Skip to main contentAccessibility feedback
Background Image

The Trouble with Catholicism

To those Catholics who identify themselves as “conservative,” Fr. Richard McBrien is an arch-heretic and symbol of everything wrong in Catholic theology today. To “liberals” he is a welcome, if not always agreeable, guest at conventions and seminars. McBrien himself eschews both labels and characterizes himself as representing the intelligent “center.”

His fellow theologians respect him as a scholar, and they warmly praise his mammoth Catholicism, which appeared two years ago in its latest of three editions. What he says is acceptable to—indeed, representative of—mainstream Catholic theology in this country. Yet last spring Catholicism ran afoul of the American bishops’ Committee on Doctrine. The book, the bishops complained, is “confusing and ambiguous” and places theologians’ opinions on the same level as doctrinal statements of the Church. Why do the bishops take such a dim view of Catholicism?

The fact is, McBrien’s theology is badly flawed: It has lost its connection with the idea of truth. Of course, Catholicism uses the words “true” and “truth,” and it does say many true things. Nevertheless, the basic concept of truth has disappeared. Let me explain.

Joseph Pieper (the German philosopher whose Leisure—The Basis of Culture used to be required reading for Catholic undergraduates) liked to ask his students, “What would it take to make this true: ‘There are men on Mars’”? Students would give all sorts of answers: “Spacecraft had photographed human architecture there.” “Green areas show patterns of cultivation.” “Sophisticated radio signals were detected.” The professor would keep the dialogue going until someone finally said that it would take men being on Mars to make this the truth. His simple point is that “truth” means that what a statement says is really so. The problem with McBrien’s book is that it does away with the truth of our Catholic beliefs.

A belief is something that we hold to be true. It can be expressed in a statement: “The Berlin Wall fell in 1989.” “The U.S. Constitution provides for a separation of powers.” But acts and habits also express beliefs. Wearing my hat to play tennis expresses my belief that the sun will dazzle my eyes and make me miss the ball. A belief is supposed to be true, and that is why we can stake something on it. If I claim to believe that Leadfoot Ned is the fastest horse, but refuse to bet on him, you may rightly say that I don’t believe what I say. So the beliefs of the Catholic faith are things we hold to be true. They say how things really are with God. And they have consequences for our lives.

We establish beliefs in three different ways. The first and fundamental way is simple experience. The boy believes green apples are bad for him because of the tummy-ache he got last summer. The witness saw “with her own eyes” that the brown van ran the red light. The second way is by the testimony of others. We believe an astonishing number of things because someone else said them—from last night’s ball scores to the lessons learned at mother’s knee to how Julius Caesar was killed. The third way is by logical deduction. Alexander Fleming saw that the bacteria around the penicillin mold were dead. He inferred that penicillin would kill bacteria. Ultimately, of course, all these ways of knowing the truth come down to some personal experience by somebody.

This applies to Christian beliefs, too. We believe, for example, that God is Triune, that man is created in the image of God, and that God has planned a destiny of eternal happiness for each of us. How do we know these things? This is the central question. No human being has had direct experience of any of these. We must rely on something besides our own experience. Here is where McBrien’s fundamental error comes in—an error that seems to pervade much modern Catholic thinking.

McBrien begins with the person’s reflection on his own experience of life and humanity. This experienced is usually enriched by the traditions of the surrounding community. The Christian responds with some kind of religious behavior—prayer, ritual, morality. He tries to express statements of belief. McBrien tells us where he thinks belief comes from. ” Faith is a personal knowledge of God, gained through the experience of God (revelation) mediated through the community of faith. Theology is the interpretation of one’s own faith from within a community of faith. Belief is an expression of faith and, as such, a work of theology.”

So faith is itself an intellectually empty encounter with God. It has no informational content. Only after doing some theology can the Christian say anything about the faith. At this point, the community (the Church) adopts certain beliefs as official (doctrines and dogmas). In McBrien’s system, the formation of beliefs looks like this: experience to theology to beliefs.

This means that the real revelation is one’s own personal experience. Even the Bible is not really revelation. McBrien writes, “[The Bible] infers from the experience of Israel and the early Church that God was active in our corporate and individual lives through the Law, the prophets, the wisdom of Israel, and supremely through Christ. But such a view is always an inference.”

Therefore, in McBrien’s scheme of things, theology is all-important. The essence of the Bible and all the Church’s teachings and practices is theological. All are products of theological thinking. Theology must judge religious belief. “Theology has the responsibility of measuring what is believed and what is taught against established criteria.” Here is a serious problem. McBrien destroys the possibility of authentic truth, because he turns theory and belief on their heads.

Theology is a theoretical science. Like every science, it is a means to explain and understand our beliefs. But in every science, belief comes before theory. Newton did not discover that apples fall or that the moon circles the earth. Everyone knew these things. What he did was to propose a hypothesis. He said that one force—gravity—explains both the falling apple and the orbiting moon. He based his theory on his beliefs. Of course, he and other scientists were able to infer other beliefs from this theory. Later, Einstein discovered that Newton’s theory did not explain all the facts, and he developed a new theory. Both theories are somewhat adequate to the truth—Einstein’s more than Newton’s (for one thing, only Einstein could explain “black holes”). But neither theory is true. One is better than the other. This is why we read scientists saying that all their “truths” are tentative; they mean that their theories are tentative. But no matter what Einstein says, apples fall. The ordinary pattern of human understanding is experience to beliefs to theory.

Theology is a theoretical enterprise that applies ideas to faith in order to understand it better. But this means that theology needs to start from the basis of beliefs.

The most fundamental and disturbing result of McBrien’s explanation is that it destroys the idea of doctrine. McBrien does not call doctrines “expressions of central truths” or anything like that. Instead they are “official beliefs.” They are what you have to confess to if you want to belong to a certain “faith community.” Thus doctrines are pronounced by the “official Church,” the hierarchy. The popes and bishops, then, don’t stand as the Holy Spirit’s witnesses to the truth, but as authorized governing officials. This means that the doctrines they proclaim are not important as truths. They are important only because they set the boundaries for the Catholic faith-community: “If you don’t believe this, you can’t be a Catholic.” McBrien calls them “normative rules [to] guide the Church’s preaching, catechesis, and formal teaching.” To take these dogmas literally as truths is “doctrinal fundamentalism.”

No doubt McBrien would disagree that truth has no place in his scheme. He might point to some deep sense of truth that has to do with a person’s existential faith-encounter with God. This would be a kind of truth that goes beyond mere isolated doctrines. According to him, the most important thing is to be faithful to your own conscience. So, he argues, it could actually be more orthodox to deny the dogma of the Immaculate Conception (in order to preserve Christ’s prerogatives) than to go along with Pope Pius IX’s infallible declaration. In other words, theology presents a kind of picture or story to flesh out the basic faith-encounter. The story doesn’t have to be taken literally to be meaningful, at least not in the sense that Caesar’s Gallic Wars was really an account of his conquests in France. For McBrien, theology can be “true” only in the sense that it “rings true” with the individual or the community.

This kind of “truth” is not enough to save the truth of the faith. It is never the theory itself but the statement of fact that is true. The theory is a vision of some reality, but it has to be measured against the truth. Othello is a powerful portrayal of jealousy, and Romeo and Juliet touchingly displays young love. Both of them can move our hearts. But neither one tells anything about the love between my real wife and the real me. The theological vision must make some factual, true statements about God. McBrien’s approach does not allow this. The best it can do is to provide some kind of judgment after the fact—for instance that certain beliefs must be rejected if they lead to discrimination against women. Ultimately, all a theology like McBrien’s can give us is an artist’s conception of the self-transcending human life.

Catholics believe that God is Triune, that there is a Trinity of Persons in the single Godhead. Theologians have expressed this in terms of “processions” within the Trinity—the Son proceeding from the Father, the Holy Spirit from the Father and the Son together. Thomas Aquinas speaks of these Persons as “subsistent relations.” Is this doctrine literally true? Is the reality of God such that only this doctrine expresses correctly what his personhood is like? For McBrien, this question is impossible to ask—perhaps even meaningless. This is probably why he prefers to discuss the doctrine of the Trinity in terms of the roles the three Persons play in salvation history. But the Church always has said that this doctrine is true—that it expresses how things really are for God himself.

Obviously, the way we discuss this doctrine is a fruit of theological development. Even the word “Trinity” does not appear in Scripture. So, if this dogma is true, it must be based on other true beliefs—beliefs that can be traced back to some personal experience of the Trinitarian life of God. Among these statements are Jesus’ words in John’s Gospel. He said that he is going back to the Father and that the Father will send a Paraclete, the Holy Spirit (John 14:3, 16–17; 15:26). The question is whether Jesus clearly said this and on what basis. John answers these questions by calling on witnesses who heard Jesus (see John 19:25). A witness is someone who has seen and heard. He gives us access to truths he has seen or heard. John was a witness, and he claimed to have heard Jesus speak of the Father and the Holy Spirit in this way. But what is the ultimate basis of this belief?

Scripture scholars tell us that many layers of interpretation lie between Jesus’ sayings and the Gospel reports. What John reports as coming from the mouth of Jesus, they tell us, is probably the early Church’s interpretation in the light of its own experiences. Although we can learn much from these scholars, the fact remains that if these statements don’t trace back to Jesus himself, then they are worthless for knowing the truth. Ultimately, they have to depend on Jesus’ own witness, because only Jesus could have direct experience of the inner life of God. If he says it is true that he will return to the Father, who will send the Spirit, this must be on the basis of Jesus’ own experience. He says that he sees what the Father is doing and takes his cue from him (John 5:19).

In short, even if most of what we say about the Trinity is theological, our doctrines have to depend on Jesus’ own experience as Son of God and on the testimony of witnesses who saw and heard him. Those who followed him knew full well that the idea of three Persons in one God would offend every Jewish bone in their bodies. They would not have invented such ideas.

For McBrien, doctrines are not so much truths as they are reference points in the Christian community’s interpretation of its experience. This interpretation guides the faith life of the individual—at least as long as he finds it meaningful. (This is why McBrien is so vague about the importance of being Catholic.) But if theology is about truth, then theology must be based on true beliefs. These beliefs cannot come from inside theology, but from the testimony of witnesses.

This reversal of theory and truth is why the bishops are so concerned about McBrien’s “confusing and ambiguous” presentations of Church doctrine. McBrien and the bishops are talking about different things. The theologian is talking about doctrines as a community’s historically-conditioned interpretation of its faith-experience, so he feels free to offer his readers a whole range of acceptable theological positions—from the “conservative” to the “liberal,” from Hans Küng to the theology manuals of the 1950s. The bishops, on the contrary, see themselves as talking about things that are true.

If McBrien is right, then the Pope and bishops are not authoritative witnesses to the truth; they are just official custodians of certain protocol statements or “ground-rules” for calling yourself Catholic. This means that it is the theologians (along with liturgists, spiritual directors, religious educators, retreat directors, and so on) who are really responsible for the Church’s life of faith. For McBrien, they are its real interpreters.

Many people find McBrien’s idea of the Catholic faith convincing. It seems to be the idea that most theologians and religious writers accept. Before we embrace it, we must be aware of what we lose in this embrace. Belief in the truth is not mere intellectual assent. To say, “I believe” is to stake your life on something. Belief has consequences. Faith means staking your life that something is true. It means becoming a witness to the truth. The problem, then, with McBrien’s Catholicism is that is presents a Catholicism without witnesses and a faith without martyrs.

Did you like this content? Please help keep us ad-free
Enjoying this content?  Please support our mission!Donatewww.catholic.com/support-us