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April 26, 2005: Bestselling author and National Book Award winner James Carroll discusses the Catholic Church with anchor Bill Moyers.
BILL MOYERS: Thank you very much, James Carroll, for joining us on WIDE ANGLE. Give me your sense of what the figure of the pope means to Catholics around the world.
JAMES CARROLL: We love the pope. When I was a child, there was on our table a magazine called The Pope Speaks. A portrait of the pope on the wall of the house. Catholics everywhere understand the unity of the Church to be tied up with this figure. I love the pope, Bill, because he's a figure of the humanness of the Church, going right back to Saint Peter who's remembered as the first pope. What was great about Peter wasn't his infallibility, it was the fact that he kept getting it wrong. And that was the tension between him and Jesus. Every pope since Peter has been a human being first and foremost. And the humanness of the Church is the wonder of it, in my view. So we Catholics see the pope as a kind of reflection of who we are.
BILL MOYERS: But since there are so many Catholics, one billion and more, with so many different expectations and experiences and hopes and ideals -- can any one pope unify Catholics around the world?
JAMES CARROLL: No, that's the other thing that's great about the pope, is that the pope is a person who appears in succession down through the centuries. And that succession touches all aspects of Catholic life. So in one period you have a tyrannical pope. In another period, you have a benevolent, gentle pope. You have a pope who's a dictator. You have a pope who's checked by the power of the bishops. It's the whole arc of the papacy that we love. And this past week, what I think the world has seen is the way in which the Vatican, the papacy itself, breaks through the boundaries of time. That's why I think so many people who are outside the Catholic Church still responded to this event. It's a celebration of continuity across centuries. And we live in a sound bite age where we're skeptical of continuity. I think we're hungry for it. And Roman Catholicism is continuous, and that's one of the things about it that's great.
BILL MOYERS: Yet you can have John XXIII unleash these incredible energies for reform, for liberalization of the Vatican. And then you can have a soon-to-be successor -- John Paul -- come along and put the brakes on many of those reforms. How do you explain -- is that the influence of personality? Is that the politics of the institution? What is it?
JAMES CARROLL: Well, don't forget that popes are figureheads of a community of people. John XXIII established the reform of the Church with the Second Vatican Council in response to experiences the whole Catholic people had been having. So for example, he himself identified the arrival of women demanding their rights, as he put it, in the personal sphere and the public sphere, as a sign of the times to which he was responding.
Popes, even though there's this sense we have that popes are the last command rulers, the last dictators, if you will, actually the church is the people most powerfully. And that's at play today. Pope Benedict arrives with a reputation for having his conservative agenda. But the first thing he has to confront is the fact that already the Catholic people have on the table ideas, movements, impulses, demands that are not going away just because they don't measure up to a particular pope's agenda.
So there's, in other words, a tension, a relationship. A back and forth between the leadership and the people. In our day, so much emphasis has been given to the leadership -- I would say too much -- that it's easily forgotten that the Church is first, as the Second Vatican Council called it, the people of God. And I think you'll see that. You'll see the people exerting pressure even on this very conservative new pope we have.
BILL MOYERS: You've often talked of the church as a conversation.
JAMES CARROLL: Yes.
BILL MOYERS: But when the leaders or powers that be don't listen, what do you do?
JAMES CARROLL: Well, we've had that experience.
BILL MOYERS: I know you have.
JAMES CARROLL: There have been popes who haven't listened. There've been ways in which John Paul II, for all his greatness, didn't listen. Didn't listen to the experience of women. Didn't listen to the experience of gay people. Didn't listen even to the experience of young people who'd been abused by priests.
What you do in that situation is you keep talking and in some cases you keep demanding. And that's happening. Women are not going to go away. Women are not going to lose their voice in the Catholic Church just because certain people in the hierarchy wish they would be silent. It's not going to happen. The Catholic Church is not going to be the only institution in the world immune from the pressures of change brought about by feminism.
Again, John XXIII recognized what we call feminism as a sign of hope. And that's true across a number of these issues. The clerical culture of Roman Catholicism will not stand up to what was revealed by the terrible scandal of the abuse of children. And remember that that was a two-part scandal. A small minority of priests abusing children; a large minority of bishops, including in the Vatican, protecting the priests instead of children. The Catholic people are living in the truth of that scandal. That's a phrase from Vaclav Havel. And as with the Soviet Union, once the people begin to live in the truth, change must follow.
BILL MOYERS: But this pope, while he was cardinal, had a record of cracking down on dissenters. Of threatening excommunication. Of silencing them. Of driving them from the seminaries, from the classrooms. How can you have a dialogue, how can you have dissent, how can you even hold an institution accountable when the people in charge do not want to hear voices to the contrary?
JAMES CARROLL: Well, again, the voices don't fall silent just because they're told to. Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict, was a key part of the determination to get Catholics to stop even talking about the ordination of women. Well, for all of their efforts, Catholics are still talking about it. It's one of the issues that's been talked about this week.
BILL MOYERS: But many of the priests, or some of the teachers who spoke up in that regard, have been exiled, in effect?
JAMES CARROLL: It's true. And one of the scandals of today's Roman Catholicism are the great people who've been condemned to a kind of internal exile. Some of our most precious theologians. Some of the most important thinkers among us, men and women both, have been pushed to the edge of the official Church. But they still -- I promise you -- they still live vividly in the experience of the broader Church. Hans KŸng, a very important example.
BILL MOYERS: The German theologian?
JAMES CARROLL: A Swiss theologian who was one of the most important prophets of the Vatican II Council. Who had his Catholic teaching credentials removed -- in large part, I think, by Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict. But Hans KŸng has not been silent. Hans KŸng is still a vivid part of the Catholic experience. And the list goes on. The truth is, Bill, that the Catholic Church is a long, traditional argument with itself. It goes back to St. Thomas Aquinas arguing with St. Bonaventure. It even goes back to St. Peter arguing with St. James. If there's something magnificent about this tradition -- I believe there is -- it is that that's the meaning of Catholicity after all. It includes within itself its own principles of self-criticism.
And that's true today. And it's been true age in and age out through the past. The Catholic community is a diverse, pluralistic, lively community of multiple points of view. Even on the great questions. And that's true since the New Testament, forward.
BILL MOYERS: If this debate on dogma and doctrine were merely or exclusively an internal dialogue between all of you Catholics who disagree, it would be one thing. But it has impact on those of us who are not Catholic, right?
JAMES CARROLL: Indeed it does. Let's take, for example, the relationship of the United States of America to Roman Catholicism. In the 19th century, the Catholic Church, led by the reactionary Pope Pius IX, set its face against what we call modernism -- the principles of democracy, effectively. Through the 20th century, the experience of Catholics in America first impacted powerfully on the Catholic Church. So primacy of conscience, separation of church and state, pluralism, respect for people who believe differently -- these things that we take for granted in America, although some of them may be at risk in America in a new way, these things that we take for granted in America were brought into the Catholic experience. That's one way of reading the history of the Second Vatican Council. A triumph of Americanism, even though Americanism had been condemned as a heresy at the very beginning of the 20th century.
Today, religion in America is also at a point of crisis. That the culture war, so-called, that's going on in the United States of America has this profound religious aspect. Roman Catholicism has a role to play in that, as it has to play in the crisis across the world. Religious intolerance as a source of violence. Let me just sum it up by saying the world is desperately in need of a reformed, rational Roman Catholic Church. Not a fundamentalist, not a triumphalist. Not a church that contributes to the tradition of contempt for the other. That's why this argument the Church has with itself is so important, even for the broader world.
BILL MOYERS: Just this morning on National Public Radio, in one of their lead pieces I heard the pastor of a large evangelical church in this country say, with approval, and I'm looking at the quote, I wrote it down, that, "The new pope will be an important force in moving American politics further to the right." What do you make of that?
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James Carroll, bestselling author
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