Speech delivered by Tom Beaudoin, Associate Professor of Theology
Graduate School of Religion and Religious Education, Fordham University, New York City

Paul of Tarsus and Catholicism Today:
A Response to Cardinal Rodriguez and Father Schreiter
26 March 2009

Both papers today direct us to recover the richness and complexity of the cultural emplacements of the faith and practice of Paul, and by extension, of the cultural emplacements of our faith and practice today.

The more we appreciate that Paul was able to fashion a theological life, the more we appreciate how the multiple belongings of his identity were intrinsic to that achievement. His Greek and Roman philosophical coordinates do not give up their history and creative force by becoming part of his theology, they do not stop being philosophical schools within him when they become part of his theological teaching; his Jewish upbringing and training do not give up their history and creative force by becoming part of his theological teaching. The figure of Paul gives us a way to think about how multiple histories live on within us as Christians, suggesting we see ourselves as a rough assemblage of pasts, personal and cultural, conscious and unconscious.

If Paul is a model, he is a cultural pastiche and his faith in Christ found a home in an internal public housing complex he did not build on his own. So too for most of us, especially, if I may, for the post-Vatican II generations who have more than any Catholic generation grown up amidst the ascendance of secular culture, in the wake of the implosion of the Catholic subculture and counterculture, a phenomenon we even see amidst recent immigrants when they reach the second and third generations of life in the United States.

The elements of secular culture are our pastiche, our irremediable history, our internal public housing complex for Christ, in a way that has become ever clearer in the 25 years since the founding of this Center. The majority of Catholics in the US are now post-Vatican II Catholics, secularly emplaced Catholics. This will only become more so and not less for the foreseeable future. The differences within the Catholic Church highlighted at the end of both papers, have been described over the last decade by sociologists as generational differences that are even more influential for Catholic identity than racial-ethnic differences. These generational differences witness to the emergence, in my view, of a secular Catholicism, the pastoral comprehension of which could use the example of Paul in his cultural complexity. In other words, what Paul gives us is not only specific teachings, but a model of inhabiting his multiplicity. The more we appreciate this model from Paul, the more insight we may get about being pastorally with secular Catholics.

My appreciation of Paul has to do with a theology of mission to secular culture, with reaching that great mass of secular Catholics who perhaps constitute the majority of U.S. Catholics today. Secular Catholics, by way of analogy to our brothers and sisters who are secular Jews, are those raised Catholic who cannot find Catholicism as their central life project. Secular Catholics are those baptized Catholics who find themselves having to deal with their Catholicism, and to do so as an irremediable aspect of their identity but whom “we” in ministry and theology might be tempted to call “nonpracticing,” “religiously illiterate,” “relativistic,” “inactive,” or “fallen away.” Secular Catholics find their Catholicism returning at some level that cannot be dispensed with, but do not or cannot make of it a regular and central set of explicit and conscious practices. Secular Catholics are occasional mass attenders, rare mass attenders, or never mass attenders. They may show up late for mass, sit in the back row, and leave after communion. They may say that they graduated from Catholicism after their confirmation. A great many went to Catholic schools. They may read stories about God or faith on the web but rarely participate in any explicitly religious forum. Secular Catholics disagree with what many in this room might take to be essential tenets of the faith or at least corollary teachings. Their “existential hierarchy” of truths, to use Rahner’s language, the deepest sense they make of life, does not match up with what many of us might take to be the Catholic objective hierarchy of truths. Many here would say that secular Catholics are putting something in place of church, like sports, work, leisure. They are the ones who may have left the Church intentionally, scandalized or disappointed, but more often have just drifted away. (And they may not be who we think they are. According to recent research on American Catholicism by Robert Putnam of Harvard and David Campbell of Notre Dame, the fastest growing group within Hispanic/Latinos are “seculars,” many of whom were raised Catholic.) Secular Catholics are trying to live their secularity, which often includes their own sense of spirituality, with much more investment than their ecclesiality. There are secular Catholics in my family, there are probably some in yours. They constitute the oceanic and silent penumbra of the Catholic Church.

Secular Catholics may include the many who call themselves “recovering Catholics,” and who do so because the apocalypses of their lives—physical, psychological, intellectual, spiritual—were not able to be located on the map of the faith they had been taught. And contrary to many Catholic apologists (including my earlier self), this does not necessarily mean that they had a deficient religious education. This is too convenient a story for “us” to tell about “them.” Many “recovering Catholics” know as much of what Catholicism at its best is about as those who still choose the Catholic Church as central to their lives.

Secular Catholics are often more or less trying to get through their lives, like all of us. They often share something important with Paul and for that matter, with Christ: service to the truth. Or at least to “fairness.” They often “scrutinize their motives” and do their own forms of “self-examination,” qualities that theologian Risto Saarinen says should be honored as theologically significant because they remind Christians of the imitation of christus iudex, Christ the judge who himself is in service to truth – as distinct from the imitation of “christus medicus” or “christus victor” (God and the Gift, Liturgical Press, 2005, p. 124) They are in no way simplistically relativistic. They are often judged, however, as cultural victims.

Do we not also notice in Paul his continual reversion to the language and exercises of self-examination, possibly as a way of working through the cultural-philosophical-religious diversities in which he was made, of finding between his Jesus, Moses, and Athenodorus a set of practices that were saving for him, such as we see in his regular invocation of a Hellenistic catalogue of virtues when he wants to help people get through: set your mind, he writes in Philippians 4, on what is true, honorable, just, pure, pleasing, commendable, excellent, praiseworthy. He draws self-examining exercises as a way of faithfully taking the measure of these crossroads that he lived.

Secular Catholics need ways of acknowledging that they are living crossroads of many experiences, relationships, languages, cultures, histories. Many people think that the more diverse and “secular” their lives become, the less Christianity must figure. But then here is Paul in all his many-cultured and multireligious complexity, and perhaps less finally at one with himself and God than we might need him to be or make him out to be. I find the judgment of renowned biblical scholar Abraham Malherbe challenging: “Was Paul a hellenistic philosopher or a Christian pastor? […] It is extraordinary to what degree [his] categories and language are derived from the Greeks… Paul is so familiar with the rich Greek traditions of pastoral care, and uses them in so unstudied a fashion, that it would be wrong to think that he only superficially mined the lode for his own purposes. He is more consistent and unconscious in his appropriation of [this] tradition than most of his pagan contemporaries… As to his method of pastoral care, Paul is at once hellenistic [philosopher] and Christian [pastor].” (Malherbe, Paul and the Popular Philosophers, Fortress, 1989, pp. 76-77) Is there nothing here for secular Catholics today who find themselves multiply invested?

Fr. Schreiter, in his paper, suggests that Paul “melds together the influences of four different contextual strands” as background for his understanding of reconciliation: the hymns and teachings of early Christianity; his Jewish background; the “Hellenism of so many of his hearers”; and contemporary Gnosticisms. But what if Paul’s teaching on reconciliation is not or not only a contextually coordinated and contextually applied teaching, but is also a spiritual exercise concerning his own multiplicity and the struggle, if you will, to hold it to make the pieces fit? And a spiritual exercise concerning what sorts of identity were allowed culturally for Jews, for Greeks, for men, and that he could allow himself? It is striking how much of Paul’s theology is concerned with trying to hold disparity together: contesting camps in Christian communities, “spirit” and “flesh,” Jews and Gentiles, the enslaved and the free, women and men, authorized and unauthorized leaders, wealthy and poor, and many more. This striking backbeat in his life reminds me of Richard Marius’ observation about Luther’s constant invocation of justification, that it was not only the intellectual crafting of a theory but a form of confidence building for Luther, in other words, not only a continual statement of a doctrine but a rehearsal of his attempt to deal with his anxiety about justification. Perhaps Paul’s many ways of trying to hold many things together—and could this be a source of his contradictions, his anger, his boasting, but also his love?—were also ways of making a spiritual exercise of his felt multiplicity and multireligiousness. As we have heard today, wasn’t it precisely Paul’s diverse cultural emplacements that allowed the very reconciliational searching that he bestowed to us?

The post-conversion Paul is a strange person. Strange, by loose analogy, like us today. He was a living crossroad. That is why returning to him can be a way of making sense of our present, because our strangeness, our irreducible strangeness, our gorgeous strangeness, the strangeness of secular Catholics, their increasing cosmopolitanism (whether privileged or in penury), their having to deal with many different relationships, demands, and lifestyles, the strangeness of the secular habitation today, the surprising diversity out there in Catholics’ existential hierarchy of truths, these are inseparable from our thoroughgoing habitation in mystery. As the French poet Rene Char tells us: “A new mystery sings in your bones / Develop your legitimate strangeness.” In Paul’s cosmopolitanism, in the way the powers and principalities were not only outside him but within him and he contended with them, indeed, in his legitimate strangeness, in his cultural and religious multiplicity, in the unusual way he put his life and faith together, and thus in his ability to be our traveling companion today, even and especially with the Catholic diaspora in secularity, this Sha’ul, this Paulos, this Paul, who attempted to hold so many disparate things together, can still open to us our own newly discovered mystery, and with our attention can open Catholicism to its present.