Q: What is the essence of being Catholic?
A: I would say the essence of Catholicism is Jesus Christ -- the sure conviction that in Jesus of Nazareth God entered human history in the person of His son, for the salvation of the world, [and] the further conviction that that saving mission continues in the Church, which is an extension of Christ -- which is, indeed, the body of Christ. To meet Jesus Christ is to meet His Church and become incorporated into that Church, and to live that Christian life through the Church -- through its sacraments, through its moral teaching, through its community of fellowship, through its service to the world. But at the heart of it all is the person of Christ. Christ is the essence of all Christianity. Christ is the essence of Catholicism.
Q: How does Protestantism differ from Catholicism?
A: Catholicism understands itself to be the fullest embodiment of the Church of Christ in history. Namely, Christ intended not only a fellowship, a community of disciples, but a structure for that community. Key parts of that structure are the episcopate, the office of bishop as the pastoral leadership of the Church. The chief bishop, the bishop of Rome, the successor of Peter, is a crucial part of that structure. And a sacramental priesthood in which the priest is understood not as an ecclesiastical functionary who's licensed to do certain kinds of church business; a priest understood as an icon of the eternal priesthood of Christ, whose priesthood continues in the Church. Those notions -- and particularly the centrality of the Petrine ministry as the continuation of Christ's mandate to Peter, embodied now in a living, in the bishop of Rome and, thus, a connection to the apostolic origins of the Church -- are very much at the heart of Catholic Christianity.
Q: And what about the sacraments?
A: One of the distinctive things about Catholicism is its intensely sacramental understanding of the world. In a Catholic vision of reality, everything discloses something else. Water and salt in baptism disclose the salvation of God working -- at work in an individual life. Bread and wine in the Eucharist become the body and blood of Christ. Marital love within the bond of fidelity discloses the truth of God's self-giving love to the world. Stuff counts in Catholicism, and that sacramental imagination about all of reality is intensely expressed in what Catholics call the seven sacraments of the Church.
Q: Let me move on to the current crisis in the Church. In your judgment, why has it become so acute? Why are so many Catholics -- and others -- so angry?
A: This is fundamentally a crisis of fidelity. If a man truly believes that he is what the Catholic Church teaches he is as a priest -- namely, an icon, a living representation of the eternal priesthood of Jesus Christ -- he does not behave as a sexual predator. So, at the bottom of the bottom line here, we have a crisis of fidelity. We have a crisis of failed discipleship. The normal reaction to that among people is a deep sense of betrayal, a deep sense of hurt, and anger that the pastoral authorities in the Church have not sufficiently dealt with this in the past. It's important to remember two things here. One is that the overwhelming majority of Catholic priests in the United States are leading faithful lives of heroic virtue. The second is that betrayal has been part of the story of the Church from the beginning. It's interesting that in constructing the New Testament, the Church did not eliminate the story of Judas. Judas is in the New Testament, but Judas is not the story line. The story line as it plays out in the Gospels and in the Acts of the Apostles is fidelity. And that is what I believe, at the end of the day, will come out of this current crisis -- a renewal of fidelity to integral Catholic faith.
Q: Is the problem a problem of homosexuality?
A: Sexual abuse, as we have come to see over the past four months, manifests itself in three ways. There is pedophilia, strictly speaking -- the sexual predation on children, the most revolting form of this and, seemingly, the least prevalent form of this. Then there is the age-old problem of clerical misconduct with women. What seems to be the bulk of the problem -- at least in the period between the late '60s and the late 1980s -- has been the sexual abuse of young men and teenage boys by clergy, and I think the normal English definition of that is homosexual abuse.
Q: And to what extent do you see in the criticism an effort by people with their own agendas to try to, in their view, reform the Church, to make big changes in its rules?
A: It seems clear to me that there has been a fair amount of ideological joyriding on this crisis -- a graying, aging, unreproductive generation of dissent seeing in this crisis an opportunity to advance items on its agenda which have gotten no traction in the previous 25 years. It is also true that the secular enemies of the Catholic Church have seen this as a great opportunity to take the Church down a notch or four. But all of that having been said, it also has to be said that this is our problem. This is the Church's problem. This is a problem of all, for all the people in the Church. It would be the grossest of irresponsibility, it seems to me, to blame the present sense of a great turmoil on either the press or on dissent within the Church. This is a real problem, and it needs real solutions. The real solution is for the Church to become more Catholic, not less Catholic.
Q: What do you mean by that?
A: I mean people living integrally Catholic lives. I mean the recognition that "cafeteria" Catholicism is simply unserious. The Catholic faith is not a smorgasbord down which you can walk, saying, "That looks good," "That doesn't look so good." It's a complete package. And when we try to convince ourselves that it is a smorgasbord, a cafeteria, a certain corruption comes into the whole enterprise. That's what we're seeing played out.
Q: What do you mean by the "smorgasbord"?
A: I mean, with particular reference to the moral teaching of the Church, dissent on what are settled matters of Catholic moral doctrine, with specific reference to the Church's sexual ethic. A generation of seminarians, from the mid-'60s to, perhaps, the mid-'80s, grew up in seminaries where it was tacitly understood that you could dissent from the Church's sexual ethic as long as you didn't publicize that. That led to an intellectual self-deception that I think eventually led to behavioral self-deception -- people giving themselves passes on behavior as they once gave themselves passes on conviction.
