I repeat what I said at the start. I feel no personal animosity toward priests. The fact that I can get along without them very well does not mean that I expect them to disappear, or even that I advocate that. I just want to assure my fellow Catholics that, as priests shrink in numbers—in some cases dashing from parish to parish, to put in brief appearances for the supposedly “necessary” things no one else can do (administering the sacraments, saying Mass, hearing confessions, presiding at baptisms or weddings or funerals)—congregations do not have to feel they have lost all connection with the sacred just because the role of priests in their lives is contracting. If Peter and Paul had no need of priests to love and serve God, neither do we. If we need fellowship in belief—and we do—we have each other. If we need instruction in the Scriptures, or counsel, or support, we can get those in the same places that Protestants do.
But if I do not believe in popes and priests and sacraments, how can I call myself a Catholic? What do I believe? I get that question all the time. Well, I will tell you what I believe. The things I believe are not incidental or peripheral, but central and essential. They are:
God.
The Creation (which does not preclude evolution).
The Trinity.
Divine Providence.
Prayer.
The Incarnation.
The Resurrection.
The Gospels.
Baptism.
The Mystical Body of Christ (which is the real meaning of the Eucharist).
The Eucharist.
The Second Coming.
The Afterlife.
The Communion of Saints.
That seems a fair amount to believe. But it is not enough for those who would impose all the things I must believe to be a “real Catholic.” Some look with equanimity on the hollowing out of these sacred truths so long as one preserves certain thin external shells around them—the papacy, the prerogatives of the priesthood, the authority of church officials, officially canonized saints, and even more disposable items, like guardian angels, holy water, or Our Lady of Fatima. None of these—including priests and popes—is in the Creed. Yet some act as if disbelieving in the papacy is worse than disbelieving in the Trinity. They can put up with disbelief in the Creed so long as one retains a piety toward miraculous visions of the Madonna.
But how can I believe in all these things the Creed says, or even some of them, without a pope or priests to tell me to believe in them? And if that is “all you believe,” as some people put it, why do I stay in the Catholic Church? Other Christians believe in those things, or in many of them. Why do I hang around where in fact there are popes and priests telling me what to believe? Well, I am content to share in the life of other churches. But that does not mean that accepting them requires a rejection of my fellow Catholics. No believing Christians should be read out of the Mystical Body of Christ, not even papists. It will hardly advance the desirable union of all believers if I begin by excluding those closest to me.
The words that should guide us in our attitude toward fellow Christians come from the Gospel of Luke. The disciples have just come back, elated, from the first mission Jesus sent them on. They are bubbling and full of themselves.
John said, “Leader [epistata], we found a man casting out devils in your name, and we stopped him, since he was not working with us.” But Jesus said, “Why did you stop him? You see [gar], whoever is not against us is with us.” (Lk 9.49–50)
All those acting in the name of Jesus are our brothers and sisters. How dare we excommunicate them, tell them they have no right to that name, set our own rules for honoring it? One cannot call out to fellow believers while cultivating a general disapproval of different believers. The great scandal of Christians is the way they have persecuted fellow Christians, driving out heretics, shunning them, burning their books, burning them. Mary Tudor of England burnt at the stake hundreds of Protestants. Elizabeth I of England had Jesuits physically chopped to pieces. Inquisitions executed all kinds of heretics. Popes preached crusades against Albigensians. New England Calvinists hanged Quakers. American Protestants burnt convents.
Pope after pope starved his fellow Catholics, spiritually, by interdicts that deprived them of all religious services. And I must say, in line with the thesis of this book, that much of this condemnatory, accusatory, persecuting impulse came from the jealousy of prerogative, the pride in exclusivity, the desire to define one’s own Jesus as the only Jesus, that the priesthood fostered through the centuries. It was a way of fortifying the monopoly on sacred things. But, having said that, I surmise that some Catholics, simply by defending many of the non-essentials of belief—the outworks, as it were, of the citadel—may have kept certain treasures in that citadel better than they have been preserved elsewhere. Article by article, parts of the Creed are fading in some churches. That is, of course, no reason to reject such churches; it just means they should be called back to their own better days.
So there is much to be said for my brothers and sisters in Christ of the Roman persuasion. For one thing, devotion to the mother of Jesus seems to me a natural corollary of worshiping her son. She, after all, gave him flesh of her flesh to make the Incarnation possible. As Augustine said in wonder, the Maker of the Milky Way sucked milk from her breast. If we are all members of his Mystical Body, she is the most materially mystical part of it. That is why I find it useful to contemplate the Gospel episodes by saying the rosary that honors her. (There are no priests or popes in the Scripture passages arranged in the rosary.)
Devotion to saints also seems natural to me, though attempt to monitor their entrance into heaven by papal canonization is a laughable example of curial bureaucracy. I do not want to get along without the head of Augustine or the heart of Francis of Assisi to help me. I have not lived almost eighty years in the Catholic Church without having deep memories for which I am grateful.
But so far I have been speaking of fellow Christians, my brothers and sisters. That does not mean we can forget our foreparents, the Jews. They, after all, gave us the one God they taught us to worship. The flesh of the risen Jesus is a flesh circumcised according to the Law. Nor do I count out monotheistic believers of other sorts. Though they do not accept our Creed, they are also children of the same one God (there are not two), who cares about them in ways we may not comprehend. All believers in God set off on broken and blind adventures into mystery. None of us gets all the way to the inner heart of that reality. As Augustine said in a sermon (117.5):
We are, remember, speaking of God when the text says, “God was the Word.” And if we are speaking of God, why be surprised if you do not understand? If you could understand, it would not be God. Devoutly confessing that you do not know is better than prematurely claiming that you do.
In that spirit, let me say simply this: There is one God, and Jesus is one of his prophets, and I am one of his millions of followers.