His Eminence Francis Cardinal George is the Archbishop of Chicago and former President of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. In April of 1997, Pope John Paul II named him the eighth Archbishop of Chicago which made George the first native Chicagoan to serve as Archbishop.
On the 15th of this month, I sat down with the Cardinal at his residence to discuss his new book God in Action, free will, Michele Bachmann's "submission," Islam's "submission," and the sometimes disputed authority of the Bishops. After spending nearly an hour picking his brain, I doubt anyone can dispute that this Archbishop is an authority on all things God.
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RealClearReligion: How does The Difference God Makes compare to God in Action?
Francis George: The first book was more relationships and primarily the relationships that are ours by reason of being baptized and in therefore the family of God. So, how does God figure into the network of relationships that make us who we are? The second book is how does God figure into our action and particularly as the guarantor of our freedom not our competitor, but somebody who is necessary for us to be free? How do you therefore work out God's purposes in the world -- not just in your private life, but in your social life, public life, in such a way that you can cooperate with God?
That being the purpose of the first part talking about how God's causality is different from ours and yet, He's closer to us and our activity than we are to ourselves. How does that work out in the challenges of the day? That's what the various chapters are about -- both in terms of constraints on God's appearing in public, particularly because of the cultural and legal constraints that are now ours. And then more actively: what do you do positively in such a situation in order to be free, in order to act with God?
RCR: What is the relationship between God's freedom and our freedom?
FG: The fact that God knows everything does not mean that He is directly causing everything. He respects our freedom at our level. He makes it possible for us to act freely. If He didn't, we wouldn't act at all -- we wouldn't be at all. His is the causality at the level of our being, and therefore the roots of our freedom. Ours in causality is determinative of what kind of being we're going to be through our free choices, what kind of action we are going to do through our decisions.
It doesn't mean either that He just sits there and looks -- He does guide. He does have a plan. He does have a purpose. But He made us free, and He respects that. It is two different spheres of causality. Interdependent, though. It is not two boxes looking at one another without any kind of direct connections. There are very direct connections. That's why the question of "how are we free if God is omnipotent?" is a real, constant question. Ultimately, God is all powerful, and yet we are free.
RCR: In a recent Republican debate, the Washington Examiner's Byron York asked Michele Bachmann about "submission" and whether or not she would be submissive to her husband in the White House. If God acts in the world, what kind of minutia of our lives does He act in?
FG: I haven't followed what Michele Bachmann has said, or the debates for that matter, but the short answer is: love. God always wants what's best for us, just as you want what's best for someone you really love. You put them before you, and God does that too. God puts us before His Son, who He sacrificed for our salvation. But the Son did it voluntarily because He has the love of the Father before us. And so, that question in marriage is mutual submission, really -- the next verse goes on: "husbands love your wife as Christ loves the Church."
So, in every case if you really love someone there is an element of submission to them because you want what's best for them, and at times they're going to tell you what's best for them. Even if you have second thoughts about it, you'll probably still do it because you love them. From a Christian perspective, the answer to all of that is not power, as it is in the modern perspective. It's love. It's self-sacrifice. That's what love is all about. The marriage ceremony says it very well: sacrifice is difficult, but love can make it a joy.
RCR: More on submission: five years ago this month, Pope Benedict XVI lectured Regensburg about the relationship between faith and reason. Also this month, we mourned another anniversary where submission to God's will made for some awful violence.
FG: That's the heart of Islamic...
RCR: Can you talk more about that in particular?
FG: Well, love isn't blind. Love is reasonable. God is pure love, but He is also pure reason. The Pope's point was that if you separate reason from faith you'll end in violence. Either way, if you have a purely rationalistic scheme that is atheistic, for instance Communism was for social justice. Fascism was for the nation-state, which isn't automatically a bad thing. If you, however, separate reason and faith so that it's purely a rationalistic scheme, it will end in violence. If a pure faith scheme -- sometimes called the fundamentalist scheme in modern parlance -- you'll end in violence too.
The Pope's point was more critical of Western secularism than it was of classical Islam. He used the example of the criticism one of the Byzantine emperors who said, "What have you brought except violence?" The Pope didn't necessarily subscribe to everything that was attributed to him. He's simply saying: what the Emperor said was true. If you separate faith and reason and there's no interchange between the two, you'll end up with a violent society.
RCR: Why has Islam had such a problem with that interchange between faith and reason?
FG: I think it dropped out of that discussion in the 13th and 14th century. Every faith uses some kind of tool to understand itself better. Faith seeks understanding. The Western tradition has used philosophy to understand the truths of the faith and you come up with theology. Where as, Islam at a certain point said: we'll use law. There are these four major, developed schools of Islamic jurisprudence. There is the enormous corpus of Islamic law that is very rich. However, law is one rational exercise of reason. Philosophy is very different. Philosophy wants to try to understand everything. It is a better dialogue partner with faith, I would say, than law.
RCR: Christians, on the other hand, as you point out have developed this understanding of God's will. Yet, the question remains, should Catholics in the public square obey God's will when making public policy choices?
FG: Well, everybody is supposed to obey God's will or this world won't end up very well. That's the history of the human race. Abraham believed in God and Saint Paul credited his faith. Abraham had met God. There was an encounter and he knew that God had made a promise. And God would keep that promise. Now He's telling him something that doesn't make any sense, but there's a trust that He would work it out somehow.
You've got to have met God. Religion doesn't start with a set of laws or rules and it doesn't start with a set of ideas. It starts with an encounter, with the living God and in our case, Christ risen from the dead. In that encounter you meet someone you can trust. That's faith: trust in truth. But then you've got the obligation to keep searching for the truth of the faith so that your life is oriented in a way that is consistent with the faith. The trust is a matter of love and faith is a matter of truth. The two together give you the guidance that you look for.
Nobody has a letter from God saying: do this. But we have a sense that God is provident, that He protects us and wants to save us. You can trust Him if you look for indications of where He is at work. You have some indication from the 10 Commandments, but also when you look at your own life and your own history and you see how God has created good out of the evil that you've done. Only God can do that: take something evil and make something good out of it. It's not like we have some sort of blueprint. Though we do believe at the end of time, He'll return and judge the living and the dead and you'll see how it all works together. But, right now no one knows how it all works together. You continue to search and you do that within a community of faith.
Christ didn't leave us a book of instructions; He left us a body, a family -- a Church. If it were perfectly clear, there wouldn't be any freedom.
RCR: This discussion is, in part, why I mentioned Michele Bachmann. She, along with many other Protestants, has said that God tells her to do things. You don't often hear Catholics talking like that.
FG: No.
RCR: Why is that?
FG: For us, the relationship with God is mediated by the Church. We're not standing alone before God. We never go to God alone, He doesn't come to us alone. Christ comes with the Saints and the Church that He gave us. God does talk to the Saints sometimes; read the mystics. You see not so much instructions, but the experience that gives them a sense that what they're doing is what God wants. There's never the kind of absolute certitude that enables you to say: this is totally what God says. You check it with the Church. That's what Jesus said all the time: you're estranged from your brother, you talk to him and if that doesn't work you talk to the Church.
The Church is our Mother, which means it is an internal voice. It is not a set of external rules. That's what isn't understood about Catholicism in this Protestant culture. It means that your conscience is formed by the Church, but in the end you're responsible for your own activities. If you're going to say you're Catholic, you inform your conscience so that you're activities will conform to what God is telling us through the Church. If God is telling you something outside of that, well, the Church will look at that and say: we think it is true or we don't think it is true. The Church might say: that might be true for you but it has no public normative value.
Public normative value of Revelation closed with the last Apostle. The Church is founded on the Apostles. That's the continuation; it's not new revelation. It is new ways of discerning what God has revealed in the past and how He guides us in the present. It's a collective thing for us. That's why you won't hear Catholics coming out and saying: God told me to do this. The Church tells us to do this. The Church has to keep correcting herself as she moves along examining herself. That's not to say that in using Holy Scripture you can't have a kind of inspiration. Sometimes it is true, but how to do you check that? For us, we check it through the Church.
RCR: Earlier you mentioned laws when talking about Islam. You write quite a bit in God in Action on American jurisprudence and place a significant amount of blame on Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. Why?
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