. And that came right in the middle of the period when the papacy was reinventing itself as an absolute source of authority in the Catholic Church, which really begins with 1870, and the First Vatican Council. Remember, it's only then that the doctrine of infallibility is formally defined. So the pope is claiming a kind of infallibitily, as it was put, in matters of faith and morals.

So if you have Pope A claiming infallibility in matters faith and morals, and then Pope B taking a firm posit on a moral question — the meaning of sexuality — in the 1930s, well, popes after that are kind of stuck. Because in order to say that contraception is moral, they have to say that Pope Pius XI got it wrong — or maybe, if he didn't get it wrong, he didn't quite fully see it.

So when Pope John XXIII, during the Second Vatican Council, began to take the initiative, then and shortly after, to reaffirm the church's posit on contraception, what was really being reaffirmed was the absolute claim to papal authority. So you have contraception re-condemned in 1968, in the summer of 1968, in the encyclical Humanae Vitae, which Cardinal Ratzinger [now Pope Benedict] actually went so far as to say, in subsequent years, was infallible teaching. So Cardinal Ratzinger is saying that the church's position on contraception, including condom use, is infallible teaching. Therefore, when he becomes pope, Benedict is stuck with this.

What he's responding to, of course, is this world-historical health crisis, HIV-AIDS, which is transmitted thru sexual intercourse. Science has clearly established that prevention of HIV is tremendously enhanced by the use of condoms. And the church can't see its way around this affirmation of papal authority. It shows you the corruption of it, because the consequence of this — especially when the pope goes to Africa and puts it on display — is the deaths of human beings who are infecting each other. Because wherever the church still has influence over the moral decisions people make, infection rates go up. And of course, in Africa, one of the tragedies is that the pope's position plays into the way women are at the mercy of partners who don't want to use condoms. And those partners are reinforced, in their power to refuse to use condoms, by this position of the pope.

This points up the inherently problematic nature of allowing a celibate clergy, and a celibate hierarchy, to instruct the non-celibate on how they should live their lives. It's so counterintuitive.
It's true, and the clerical culture is a problem. We saw that in the priest sex abuse scandal, where the clerical culture closed ranks around abusive priests who were members of it.

But let's be clear here. Human beings are faced with a moral crisis, which is that our traditional categories no longer apply because of technological innovation. So: what is reproduction? There's a quest that human beings didn't have to ask until this generation. We knew, but we don't know anymore. Human reproduction can take place outside the human body. And if you give a high value to the enhancement of future generations of human beings — improving of intelligence, physical health, longevity — well, you can find yourself arguing more and more for what we might call unnatural modes of reproduction. The genome revolution; analysis of DNA; the ability of people to control conception outside the woman's womb — all of these things put before human beings vast moral questions.

The Catholic Church is basically removing itself as a participant in this moral debate, going forward, by just basically saying no to all of it. And why is that happening? it's not happening, I would argue, because of serious moral thinking that's been done about these new technologies. It's mostly taking place because the hierarchy of the church is defending its authority by defending posits that have already been taken. Contraception is the obvious example, but it's not just that.

And the fact that the church has taken positions already on some of these posits may prove to be irrelevant, because technology has so changed the way these issues are presenting themselves to human beings. And if that's the case in 2009, imagine how it'll be in 2050! What will the questions be that human beings are dealing with a generation from now? And this is just on the beginning of life; the same thing applies on the end of life.

I think that the Catholic Church has a moral wisdom going back 2000 years. It's part of the biblical tradition going back 5000 years. That's crucial for human beings going forward. I think it needs to be part of this moral reflections that human beings have to do.

So what would it take, in terms of internal church reform, for that tradition to be successfully mined?
Well, you can look for an analogy at the church's tradition on war and peace. In my lifetime — I never thought I would see this — the Catholic Church has gone from being a partner to war makers to being a partner to peacemakers. The Vatican and the hierarchies of the Catholic Church have been staunch opponents of war making and military violence for most of a generation now. The Catholic bishops, following the lead of the Vatican, have opposed all of America's wars since Vietnam, including the short war against Panama, the first Gulf War, the second Gulf War, and now the war on terrorism. Popes and bishops have been staunch critics of these wars, even in periods when most Americans were pretty enthusiastic about them.

For someone raised in the era of Cardinal Spellman, that's unbelievable. Spellman was a military cardinal; he was famous for saying, My country, right or wrong. And Pope Pius XII was a warrior pope. He's famous as the pope of World War II, but he was also the pope of the Cold War. And the Catholic Church was a staunch ally of the American nuclear standoff against the Soviet Union, and the Catholic Church was silent during the corruptions of the Cold War's deterrence period, when something like 100,000 nuclear weapons were created by both sides in the Cold war. There was no moral teaching coming from the church on that.

That's all changed! What we have is the church retrieving its own tradition of criticism and resistance, going back to the Just War theory of Saint Augustine. St. Augustine articulates the Just War theory against the Christian Roman empire. Before the Roman Empire became Christian, Christianity was a pacifist movement; it becomes a militarist movement when the empire becomes the church and the church becomes the empire. Within two generations, the most important theologian in the church articulates an argument against unbridled use of violence by power.

There's a peace tradition to be retrieved, and the church has been retrieving that in my lifetime. The church has also been retrieving its firm commitment to be on the side of the poor, which is something that was also lost during the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance, and the modern era, when the church was firmly allied with wealth and with power. That's changed. It's one of the reasons that all those poor people were able to cheer the presence of the pope in Africa last week: poor people in Africa understand that the Catholic Church is on their side. Well, only two or three generations ago, that wouldn't have been so obvious. So the church's retrieval of its preferential option for the poor, as the bishops of Latin America put it, is another signal of what's possible.

The church needs to retrieve its tradition of treating all people equally. Therefore, the rights of women have to be firmly affirmed by the church, which isn't happening — either on sexual morality or in the ways in which church power structures forbid the admission of women, most obviously in the ordination of women as priests.

Having said all that, the church has learned to retrieve these traditions them not from religious teachers, but from secular teachers. It was the antireligious revolt, beginning with the French Revolution in 1789, that put human rights on the world agenda. The declaration of the rights of man in 1789 right up to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948: all of that comes out of secular, antireligious, Enlightenment movements. I'm not saying that the church is the source of these great ideas, but the church can learn from them, and retrieve from its own tradition religious justification for these ideas.

This matters so much because there are more than a billion Catholics in the world, and a lot of them live in the most desperate parts of the world. Those folks really need a reformed, liberal, justice-and-peace-oriented church to be their great ally.

InPracticing Catholic, you talk about reform being driven by the move from ethics to theology. Could you discuss that principle in general, and a couple ways in which it's played out? I wasn't familiar with the story of Cardinal Cushing and his brother in law, for example.
There was this revolution associated with Copernicus and Galileo. What was that? It was a move away from the idea that the truth comes from above — from God, from the teaching author of the church, from the rules of the monarch, and down to the people. The modern revolution reverses that. You see it in science, where truth comes not from above, but from the self.

When Descartes says, 'I think, therefore I am,' what Descartes is telling us is that he knows he exists not because God told him he exists, but because he can experience it himself. And when Galileo says that Copernicus was right — that the earth goes around the sun, not the other way around — he can look through his telescope and show you why he's come to that conclusion. His eyesight gives him his truth, and that puts him in direct conflict with an establishment that's saying, 'No, your eyesight doesn't give you the truth. The power structure of the church — the tradition — gives you the truth, and your eyesight has to conform with that.'

That, in a capsule, is the change that's been taking place over the last 400 years, not just in the church but in the broader culture. And in my lifetime, this has played out in the Catholic Church most powerfully around the idea of what makes for salvation.

Salvation used to do for human beings what the idea of meaning does for human beings today. Lots of us can be indifferent to whether we're being saved or not; you haven't been worried about that this week. But every day, you get up and wonder if your life is meaningful. And despair is the conclusion that life isn't meaningful.

In the past, human beings couldn't live without the idea of being saved. And the tradition said that, in order to be saved, you had to be a Catholic. Other traditions had their versions of the same thing: if you're not with us, you're lost. It's a common human dynamic.

That doctrine — No Salvation Outside the Church — changed in my lifetime. It was one of the first things I was taught as a child, and I remember it troubling me, because my neighbor and best friend was a Protestant, and my neighbor on the other side was a Jew. So, my best friends are going to Hell. That troubled me as a seven-year-old. I was already a kind of troubled Catholic.

And then in 1953, when I was 10 years old, I learned that there was a priest in Boston, whose name was Father Feeney, who was excommunicated for teaching No Salvation Outside the Church. It was my first experience in theology. I was 10 years old, and I said to my mother, 'I thought that's what we believed.' My mother said, 'It was.' 'Well, what do we believe now?' My mother said, 'We believe, live and let live.' And I thought, 'Whoa! how did this happen?'

It was only years later that I understood. It happened because of this Irish Catholic archbishop in Boston — he wasn't a cardinal yet — named Richard Cushing, who was a working-class Irish guy from South Boston. And he was a typical American. By that, I mean he grew up in a society that did not take for granted the borders, the boundaries, of the old world. The peace of Westphalia, in 1648, defined nations in Europe by religious denomination. So if you were a Catholic, you didn't know anybody who wasn't Catholic, and if you were a Protestant, you didn't know anybody who wasn't Protestant. The exception to that were Jews, who had to make their way inside these communities. But if you weren't Jewish, you knew very few Jews.

But when I was a boy, we lived next door to a Jewish family, and on the other side of us was a Protestant family. This is America. In America, people rub elbows with people who are different from them. That's been defining this country from the beginning, and is part of this country's genius.

So there's Cardinal Cushing growing up in South Boston. It's an Irish enclave, that's for sure, but he, like everyone in South Boston, has to make his life outside, in the bigger town. He starts commuting across Boston to go to Boston College. His sister gets a job as a token-taker at the MTA, and marries a guy she falls in love with, whose name is Dick Pearlstein. He's Jewish. So Cardinal Cushing suddenly has a brother-in-law who's Jewish, and he has a relationship with Dick Pearlstein that includes friendship and authentic love.

Cardinal Cushing becomes archbishop in the mid-1940s, and in the late 1940s, he hears complaints from people — probably including his brother-in-law — that there's a Catholic priest down on Boston Common giving sermons that denigrate Jews, and say Jews are going to hell. Cardinal Cushing has to hear that in a way that maybe, in the old country, he wouldn't have heard it — because Jews going to hell includes his brother-in-law, which is a personal affront.

And this is the condition of a kind of grassroots experience that begins to weigh more than the doctrine at the top, which says No Salvation Outside the Church, including Dick Pearlstein. I don't think so.

I don't think it's an accident that the first person in almost a thousand years to challenge this particular doctrine of Catholicism is this Irish bishop in Boston, who tells Father Feeney, 'You can't say that.' To which Feeney says, 'What do you mean I can't say it? This has been the teaching of the church since Pope Innocent III in the Middle Ages, and since the Fourth Lateran Council in the 13th Century. How can you tell me not to say it?' And Cushing says, 'I'm just telling you not to say it.'

Feeney disobeyed Cushing, and they went back and forth. Finally, Feeney was excommunicated by Cardinal Cushing in 1953. But he wasn't bothered by that, because he immediately appealed to Rome, assuming Rome would support him and not Cushing.

And the astonishing thing in this story — this shows you how the world had changed. This is post-World War II, post-Holocaust, post-the collapse of European culture, including Christian culture. It's a period when people are looking for a new meaning in their experience. Experience has begun to weigh more than doctrine throughout culture. And the cutting edge of this, the issue that changes it for Catholics, is this one.

When Feeney appeals to Rome, to the astonishment of everyone — including me, a 10-year-old in Alexandria, Virginia — Rome supported Cushing against Feeney and upheld the excommunication. Now, it's true that they tried to dodge the issue by saying they were upholding Cushing because of Feeney's disobedience, and not condemning the position Feeney took. But they upheld the excommunication.

That's the beginning of the end of No Salvation Outside the Church, which is gone! And what put the nail in the coffin was the Second Vatican Council, exactly ten years later. Cushing, by now a cardinal, is one of the leaders in the council arguing in favor of the council's declaration on human liberty, which is an affirmation of the primacy of conscience. Conscience weighs more than doctrine — it's a principle of modern life, that the self is the beginning of meaning. And that revolution began with a relationship between a Jew and his Catholic brother in law.

One question I have, as the child of parents who cite Vatican II as an example of what the church is capable of, is: what if Vatican II was an anomaly out of keeping with the broader character of the church?
History makes me hopeful. There has been, on average, one council every century — a gathering of all the bishops of the Roman Catholic Church. These are gatherings in which church leaders, together, exercise authority over the church. Between councils, popes exercise authority over the church. You can understand the whole history of the church as a tension, if not a conflict, between the teaching author of the pope and the teaching author of the council.

The pope is infallible, right? How do we know that? Well, the First Vatican Council told us; it was only when the council said that in 1870 that that doctrine took bite. A Second Vatican Council, approximately 90 years later, begins to nuance that claim by exercising authority itself. The watchword of the Second Vatican Council was collegiality: the pope exercises authority in the church, but collegially, in consultation with the bishops. And that principle is the wedge into a more democratic church as the bishops also exercises their authority collegially with the laypeople.

It's then that you begin to see lay councils, laypeople taking charge of the church at the grassroots level, creating a more democratic structure. The church isn't a democracy — there's nothing sacrosanct about the political form of democracy — but democratic liberalism is an improvement on monarchy, and that's going to be reflected in the governance of the church too.

So that's one reason I'm hopeful for the future. The other is, is we don't sufficiently appreciate the world-historic watershed that the Holocaust was. The Holocaust — the genocide that took the lives of nearly seven million Jews as Jews — the Christian world was an accessory to that crime. I'm not saying the Christian world did it; the Nazis did it, and that must be insisted on. But the Nazis couldn't have done it without the centuries-long tradition of anti-Judaism in the Christian World, and the quiet acquiescence that took place throughout the Christian West. And one of the most pointed manifestations of that acquiescence came from Christians, and from Catholics, who did not oppose the Holocaust in significant ways. There were heroic acts of opposition, that's true. But they were isolated and they were exceptional. Those heroes should be celebrated, but never to give us the idea that the Christian world generally or the Catholic Church opposed Hitler in any significant way. It was not true.

Pope John XXIII was a person who had firsthand experience of that failure. As archbishop, he was a papal legate in Turkey during World War II. He was one of the few Catholic prelates to actively resist the Holocaust by secretly providing baptismal certificates to Jews escaping through Turkey; hundreds, maybe thousands of Jews got out because of Archbishop Roncalli, as he was known then. And as the papal legate in France at the end of the war , he was one of the first people to see how the church had been compromised by the Vichy regime, and he took steps to undo that — for example, to return the baptized Jewish child who'd been rescued by Christians to their families, if there were relatives, but at least to allow them to resume their identities as Jews. And he was stopped in that by the Vatican.

Roncalli knew that the church had failed, and that I believe was his main impulse in calling the council. He knew that the church had to deal with some very basic mistakes, and central to that was the church's tradition of anti-Judaism. The teaching of the church was that the Jews were the murderers of Jesus, and that the Jewish religion had no reason to continue existing after Jesus. And the most important thing the Second Vatican Council did was attack those two ideas.

Nostra Aetate, the most important declaration of the church, said two things. One, the Christ- killer myth can no longer be taught as Christian doctrine, even though the Gospels themselves are the source of it. (That left us with the problem: how do we read these gospels that say the Jews, not the Romans, are the main murders of Jesus?) And the second thing Nostra Aetate said was that the Jewish religion continues as an authentic mode of access to God — that the covenant God has made with the people of Israel is full, permanent complete. The Jewish religion, that is, has not forfeited its reason for existence — which had been Catholic teaching for close to 2000 years!

So right there, the Second Vatican Council has made the most important reform of Christian theology, I would argue, in church history. That's a direct result of the Holocaust. And it goes to the pins of what it is to be a Christian — which is why the church has had such trouble implementing it since then. The Christ-killer charge isn't gone from Christianity — we saw it vividly in the Mel Gibson film The Passion of the Christ — but it has gone from the grassroots experience of Catholicism. Most young Catholics are unfamiliar with this tradition, and when I talk to young Jewish people raised in communities that include Catholics, they've heard about the Christ-killer charge, but never been victimized it themselves. People of my generation were. This has happened in a generation. It's an astonishing change.

Look, we've been in an anti-reform reaction to the Second Vatican Council — since the papacy of Paul VI, really, but certainly since the papacy of Pope John Paul II, especially with his partner in rejection of reform, Cardinal Ratzinger, who's now Pope Benedict. Well, it's no wonder they're rejecting it. Human beings change, at this deep level, slowly and with difficulty, so we've seen slow and difficult change in the Catholic Church. But I regard it as irrevocable.

When you frame it that way, it becomes a whole lot easier to imagine a future in which priests can get married, or women can become priests, or the church opposes abortion but not contraception.
Absolutely. The shift in the church's teaching on Jews and Judaism is the most radical change imaginable. It's much more radical than for the church to change its position on contraception, on married priests, on ordaining women. Those traditions are 1000 years old: it's true, they're old, but in the Catholic Church, time is counted a little differently. The tradition of anti-Judaism goes back to the New Testament. The way the people who wrote the Gospel of John were understood by the next generation as seeing the Jews — the way the word "Jews" was heard by Christians in the 1st Century — that's being changed now.

Pope Benedict cannot get away with reinstating an anti-Semitic bishop without a worldwide protest. That's a signal of the change. Because what Bishop Williamson believes is what every Catholic believed two generations ago about the Jews — and Pope Benedict not only had to backpedal, he had to apologize.

You make a good case that dramatic change can occur in the church, and that the resources are there in the church's history to facilitate that change. Do you still need a Roncalli-type figure who's —
You do. You need world-historical figures. I used to say that the church needs a new Pope John XXIII [a/k/a/ Angelo Roncalli]; now I say it needs a Gorbachev.

Look who Gorbachev was. He came out of the heart of the Communist Party. True, he came out of something called "New Thinking" — this movement in the 1970s and 1980s among young communist intellectuals in the Soviet Union that was embodied in the two words we associate with Gorbachev, glasnost and perestroika, new ideas of how politics and the economy should be — but his mentor, the man who appointed him, was a KGB operative, Yuri Andropov. Andropov was a right-wing reactionary. He was like a Pope Benedict, and he came to power with an agenda of preserving the old order at all costs. He died, and he was replace by Konstantin Chernenko for a brief interregnum.

The shocking, unpredicted event — what the Kremlinologists who'd spent their lives studying the Soviet Union said was impossible — was that you got reform from within the system. By a coincidence of history that almost makes you believe in God, Gorbachev came to power just at the point where Ronald Reagan was at the bottom of his failed first term as president. True, he was re-elected, but his policy was going nowhere. He was presiding over a war, in the Cold War, that the United States was losing, and he was about to be disgraced through the Iran-Contra affair. His people were afraid of him. He needed a new act. And the new act began with Gorbachev, who put before Reagan the possibility of ending the Cold War nonviolently.

It's true the Soviet Union was in a state of collapse: it was behind the curve of history on computer technology; its economy was a shambles; it was a house of cards ready to fall. But that's when tyrannies like that are most dangerous. The impulse is to strike out. It would have been reasonable to expect the Soviet Union to act out the nightmare scenario of nuclear war — and it didn't happen because of Gorbachev.

Over the next few years, Gorbachev made a succession of decisions that everyone said he couldn't make. Every time he made an offer to Reagan, Reagan would raise an objection, and Gorbachev would remove the objection by acting on it. When Gorbachev said, 'Let's get rid of midrange nuclear weapons,' Reagan said, 'Well, if we do that you'll have conventional superiority in Europe, because the Red Army is poised to attack Western Europe. Of course you want to get rid of nuclear weapons.' To which Gorbachev said, 'Okay, I'll remove the Red Army.' And he ordered it out! He got to yes with Reagan, and the two of them came within an inch of agreeing to end the whole nuclear arms race. It's an astonishing story. Gorbachev saved the world. He gave us a way out of this room that we were locked in that was inevitably going to destroy the world.

We need a Gorbachev in the church, and it's possible. It wasn't that he was such a moral giant. It's that he was a realist in assessing the pressure he was dealing with. He knew the Soviet Union had no future the way it was. Well, the next leader of the Catholic Church — if he's a realist — will know that the church has no future the way it is. That's as obvious as the shortage of priests.

And widespread disregard for the doctrine on contraception —
Every way you would assess the health of this organization, it's unhealthy. You can't have an organization with a middle management that's disillusioned and collapsing, and that's the priesthood. The executive branch of the Catholic Church, the bishops, are morally bankrupt, which is manifest so clearly by their failure to deal with the priest-sex-abuse scandal. Alienated women — the Catholic Church isn't going to be the only institution in the world that's going to stand against the arrival of women. Women have more authority and more power over their lives in Iran than they do in the Catholic Church, and that's a signal of something. The Catholic Church is not going to survive as a misogynistic, anti-female throwback to another world.

It may not be the immediate successor to Pope Benedict. The church moves slowly. The bark of Peter — it's a huge ocean liner, and you know how slow an ocean liner is to change direction. But it's changing.

You mentioned belief in God a moment ago. It's clear, inPracticing Catholic, that the way you understand certain staples of Catholicism and Christianity — God, the Resurrection, life after death — has evolved over the years. Howdoyou understand those things?
Theology presumes philosophy, so when a philosophical paradigm shifts, theological understanding has to be affected. The pre-Copernican, static worldview assumed the cosmos was divided between two spheres: the supernatural and the natural; the other world and this world; eternity and time. Once that gave way to a modern understanding, basic ideas changed.

So, what is the meaning of Jesus's preaching on the Kingdom of Heaven? It isn't about some special suburb in the sky. It's really about existence here and now, living as deeply as we can in the present. Ancient Greek ideas about the immortality of the soul aren't necessary for Christian faith. The afterlife — I believe that death is not the end, but my belief in the future is dependent entirely on my belief in God. It doesn't depend on my assumptions about my own immortality.

I talk in the book about a "second naïveté," in which I embrace the basic traditions of the creed, but understand that I believe them differently than the authors of the creed would have. I believe in the resurrection of Jesus, for sure. But if a video camera had been running nonstop from Good Friday through Easter Sunday, and you could have access to the tape, what would it show? Would it show the body of Jesus being reconstituted, the molecules reassembling so he'd be revived, and then Jesus casting aside the shroud and getting up from the slab? My faith doesn't depend on what the video camera would capture, because faith isn't addressed to a video camera; it's addressed to human beings. I do believe in the resurrection. But I don't think it means the

I think most important thing to know about God is that we cannot know God. And that's a kind of knowledge. As soon as we have God neatly fitting into a category of some kind — Michelangelo's supernatural being on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel — we've lost God. It's not for nothing that in the Hebraic tradition, you're not supposed to speak the name of God.

Everything that exists participates in the divine source of its being. So if you want to see God, look around. The story of Jesus is full of affirmation that the surest manifestation of God's presence are acts of loving kindness. This is especially compatible with Catholicism, because Catholicism is defined by its sacramental imagination — that is, you look at the created world and see indirect signals of who the creator is.

But the key word in that is indirect. The source of our transcendent happiness is a mystery that's always beyond our ability to express it. Perhaps the best image I know for God is the horizon. We love to go to the beach and stare at the horizon because it's a way of entering into this mystery. But the horizon always defies our efforts to get closer to it.

That would be a good note to end on, but I want to ask you two more things. First, what's the relationship between the small-bore work you do in yourBoston Globe column and the broader-bore work you do in your books? How do those feed off each other?
The column, which I started writing in 1992, is where I discovered the voice in which I write nonfiction. Before I was a columnist, I was a novel writer; almost all my writing as a professional writer had been fiction. What's most important to me is that, when I started writing nonfiction, I imagined the readers of my Globe column. The readers became vivid to me, because I knew who they were; I knew I had this community of thinking, committed, socially conscious people. As a writer, you sit at a desk in room, alone, with the door closed. But you're in communion with strangers in a very intimate way. The Globe column gave me that sense of who my community of readers is.

And the Globe has been extremely and unfailingly supportive of my commitment to say what I think. How dare you write that? has been a common response to some of my work. I learned early on that the simple answer to that question is, 'I write it because it's what I think.' That's been more than good enough for the editors at the Globe. I've written many columns that the editorial consensus there would disagree with, but I've never felt anything but valued by the paper, and I don't take that for granted. That was especially true in the years after 9-11, when I had this visceral rejection of militarism, of America's responses, that was somewhat out of step. I was right, alas.

And finally — you said earlier that you're not trying to sign anybody up for Catholicism. You came of age in the church, and you have these powerful historical and emotional attachments to it. But leaving those aside for a moment, is there anything that you get from your identity as a Catholic that you can't imagine getting as a member of some other faith community?
I could be an Episcopalian, in terms of my aesthetic and my theology. In some ways I'd be a better fit, because my politics are more Episcopalian. The Episcopalian Church has accommodated democracy in a way that the Catholic Church hasn't. In terms of what I believe about the authority of the pope, I am more Episcopalian than I am Catholic.

So I'm a Catholic for certain inherent reasons. But let me first say that I think these denominational questions are minor. They themselves are the last vestiges of the Reformation crisis, which is just ending. Going forward, if I were to quote-unquote change denominations — if I were to become an Episcopalian because they're more respectful of women and gay people, or more democratic — it would be an affirmation of the importance of denominational identity, which I don't think matters that much.

But I'm also claiming the church as mine, as a way of staying in the fight for it. Because the stakes for the world and the future are high. Let's face it — this is a global institution. Name another institution that cuts across the divides of the world the way the Catholic Church does today. Not Islam. Islam and Roman Catholicism are comparable numerically: there are more than a billion Roman Catholics and about a billion and a half Christians, and there are a billion and a half Muslims. But the Catholic Church is First World-Third World. It's Information Age-Illiterate. It's post-Enlightenment/postmodern-pre-Enlightenment/superstitious. It's pagan/cultic native religions with a Catholic veneer, and it's post-theistic and abstract. People who are beyond language about God can also be at home in the Catholic Church; you can be a postmodern intellectual at home in this institution, and you can be an illiterate peasant whose religious life is basically traditional superstition.

I think that that's magnificent; I'm not excommunicating anybody. And I'd say, going forward, it's enormously important that as the globe shrinks, and that illiterate peasant and that peasant's child are brought into the global culture, it's urgently important that this institution be liberal, reform-minded, rational, and in touch with the best of Catholic tradition.

Let me just end by saying that I don't think you need to be religious to be a happy human being. I don't think God put us here to be religious; I think God put us here to be human. And humans have demonstrated lots of ways to be in tune w the transcendent, with the holy, with the spiritual: you see it in art, in music. You don't have to be religious to live this way, and maybe fewer and fewer people going forward will be. That's fine with God, I think; my understanding of God is that God is present to us just by virtue of our being.

But I also would say that there's something profoundly meaningful about the awareness that I have as a religious person — that this is the meaning of my being.... Homo sapiens became homo sapiens sapiens, if you'll forgive me; we're the creatures who know, but more than that, we're the creatures who know that we know. We can actually think about our knowing; that's the importance of 'I think, therefore I am.' We think about our thinking. And that move qualifies us — stay with me — to be homo sapiens sapiens sapiens. Our knowing that we know opens us to something infinite. My knowing that I know makes me aware that I am known. And it's not Michelangelo's God on the ceiling; it's not a person up there. We talk about God as an object all the time, and atheists deny that God is an object, and they're right. The atheist affirmation is religious, because it says don't confuse God with that thing that you talk about up there. God is beyond God. And the Catholic tradition has a language for this.

Monotheism is not what people think it is. It's this intuition that we are known and loved by something, someone, that we have no words for, no image of, no way to describe.

The most important symbol of this was in the Temple of Israel, in the Holy of Holies. Only the high priest could enter the Holy of Holies, and only on one day of the year, Yom Kippur. And you know what was in the Holy of Holies? Nothing.

And yet, as people of language we're constantly attempting to put the unspeakable into words. And as human beings, we're constantly tempted to take our words as God, our images as God. The church does it by taking the church or the tradition or the authority as God — and the next thing you know, you're committing crimes in the name of it. In the Protestant Tradition, the Bible becomes God. In the Islamic tradition, certain texts in the Koran begin to do this.

Human beings are constantly doing this. And happiness — meaningfulness — is to have a tradition and culture and language to be self-critical, and within which to be hopeful going forward. The Catholic Church is a magnificent tradition for that. So I'm not a reluctant Catholic; I'm not ambivalent. I'm in dissent from the particular authority as it's manifest today. But I also am conscious of how that itself is a violation of the deep tradition. Why? We measure everything in our tradition against the person of Jesus, whose affirmations are very clear.