On religious America:
By one standard, the United States is one of the most religious countries in the entire world, if you take religious by conventional criteria -- going to church, confessing a belief in God, doing religious things -- prayers, prayer groups, reading the Bible. But "religious" in terms of what's in one heart, that is having a real faith, a real understanding of the sacred, the transcendent. That's not measurable, and I don't know how religious we are. I've been a Catholic Christian all my life, and I wince and sometimes I gag when I hear the name of Jesus or see the name of Jesus on cable television or on billboards or bumperstcickers. Those are moments I feel much more akin to an agnostic than a Christian. Because I don't see much relationship between Jesus-talk and invoking the name of Jesus ... with the carpenter's son of Nazareth, the one who got himself executed at a relatively young age because he stood up against people who, in a sense, were in the religion business, who went around with their tassels and their religious accoutrements and were always judging everybody else, looking down their noses at other people. Jesus excoriated those people as hypocrites who put the law ahead of justice and mercy and kindness. Some of the most exclusively religious people are also some of the most reactionary people when it comes to respect for people who are different from them -- whether it be gays or lesbians or people of color, people of different ethnic background, people of a certain economic status. Some of the most reactionary people are exclusively religious people. When I say I am sometimes turned off it is because I see such a discrepancy between what I believe Jesus was all about and what the Christian movement was all about and what it has come to be, and not just among Evangelicals and fundamentalists, but also in my church, the Catholic Church, with our pomp and circumstance and our titles and laws and regulations and all the rest. Again, it's a clichˇ to say it, but if Jesus were to come back and see it all, I think he'd be appalled by a lot of it.
On Catholic identity:
Whether it's America, France, or Uganda, or Indonesia, the most important thing about being a Catholic is participating in its sacramental life. There's nothing more important than that. I mean, Catholicism is the Eucharist, it's baptism, confirmation, it's the anointing of the sick, it is marriage, holy orders. That is what Catholicism is all about. It's a religion that celebrates and ritualizes the most important moments of passage in a person's life, in a family's life, in a community's life. Now there are a lot of other aspects of Catholicism outside of its sacramental life. It has a rich body of teaching on social justice and human rights and peace which I'm enormously proud of as a Catholic. Unfortunately, most Catholics aren't aware of it. And many Catholics even oppose it, without realizing it. I'm also enormously proud over the centuries, not just now, of the Catholics Church's involvement, especially in religious orders of the ministry, with the sick and the poor, the marginalized. Mother Teresa got a lot of publicity, but the kind of work that Mother Teresa did and got a lot of publicity for is done every day of the week all over the world by Catholic nuns and lay people and priests who are doing these traditional ministries to the sick and the poor and the marginalized and the powerless. And so those are characteristics too. But when you come right down to it, it seems to me you come back to the beginning. Catholicism is really identified by its sacramental life. And one of the reasons, by the way, that the vocations crisis, the declining number of priests, is so serious is that the sacramental life depends -- not totally, but it depends -- in large measure on having a sufficient number of qualified priests to administer those sacraments and to make them available to the millions of people who belong to the Church.
On the significance of the sacraments:
To understand the seven sacraments of the Catholic Church, one has to understand what I call the principle of sacramentality. And when we talk about the sacramental life being central to Catholicism, it's not just the seven sacraments, although that's obviously a central part of it. Catholicism is a tradition that has a sacramental vision -- it sees God in all things. God is not a reality totally separate from the material world. On the contrary, God is the creator of the material world and God is present through that. In fact, our only access to God and God's only access to us is with things of the earth -- with history and especially with one another. That is what sacramentality is all about. That's why Saint Francis of Assisi is such a popular saint, you know, with all the birds, the stars, the moon, the rivers, the fish and all the rest. Everything, in a sense, is part of this grand drama that reveals the beautiful face of God and through which we can respond to God's call to salvation and to intimate communion with God.
On the Eucharist:
Being a Catholic means being a participant in its sacramental life. The most important thing about the Catholic Church is the Eucharist, the Mass. The summit and the source of the whole Christian life is the liturgy, and the center of the liturgy in the worship of the Church is the Eucharist. That's the most important thing about being a Catholic. It's being part of a eucharistic community, and then you broaden that out and you see that the Eucharist is the central sacrament, but the six other sacraments are like satellites. They flow from the Eucharist, and they flow back into the Eucharist, and that's what it means to be a Catholic --to be part of a sacramental community. I can't account for what Catholics actually believe about the Eucharist. I suppose some of us theologians and maybe some bishops would be a little bit taken aback by some of the ideas that some Catholics have, or their ignorance about the Eucharist. But what they should believe and what I think what many of them do believe instinctively and live out in their Catholic lives is that the Eucharist is the family celebration. It's the occasion when we get together as a Catholic family to remember what God has done for us in Jesus Christ -- to have the opportunity to participate somehow in the great redemptive work of Jesus Christ not only on the cross but in the resurrection and the ascension back to the right hand of God the Father. Somehow we feel drawn into a mystery, a reality that puts us at the very center of the universe itself, that puts us in touch with that which is most important in all reality -- God and the things of God. Catholics have that sense that when they go to Mass, when they participate in the Eucharist, -- even if it's not always done as well as it should be done and as well as they should understand it, that nonetheless they feel that they're part of something much bigger than what they could understand. When they come away from the Eucharist, they feel they've been in touch with something that is more important than anything else they do in their lives. The Eucharist begins when the people gather. The Second Vatican Council pointed that out. Christ is present already when the people gather for the Eucharist. He's present in the community. But when you talk about the Eucharist, you also talk about the sacrament of the Eucharist as well -- the bread and wine that have been transformed into the body and blood of Christ in the whole action of the Eucharist. But that's really part of the whole Eucharistic action. It's not the whole of the Eucharist. Otherwise you wouldn't have to have all the ritual. You'd just come in and have the priest say "this is my body, this is my blood" and give out communion. The reason they have readings from scripture and all the other elements that make up the Eucharist is because there's more to the Eucharist than making the body and blood of Christ present for Holy Communion. That has to be seen in the larger context. First and foremost it is participation, a continuation of the Lord's Supper, which itself was an anticipation of His sacrifice on the cross and the resurrection that followed which is the culmination of the redemption. People might not be able to pass a theology exam on it. But they have an instinct about it -- that when they are participating in the Eucharist they are participating in something that really defines them as Catholics, but also draws them into a Mystery that they sense is more important than any specific institutional elements that identify them as Catholics.
On Hispanic Catholics:
Right now Hispanic Catholics constitute about 25 percent of U.S. Catholicism -- maybe the percentage is even a little larger. I think it's wonderful. Catholicism in America has been built on its immigrants, and we have to be very careful -- those who belong to ethnic groups who came earlier look down on immigrants, not only Hispanics, but Vietnamese and Asians and so on, as if they are just guests in our house. It's as much their house as anyone else. That's the wonderful thing about Catholicism. It is open to all cultures and to all traditions. My general reaction is the large Hispanic percentage in American Catholicism today is clearly a plus. It brings to Catholicism a culture, a spirit that is very Catholic in a sense. It's high on celebration. It's high on unity and family, at being at ease with the things of this earth -- food and love and all the rest. Whereas some of the Catholic immigrants from, say, northern Europe have been uptight about a lot of that stuff and are very dour. We can do with a lot more open and responsive and spontaneous elements of Catholicism that Hispanic culture has always cultivated and manifested. But on the other hand, we don't want to go to the extreme and pander to Hispanics. They've got as many problems as non-Hispanics. Hispanic Catholicism, for my money, in some respects is too conservative -- too focused on some private devotions, too uncritical toward the hierarchy, the pope. There is something in the non-Hispanic tradition, the cultures that came from Europe -- the sense of due process and human rights and suspicion of authority. I think we can learn from each other. On the whole, the large percentage of Hispanic Catholics in the church in the U.S. is definitely a plus. I look to that to be a constant source of enrichment in this new century.
On Catholic trends in America:
Perhaps the most significant development in the Catholic Church in the twentieth century, was the great flourishing of Catholic higher education -- the development of universities like Notre Dame and Boston College and Fordham and many colleges and high schools and parochial school systems. What we have produced in this country is clearly the most mass-educated laity in the history of the Catholic Church. That's not to say that French Catholics or Mexican Catholics or Ugandan Catholics are not educated, but the American experiment in higher education has been a great success. With education comes a critical spirit, and I think probably the best thing that has happened to American Catholicism because of the great advantages of its higher education system is that now do we not only have a better educated Catholic laity, but a more critical Catholic laity. They don't simply [believe] things because the priest says so or the bishops say so or even the pope says so. And that's a good thing. Some people think that's bad, that we've become more rebellious. We've become cynical. What's better? To have someone do something because they're convinced it's right, or to have someone do something because they're told to do it, but don't see why they should have to do it? Educated people who have developed critical faculties -- once they are convinced this is the right thing to do, they'll do [it] with conviction, and they'll do it better than if they were under duress. Another thing that's happened in American Catholicism that's been very positive, [and] it's not limited to the United States, is, of course, the elevated consciousness of women in the Church. This is, again, related to the educational development of the Church, but it's the most significant development, I think, in the Catholic Church in the last two decades of the twentieth century -- the rise of the truly feminist consciousness of the Catholic Church of the '80s and '90s and now into the twenty-first century in the United States. [It] is really a different Church than it was even right after Vatican II precisely because of the new role women are playing as theologians, as pastoral leaders, as writers, as teachers, as scholars in a way that just didn't exist. ... It's a whole new game and a whole new day and it's a wonderful change.
On the ordination of women:
That's coming. Ordination of women will eventually come. Not in the next few years, certainly not under John Paul II, but it will come eventually.
