Robert Royal is the founder and president of the Faith & Reason Institute in Washington, D.C. and editor-in-chief of The Catholic Thing (www.thecatholicthing.org). He is the author of numerous books. One in particular, The God That Did Not Fail, is one of my all-time favorites. Royal’s new book, A Deeper Vision: The Catholic Intellectual Tradition in the Twentieth Century, framed this interview.
David George Moore conducted this interview. Dave blogs at www.twocities.org and his videos can be seen at www.mooreengaging.com.
Moore: Vatican II had far-reaching implications for the Roman Catholic Church. Do you see the effects of this momentous gathering, at least to this point in human history, as a net positive or net negative?
Royal: That’s a big question and deserves a big answer, which I’m, unfortunately, unable to give. The negative effects are well documented: decline in religious vocations, decline in Sunday Mass attendance, flat and uninspiring liturgies, continuing widespread confusion about what the Church teaches about faith and morals, shrinking Catholic populations in Europe and Latin America, and stagnation in North America. As has been widely reported, the second largest religious group in America consists of ex-Catholics (about 25 million) with only the Catholic Church itself (70 million) larger, and even of those perhaps only one-quarter are Catholic in any real sense.
In the plus column, where the Church is truly present, there’s been considerable renewal. As I tried to make clear in my book A Deeper Vision, in philosophy, theology, Scripture Studies, culture, literature, etc. the Church in the twentieth century was remarkably fertile both before and after the Council (1962-5). Indeed, I would say that the renewal was the result of this ferment, which simultaneously looked back to the Scriptures and early Church Fathers (ressourcement) and looked to present and future (aggiornamento) using the recovery of a deeper Catholic tradition. Catholicism is booming in Asia and Africa (there will be more Catholics, probably over a billion, in Sub-Saharan Africa by 2100 than in the whole world today).
The Council put the question to those of us in advanced democracies of how we are going to live fully Christian lives in our circumstances. The Gospel has the power to answer that question, but it’s explosive. It may take a few decades yet before we come to a better equilibrium.
Moore: Your book makes clear that good theology can’t be done apart from good philosophy. How can Christian scholars better persuade non-experts that knowing both theology and philosophy matter?
Royal: Theology is simply the part of religiosity that thinks about God. That’s something any reflective human being will do, believer or not. The Creator made us capable of reasoning and willing, and those fundamental human powers will inevitably turn to questions such as where did I come from? Where am I going? How should I live? What is there after this life? Classic questions that pure philosophy and theology have always confronted.
It’s always been the case that there are only a few believers capable of formal philosophy and theology. That’s where the Church, formed in both faith and reason, assists the vast majority of believers. Most believers are such because they’ve heard the Word from family, friends, parish, and come to appreciate its value in the midst of all the things that life brings us all.
But to have that confidence in the Church, we also need confidence that there are those within the community who can answer the questions that the world puts to us – or at least show how they fit into a coherent scheme. When I’ve taught philosophy to graduate students, I’ve found that they often fear rational examination of the truths of the faith, as if reason is somehow the enemy of faith. I try to convince them that – even if they don’t remember all the logical arguments we go over – they will at least remember that there are answers to various difficulties. And they should never be intimidated by secular critics who assume (they cannot prove it) that Faith is irrational. All truths are from God, whether we arrive there via reason or revelation. And patiently pursued, they will not contradict one another.
The opening of John’s Gospel, “In the beginning was the Word. . .” etc., shows how the NT writers were already using philosophical ideas like the Logos (“Word”) to reason about revelation. It’s a task that’s never completed, because new questions and situations arise. But it’s crucial for the Church to be present in such debates. For that, you need tools of reason as well as faith.
Moore: Has your candor about problems within the Roman Catholic Church ever gotten you into serious trouble?
Royal: It depends what you mean by trouble. Nothing from Church authorities, ever. But anyone who tries to speak truth in any time and place will run afoul of people in one direction or another.
In my most recent book, for example, among other things I try to see what truth, if any, exists in some figures with whom I find myself in basic disagreement. My model in this is St. Thomas Aquinas who, in the individual articles of the Summa Theologiae, first lines up one set of positions on a given question: “Some have said…” Then, he opposes another group to those views, sometimes multiple voices of varying kinds, “But against that…” Finally, he tries to adjudicate, discerning where those who are partly right are right (and wrong), and trying to reconcile the various truths thus established into a consistent resolution of some disputed point. You don’t read a book like that for the spiritual inspiration you might get, for instance, in The Imitation of Christ. But if you want a patient, logical search for truth, there’s no better example among Christian thinkers.
I wasn’t writing a Summa, so I try to make that kind of story more interesting for readers – the exchanges between Hans Urs von Balthasar and Karl Barth, for example, on the idea of analogy and our knowledge of God are a more living form of what Aquinas did. But I can tell you from experience that when you try to do this, some accuse you of being overly irenic, others of complicating questions to which they have the simple answer.
Life’s unfair, and you don’t realize how unfair until you’ve written a book.
Moore: Much of what you write is readily applicable to us Protestants. You write that an overemphasis on God’s love can lead to “theological drift.” Describe why you have concerns here.
Royal: As everyone knows these days, the very idea of Christianity as something true has all but disappeared from the public square, and even sadly from many churches. When Christ said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life,” a Christian should probably recognize that he meant what he said. We also have “God is love,” but love – for us humans – takes all sorts of forms, including right and wrong forms, as even pop song make clear. Any faithful reading of the Gospel shows, I believe, a Jesus who is merciful and the very incarnation of a love that transcends all human loves. And at the same time – you can look it up – Jesus repeatedly warns about hell and damnation, the evils that come from the human heart, the failure even of those who claim to be Christians to truly follow Him, that He will say to them at the Last Judgment, “I never knew you.” Different people will have differing judgments about which of the two stances – the forgiving or the admonishing – needs to be applied in a given time and place. There’s no question, however, that without the hard look at sin and evil, indeed determining the truth about which is which, there’s not only “theological drift,” there’s an undermining of Christianity itself. If God is just indulgent and loving and doesn’t demand anything from me, why did he go to all the bother about the Cross and Resurrection? I won’t speak about Protestants – I’ve learned a lot from them over the years. But too many Catholics I know suffer from what we call in technical theological language “presumption.” They presume that God will forgive them and don’t need to examine themselves, their lives, and live differently than the people around them. It’s only one side of the Gospel – and a dangerously self-indulgent one when we’re not sharply aware of the rest.
Moore: To what degree is Marxist ideology still a threat to the Roman Catholic faith, especially in Latin America?
Royal: Well, things have changed quite a bit. Even in the heyday of so-called “Liberation Theology,” very few who embraced it had any idea of what Marxism really is. They thought it prescribed some sorts of revolution that would help the desperately poor, without any clear idea of Communism (which Marx himself regarded as “scientific socialism,” which is to say an ideology with a set of principles like class struggle, dictatorship of the proletariat, and much more). There persists a kind of anti-capitalist – and to be frank, anti-American element in many pockets of the Catholic Church in Latin America. Pope Francis himself, I think it’s fair to say, fits somewhere into that broad view of things. For me, as a Catholic living in America, I think there’s plenty to criticize in the way globalization and American policies have sometimes harmed Latin America. But the solutions we often here from the Latin American church are mere slogans. They don’t really understand global economics or international politics very well, let alone the dynamics in their own countries. So much of what they say is heartfelt about the poor, but not much more than pious wishes beyond that.
Moore: Does the present Pope have major doctrinal differences from the two Popes who preceded him?
Royal: He and many of his supporters would say no, and on perhaps 90 percent of Catholic thought, it’s probably the case. But he’s had this odd tick about Communion for the remarried and divorced – something never accepted in the Latin Church out of fidelity to Our Lord’s words about the indissolubility of marriage. He’s also seems ready to permit intercommunion where there is no communion. For example, Catholics take seriously – sometimes militantly – the splits that opened during the Reformation over whether Communion presents transubstantiation (as we believe), consubstantiation (as the Lutherans came to think), or any of the other – by now many – different views of the Eucharist, which even include regarding it as a “mere symbol.” You may think these are just opinions that mean nothing now, given that Christians face so many challenges from secularism and outright anti-Christian currents. But it matters what we think about those who belong in the Body of Christ, and how, and to what degree. My own view is that we need to reach out to one another and hold furiously to what we have in common in the storm that is now about to strike, but also not to forget that Christianity has a truth dimension that we cannot simply brush past our of some desire for ecumenical fellowship.
Moore: Many believe that the Roman Catholic is a monolith, but that is simply not the case. I’ve asked theologically informed Roman Catholic friends how many Roman Catholics have read the Catechism. The percentage is usually 10-15%. If that is remotely true, what would you propose for Catholics to better know their faith and thus what is non-negotiable if one aligns with this Christian tradition?
Royal: The official Catechism of the Catholic Church is a large book and was not intended to be read straight through. It’s more like an encyclopedia and the intention, when it was written, was to provide a broad jumping off point so that Catholic churches in various nations, or language groups, could develop other catechisms more adapted to their own circumstances. That hasn’t happened, for the most part. But there are many good, shorter guides, several books by now Cardinal Donald Wuerl of Washington DC, for instance. Bishop Robert Barron, now of Santa Barbara is a brilliant expositor. Then there are the older writers like G. K. Chesterton, Wilfrid Sheed (especially “Theology and Sanity”), wonderful NT Commentaries like Fulton Sheen’s Life of Christ, for the intellectual ambitious Joseph Ratzinger’s Introduction to Christianity or, as Pope Benedict XVI, his three-volume commentary on the NT. In a way, of course, Christianity is a simple message of God to man, but that message has to face many questions and challenges. So our faith should be constantly growing in simplicity and strength and – for those of us so called – also in wisdom and knowledge to meet the complexities of our moment.
Moore: Would your book be helpful for Protestants to read?
Royal: I believe so, because I’ve tried to lay out what the Catholic tradition thought and did in the twentieth century. Protestants, of course, faced some of the same problems during that period. Sometimes our responses have converged, at other times diverged. But if we’re being faithful to the Gospel and trying to see our way forward, we can all learn from one another, even from our failures and the failures of others. God has placed us at a critical moment in the history of the Church and the Western world. We need all the light we can possibly find to respond to it. I tried to illuminate what seem to me several areas where we might look for help moving forward.
