religion

Article @ Where Peter Is

Deacon Douglas P. McManaman

It has been reported to me that there are quarrels among you. What I mean is that each of you says, “I belong to Paul”, or “I belong to Apollos”, or “I belong to Cephas” (1 Cor 1, 12).

It seems to me that things have not changed a great deal in 2000 years. The New Testament reading for today reveals the divisions that faced the early church. Over the years, divisions remained. In the Middle Ages, there was rivalry between the Franciscans and the Dominicans – perhaps not all that adversarial: “I belong to Bonaventure” or “I belong to Aquinas.” The Church is still divided in many ways. In the past fifteen years or so we have seen similar divisions, with some Catholics saying, “I belong to Benedict XVI”, or “I’m a JPII priest,” or “I’m with Pope Francis.” Others, clergy included, openly speak out and write against Pope Francis on a regular basis. Some even reject Vatican II and the Novus Ordo.

The problem with this is that the Holy Spirit is a Spirit of unity, not division. There is great diversity in the Church, but it should be diversity in unity. Sin divides. The devil polarizes, excludes, and sows seeds of suspicion among the faithful, which is why Jesus said a kingdom divided against itself cannot stand (Mt 12, 25).

I believe the root of the problem is both psychological and philosophical. What so many people today fail to understand is that knowledge is very hard to achieve. Most of what is in our heads, most of what we claim to know, is not knowledge at all but belief – I don’t mean religious belief necessarily, but any belief that falls short of reasonable certainty. For example, I believe I voted for the right person, but I don’t know that for certain. Similarly, I don’t know whether this or that person is trustworthy, I might be deceived. I don’t know for certain whether this medication is going to heal me or kill me – I believe my doctor. “That person’s a saint.” “Well, you don’t know that. It might all be a facade”. We do tend to conflate our beliefs with knowledge, which is why we hold these convictions with a much greater confidence level than is warranted.

When we were young adolescents, most of us thought our parents were utterly “out to lunch,” until we became parents ourselves. Most young teachers think their administration is blind and incompetent, until they become administrators themselves and realize things are far more complicated than they initially thought. I have a friend in medical research who said that he used to attribute sinister motives to Ottawa with respect to certain decisions made around public health. Then he was made the Surgeon General himself, with all the relevant information at his disposal, and found himself making the same decisions that he used to condemn in his ignorance. A very good priest friend, who has since retired, looks back and has many regrets about his approach as a young priest – including the way he sometimes preached.

The problem with being young is that we have very little experience of being wrong. In fact, when we are young, we tend to block out those times when we were wrong only to remember the times we were right–it’s much more flattering to the ego. But that gets harder to do the older we get – unless we are ridiculously close minded and have stopped learning. When we are young, we tend to believe that our worldview, our current conceptual frame of mind or the epistemic model through which we see the world, is all encompassing and far more comprehensive than it actually is. In fact, it is really a very small circle outside of which we quickly lose our way.

Human knowledge is profoundly limited. When we come face to face with the vast complexity of reality, we get a sense of those limits and that can cause great anxiety. If we cannot accept ambiguity, if we are not at ease with uncertainty, we will be tempted to latch onto a single ideological faction or limited school of thought. We can begin to see others outside that faction as a bunch of deluded morons. I’m convinced that this is how fundamentalism develops, both religious and political fundamentalism.

Fundamentalists typically limit their thinking to one source: the Koran alone, or the Bible alone, or St. Augustine alone, or St. Thomas Aquinas alone, etc. The problem with the Bible alone mentality is that we need others to teach us, to provide historical context, to help us avoid pitfalls that trapped others in the past. To know the bible well, or any classic author for that matter, requires a much larger community that is constantly developing.

Fundamentalism is essentially rooted in a fear of a reality that is much larger and much more complex than our current worldview is able to contain. It involves an inability to be at ease with ambivalence. In fact, psychiatrist Leopold Bellak proposed a dozen ‘ego strengths’ for people to aspire toward. One of these had to do with ‘contentment with ambivalence’. This is one strength that fundamentalists always seem to lack.

Life feels much simpler when a person convinces himself that all truth can be compacted into a single source and that “I have all the answers”. Of course, we will never have all the answers. Physicist Richard Feynman once said that science is an ever-expanding frontier of ignorance. This means the more we discover, the more we learn how much more there is to know and how much we don’t know but thought we knew. As our knowledge grows, our ignorance expands exponentially at the same time.

And this is the case in theology as well – perhaps especially in theology – because the object of theology is the unutterable mystery of God and the Church has always taught that God is infinitely knowable and incomprehensible, even in the Beatific Vision. We will see God directly, but God will always be infinitely more than what we know about Him at any one point. And we believe Jesus is everything that the Father can say about Himself, because Jesus is the Logos, the eternal Word of the Father. So, Jesus is infinitely knowable, which is why theology constantly develops.

Christ is the only one we are to belong to. Everyone else must be listened to and heard, because everyone is able to provide a unique angle on things. I cannot see the world from your vantage point; you know things that I don’t and so I must listen to and learn from you and from everyone else and vice versa. This is why it is fitting that the Church, under Pope Francis and Pope Leo XIV, continues to emphasize dialogue and synodality. The dialogue they propose is not just between bishops but also involves bishops in dialogue with the laity from around the world; for the laity knows so much of this world in ways that we do not.

And so, we don’t belong to Paul, or to Apollos, or Cephas, or Benedict XVI, or John Paul II, or Cardinal Burke, etc. But we do belong to Christ and since we are his Mystical body, we belong to one another. As Paul says in his letter to the Romans: “…so we, though many, are one body in Christ and individually parts of one another.” (12:5) That is an interesting line. What it means is that we are not just all parts of the one body of Christ; rather, we are also parts of one another. I am part of you and you are part of me and if you are diminished, I am diminished. Just as I need healthy parts to flourish, I need to learn from everyone in order to flourish because I am a part of everyone and everyone is a part of me.