Thoughts for the Church in the Modern Era

There were no empty seats in the room on Brighton campus which hosted the acclaimed author and columnist James Carroll this past Wednesday. The standing-room-only crowd, which included members of the public, was there to hear Carroll’s thoughts on what he called “Catholic Renewal”. His historical approach to understanding the Catholic Church denounced “Manichean” outlooks in favor of tolerance.

Carroll had the fortune of being able to speak from personal experience as his narrative wove through the darkest days of the Cold War. The anecdotes from his own life through these times brought home the prevalence of what he called “nuclear dread” pervading society, and indeed the world, at the time. This “nuclear dread” is what began to cause the development of an apocalyptic outlook.

Carroll’s idea of this apocalyptic outlook extends beyond a bare realization that the world could end in a nuclear exchange.

The apocalypse is viewed in terms of what Carroll called the “apocalyptic imagination” which views the world in terms of a divide between good and evil.

This is what brings us back to the religious aspect of his historical analysis, because this divide represents a view of the end which seems to come straight from the book of Revelation. The “Manichean” division between good and evil split the general view of the world into the evil Soviets on the one hand, and we who were good on the other.

It was on this historical backdrop that Carroll talked about Boston priest Father Leonard Feeney’s position “no salvation outside the church.”

Carroll recounted the distress his young mind experienced at the thought of his Jewish and Protestant friends burning in hell. As endearing as the anecdote was, it served to illustrate the reasoning of Archbishop Cushing, who was responsible for reprimanding Feeney and his position. “Experience over doctrine” were the words which Carroll chose to illustrate the need to look with a compassionate eye upon the world, and not with a divisive eye which separates “good and saved” and “evil and damned” so coldly.

This was the heart of Carroll’s great insight. He chose to believe, and the rest of the Catholic Church did soon after, that if he could love his Jewish friend then there is no reason that God could not also.

The Second Vatican Council, called by Pope John XXIII saw the realization of this by the Church hierarchy. Carroll points out that in Pope John XXIII’s commencement speech for the council, he uses the phrase “the Church in the world” as opposed to“The Church and the world”.

The former phrase is reflective of the attitude Carroll wants, whereas the latter is invocative of the “Manichean” division and opposition of which the Church needs to rid itself.

To Carroll, even the wrangling between the Church and science is a “false dichotomy”. This attitude promotes a fundmentalist point of view in his eyes, and is another Manichean division.

In short, understanding and tolerance are the highest values in the process of Catholic renewal. A Roman Catholic Church which intends to succeed in the future ought to cultivate these, and relinquish its grip on doctrine wherever it proves harsh and divisive.

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