Fr. John F. Kavanaugh, SJ, professor of philosophy at St. Louis University in Missouri, has written a column in America magazine (December 20-27) that could go a long way towards establishing an intelligent framework for the discussion among Catholics of the moral and theological issues of our time.
If that were to happen it would be a welcome turn of events. I don’t think I am the only one made uncomfortable by the acrimony of the debate between the Left and the Right in the modern Catholic circles. There are times when we act as if we have more in common with those outside the Church than with each other.
Kavanaugh informs us that this past Christmas season he decided “to sit down and read the Gospels as if they were really true”; that if he “was going to preach about” the Gospels, he “had better really believe them.” He found the encounter a “life-forming experience.” He proposes that we follow suit; that we “take up the Gospel of Matthew and read right through it in one or two sittings. Don’t meditate on it, but read it carefully and slowly, not as a teacher or a priest or a theologian or a Republican or a Democrat or a feminist or hyphenated American. Read it as a human being, and see if you believe it, as if you truly think it is all real, all true: how Jesus was born; how He lived; what He taught; how and why He died.”
You may be puzzled over why a priest would have to take a step like this. But we shouldn’t be. Priests can lose focus. That is why they are encouraged to make retreats on a regular basis. Like many of us caught up in our daily work, Kavanaugh found himself taking for granted the centrality of Jesus and His revelation to his life: “Although I teach at Saint Louis University, a Catholic, Jesuit institution, my ethics course is in the philosophy department, not theology, so the arguments and evidence concerning intrinsic human dignity and the inviolability of human life are limited to rational argument and scientific data available to anyone open to inquiry.” To right this imbalance, Kavanaugh went to the Bible for what he calls his “ultimate reality principle.”
What did he find when he undertook a “strict and literal” reading of the Gospels? At first glance, you might not think it groundbreaking. I disagree I submit that, if we could take it for granted that all Catholics accept Kavanaugh’s conclusion about what the Gospels means to our lives, the disputes between conservatives and liberals would proceed far more amicably and constructively than they do at the present time. Here’s Kavanaugh’s bottom line: The Gospel tells us the “most High miraculously became human flesh.” “[T]he overwhelming reality is this: the desire of God in Christ to be one with us, to transform us, to save us.” Jesus is the Way, the Truth, and the Life.
Those who have been transformed by these truths view the world differently from those who do not. They are likely to be members of the Communion of Saints. Shouldn’t that make a difference — a big difference — when we debate with them on matters such as women priests, capital punishment, the sexual revolution, the Seamless Garment proposition, birth control, abortion, the inerrancy of Sacred Scripture, and the Latin Mass? I say it should.
This is not to say that the debate on these questions should not be vigorous and determined. If Jesus is Lord and the Catholic Church is the Church He founded, it is essential for the Church’s teachings to be communicated accurately to the faithful. The goal for Catholics is not that we be true to ourselves, but that we follow the Lord. But if we accept Kavanaugh’s common denominator as the starting point, there is no reason for Catholics on the left and right to not see each other as brothers and sisters in Christ sincerely searching for the best way to remake all things in Christ. Look: Not everyone who questions the literalness of certain segments of the Infancy Narratives denies the divinity of Christ; not everyone who calls for a greater application of free-market theory harbors a contempt for the plight of the poor.
The longer I live the more I am struck by the fact that, no matter where we stand on the Catholic theological spectrum, the odds are that there will be someone in the Church to the left and to the right of us, serious-minded Catholics who will think we are mistaken on important matters of faith and morals. I’ll use myself as an example. I get angry letters from readers who contend that I am not sufficiently attentive to the Church’s teachings on capital punishment and the need for social programs to aid the poor. They accuse me of being a “cafeteria Catholic” who has sold out to the Republican Party. But I also get angry letters from readers who accuse me of being wishy-washy on the Latin Mass and naïve about what they believe is the modernism implicit in the writings of Teilhard de Chardin. They also think I am a cafeteria Catholic.
My point is not that I think that I have chosen the correct middle ground between extremists in the Church. I am not that big-headed. I do not question the right of any other Catholic to criticize my views. The stakes are high in these debates. It is entirely fitting and proper for Catholics to speak against what they think is a misinterpretation of the Church’s teachings. What is out of bounds is for us to jump to the conclusion that those who disagree with us are guilty of ill will, rather than simply bad judgment.
In other words, the terms “anti-Christian” and “heretic” should not be resorted to without a very serious consideration of the evidence, especially when we are taking stock of a man or woman who comes from a reading of the Gospel with Fr. Kavanaugh’s conviction that the “most High miraculously became human flesh,” and that the “ultimate reality principle” of our lives should be our belief that in Jesus is manifest “the desire of God to be one with us, to transform us, to save us.”
I know: heretics exist. We should not be naïve. There are wolves in sheep’s clothing, people whose primary loyalty is to one of the secular “isms” of our time who strive to manipulate the teachings of the Church to further their agenda. There are Marxists who mouth Jesus’s words about loving the least of our brethren to intensify class warfare; relativists who recite His warnings about casting the first stone to promote moral indifferentism; pantheists who use terms such as “immanence” to deny the difference between the Creator and His creation. But those who employ these subterfuges do not share Fr. Kavanaugh’s conviction that we have been “saved by the mystery of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus.”
Might there be those who pretend to believe in Jesus’s role in salvation history in order to serve secular ideological aims? No doubt. Keep up your left. But it is as much a mistake to be overly cynical as it is to be naïve.
James Fitzpatrick's new novel, The Dead Sea Conspiracy: Teilhard de Chardin and the New American Church, is available from our online store. You can email Mr. Fitzpatrick at fitzpatrijames@sbcglobal.net.
(This article originally appeared in The Wanderer and is reprinted with permission. To subscribe call 651-224-5733.)
