The Scholar-Priest

Called Back to the Gregoriana, 1982 – 1995

When they asked me to return to the Gregorian University to teach, my first instinct was to decline.

I had found my work. I was embedded in a community. The people of Trastevere knew me, and I knew them, and the pastoral relationship that had built over twelve years was a living thing that I was reluctant to transplant. I also had a genuine suspicion, formed through observation of several colleagues who had made the academic transition, that the move from parish to lectern could calcify a priest in ways that were difficult to detect and harder to reverse.

Monsignor Caruso, who was by then very old and very wise, listened to my hesitation and then said: “You are afraid of losing the people. But you are being asked to multiply them. Every student you form will carry what you give them into parishes you will never visit. This is not abandonment. It is a different kind of fruitfulness.”

He persuaded me. He was right. And the years at the Gregoriana were among the most formative of my life, though not always in the ways I anticipated.

• • •

Teaching theology is, at its best, an exercise in productive confusion. The goal is not to transfer certainty from the professor to the student. The goal is to show the student how to live faithfully inside the questions that have no certain answers — how to remain a person of faith without becoming a person who has stopped thinking.

The students who taught me the most were the ones who brought the hardest questions. A young Nigerian seminarian named Brother Francis asked me, in my second year of teaching, why the Church had taken so long to condemn the slave trade when the moral case against it was available in the New Testament from the beginning. I did not have an adequate answer. I said so. I spent the next six months researching it, not because the syllabus required it, but because the question required it.

This is what good students do. They expand the professor’s obligations. They are not a passive audience for what you already know. They are, if you let them be, the reason you keep learning.

I published my first book during this period: a systematic theology of encounter, arguing that the primary category of Christian life is not belief but relationship — that orthodoxy matters because it correctly identifies who it is you are in relationship with, not as a freestanding intellectual accomplishment. My Jesuit editor, Father Moretti, disagreed with approximately a third of it and we argued the book into its final shape over three years of correspondence that I think improved both of us.

• • •

It was during these years that Emmanuel and I began the Thursday evenings in Trastevere.

He was then a parish priest himself, working in a community on the other side of the river. We had been friends since our years at the Gregoriana together as students — he had arrived the year before me and had constituted himself something of a guide to the city with an authority that was completely unjustified and entirely effective.

The Thursday evenings began without plan or intention. We were walking in Trastevere one autumn evening in 1984 and encountered a woman sitting outside the entrance to a building with two children, clearly without shelter and clearly hungry. We had almost nothing between us — Emmanuel had a bread roll from his dinner, I had some cheese from my bag. We gave what we had and sat with her for a while.

The following Thursday we came back with soup. There were three people waiting.

By the end of the year it had become a regular operation, which is how most of the best things happen: not by design but by accumulation, one Thursday at a time.

We have not missed a Thursday in forty years. Cardinals have schedules that are controlled by other people; I have had to fight for my Thursdays more than once. I have always won. Some things are not negotiable, and the Thursday evenings in Trastevere are among them.

What they give me — what they have always given me — is the thing that academic life and eventually curial life conspire to take away: the direct encounter with human need. The faces in Trastevere are not statistics or pastoral challenges or theological problems. They are people who are hungry and cold and sometimes frightened, and the only appropriate response to a hungry, cold, frightened person is the one Emmanuel and I have been making for forty years: soup, and time, and the refusal to pretend that anything else is more pressing.

• • •

It was during the Gregoriana years that I came to the conviction I mentioned to Michael in one of our early conversations: that the Church’s deepest crisis is not doctrinal but relational.

People were leaving. Not in the catastrophic numbers that would come later, but the movement was already visible in the 1980s if you were watching for it. And what I observed, both in the student population and in my research, was that the departures were rarely caused by intellectual dissatisfaction with the content of Christian belief. They were caused by relational failure: by the experience of not being known, not being heard, not being met in their actual lives by the institution that claimed to carry the Gospel of the One who said He knew His sheep by name.

The Gospel is extraordinary. Its content is radical enough to reorganize a life completely. But it arrives through relationships, and when the relationships are broken or absent, the extraordinary content does not reach the person who needs it.

This is not a criticism of doctrine. It is a criticism of the institutional practice that can grow up around doctrine and, if left unchallenged, replace it. The Pharisees had excellent doctrine. Their relational practice was lethal to the people in their care.

This is the sore spot Michael keeps pressing. He is right to press it.