Cardinal Francis George
on Faith, Freedom & Freud
interview and photos by Carrie Swearingen

Nominated for Best Interview of 2000,
Catholic Press Association
National Catholic Register, January 2000

The archbishop of Chicago is one of the United States’ most visible bishops. In this wide-ranging interview with Register correspondent Carrie Swearingen, he spoke with friendly candor. Their conversation follows.

CARRIE SWEARINGEN: Like others, I have come to understand that using terms like "conservative" and "liberal" reduces my faith to a political agenda. You said something similar at the recent Commonweal forum on "liberal Catholicism." Do you think these terms should ever be used?

CARDINAL FRANCIS GEORGE: The use of those labels within the Church is descriptive of some differences and, in that sense, you can use them depending on the context. The problem is two-fold. Their original meaning is political and, therefore, they don’t capture the deepest reality of the Church because the Church is more than a political reality. It is the Body of Christ. It’s an organic reality, a mystery of faith. So to translate her life into political terms, or psychological terms or even economic terms is always less than the reality and, therefore, somewhat misleading. The second problem with using the terms as broadly or as often as we do is that they don’t invite people to think. They invite people to stop thinking. In an age where change is very rapid and the Church, too, develops very rapidly, we have to develop the habit of thinking things through. And the use of those terms isn’t helpful in many cases. It puts people in boxes, and they even resent it when someone acts out of the box. It makes our inner life brittle and doesn’t advance our "walking together" in the mission that Christ gives us.

SWEARINGEN: I have cancer. You have been kind to me by way of notes during my chemotherapy and comparing me to Joan of Arc at the debut of a startling crew cut. You, as a child, were stricken with polio. Though many in this world face far more significant hardships than we do, there is a special calm –– a deepening of faith –– that only seems to come through suffering. I am rather fond of something a priest once said to me. "Only through the suffering will you be able to speak to me more beautifully." How do you explain this to a person who is grieving?

GEORGE: First of all, loss is not a good thing. Pain and disease are not good things. Those are evils, but God can bring good out of evil. Jesus rose from the dead. I think living through suffering tells us something about the love of God because it forces us to give up good things, and finally our life, to be set free by God’s love. God doesn’t possess us with His love. God’s love liberates. And suffering tells us that we have to love in a nonpossessive way. If we accept the lesson –– and it is a hard lesson to live and to hear –– if we are to live as God does, then ours has to be a nonpossessive love. We don’t want to bring people into our lives as much as we share our lives with them. We don’t own anything, and yet we love everything. We don’t own our own health. If [this lesson] is lived, suffering enables one to get that insight into the nature of God’s love, even though it can leave one very vulnerable. And God is vulnerable, too. He leaves us free and we can sin. If suffering doesn’t open people up, if it makes them collapse into their own agony, it leaves them rather shriveled and there is nothing redemptive about it. But if it does open them, so that they’re available, know compassion and obedience as Jesus did –– then God can use us for the redemption of the world.

Cancer is not a good thing; but because you are vulnerable, you are an occasion for other people to be generous. And that is a good thing. It is good even in our search to be autonomous and independent to accept help. If we can do that graciously, it gives other people a chance to grow in generosity and that is another sign that God’s love is present.

SWEARINGEN: Thomas Merton, in his original and unfortunately out-of-print work, "The Seeds of Contemplation," spends all of chapter four discussing humility. I find that this chapter is brilliantly written. Here, Merton addresses the problem of being disobedient and the dangers of justifying this behavior by telling oneself, "I am persecuted. With the saints it has always been so."

Tell me, how does a priest –– a person –– remain obedient to his or her calling in life and still remain obedient to his or her superiors? And, does one take precedence over the other?

GEORGE: The quote from Merton is insightful. We live in a community which has rights language as part of its vocabulary. In a political order, that’s very good language. In universalized rights, outside of a political order, we become victims very easily because we can always find rights that are infringed upon. The difficulty in going through life as a victim is that the solutions mean reclaiming your rights instead of accepting everything as a gift. In other words, victims don’t need a savior. The sense that, even with the injuries life brings, life is still a gift is lost. In a political order, there are times when there has to be opposition to oppression, whether political or psychological. But, as a constant of defining yourself in the world, victimhood is kind of a dead end. Humility opens us up. With that openness, a lot of things can happen. A closed universe, defined by my rights with nobody infringing upon them, doesn’t go anywhere.

SWEARINGEN: Again, regarding a personal call versus obedience to superiors, which takes precedence?

GEORGE: I don’t see a conflict there, particularly with the priest. Obedience is part of your calling. You make a promise of obedience. That is part of your life. You cannot use [your personal relationship with] the Blessed Mother, for example, as an excuse for disobeying your superiors. That’s not the way she operated. That doesn’t mean that superiors are always right. They’re not. If you think they are doing something wrong then tell them and try to work it out. But you’ve made a promise of obedience, and the Blessed Mother is not going to absolve you from that. If you can’t accept that God’s will is mediated by your superiors, you’re in the wrong calling. You’re also not in a sacramental Church. If there is a permanent conflict between a personal call and obedience, then there is something wrong.

SWEARINGEN: To whom are you obedient?

GEORGE: I hope that I am always obedient to the Lord. But for me, the Lord’s will is expressed through the Holy Father quite directly when he sends me somewhere. And also by the people that the Lord gives me to serve. Every bishop, in a sense, is obedient to his own people. They set my schedule. I think this is consciously felt by most bishops I know.

SWEARINGEN: Though I’ve enjoyed many books, chapter four of the original "Seeds of Contemplation" always stands out for me, and that is why I mentioned it. If you had one piece of literature to recommend to our readers, what would that be?

GEORGE: I don’t have one piece of literature, and I’m never good at this kind of question. Is there one single book that has changed my life? No. Outside of scripture, of course. I enjoy John Dunn’s work. He’s a Holy Cross priest who taught theology at Notre Dame for many years. But at certain points in my life, different works have been very important to me. As a religious order priest, I use my own rule very often. That’s not something for everybody, but it defined my own life. The works of the 17th century French school of spirituality I find very helpful for me and that is the spirituality I was trained in as a novice. (Laughing) I’m sorry. I know that doesn’t help your readers.

SWEARINGEN: There has been an increasingly heated debate about whether or not to strengthen Catholic identity on college campuses. I realize that the November meeting enables U.S. bishops to move forward on this issue. They have sent to Rome their plan to implement Pope John Paul II’s 1990 apostolic constitution on higher education Ex Corde Ecclesiae (From the Heart of the Church). In your opinion, what should our readers focus on amidst all the back-and-forthing?

GEORGE: [The U.S. bishops] passed the implementation of, for this country, a document that was written for the whole Church, defining universities as at the heart of the whole Church rather than something outside of the Church. So how do you specify the relation that gives a university its identity if it calls itself Catholic? Ex Corde Ecclesiae specifies the relationship to the faith community that gives the university its name –– Catholic –– and it also specifies the relationship of those who teach the discipline of theology. It relates the university as a whole and professors of Catholic theology in explicit ways to the Catholic Faith community. It establishes a stable juridical framework as the conversation moves on. I think what has caused a lot of the problem is that we sometimes can’t think of a relationship that isn’t also confining. But relationships set people free. That’s true in relationships like marriage, which is also juridically expressed. So the relationship is surrounded by a certain juridical framework; but it is designed to strengthen the universities, not to confine them, to make them stronger in their identity and, therefore, freer to participate in higher education. Now that it has passed, we have to work out processes for doing all of this, always in dialogue with university governments and theology professors. I think some of this will become clearer and people will understand that this is not a given but a relationship that will have influence. The mandatum for theologians doesn’t mean that the theologian teaches in the name of the bishop nor in the name of the church but only in "communion with," in relationship to the bishop. That relationship is there for all Catholic believers. But this is such a very important relationship for professors of theology because it is what theologians say that helps us to understand the Faith better. A statement of that, in the mandatum, is a helpful development, although not everybody will agree. We’ll see.

SWEARINGEN: I have come to feel that feminism and chauvinism are equally senseless, primarily because they are hurtful in their exclusivity. We are equal, though our roles may be quite different. Over the years, I have heard a passage from the Bible used as a rationale for abusive chauvinism. "Wives be submissive to your husbands. Husbands love your wives."
Because we are, of course, expected to "love" each other, I have always interpreted this to mean that we are to be submissive to each other as well. Is my interpretation wrong, and can you verbalize your interpretation of these sentences which pastors so often avoid?

GEORGE: I think the word that sends everybody off is "submissive." The Church understands that is mutual submission because it is mutual love. The next sentence is, "Husbands love your wives," and that means be submissive to them. But, again, love is a liberating relationship and in that freedom one seeks to, in a sense, be submissive or at least be influenced by and be there for the husband or the wife. Our problem is that we are a very psychological culture and everything has to get translated immediately into psychological terms. "Submission" is not something that a culture that values autonomy sees as a good thing. I think it is clear enough what Jesus is saying through St. Paul and that is that marriage is a relationship where the partners, because they love one another, sacrifice themselves for each other as Christ sacrificed Himself for the Church –– and as we must sacrifice ourselves for Him as the occasion demands it.
If you take this –– not out of a particular historical context that we bring to it and not out of fear of marriage, and you compare it to the relationship of Christ and the Church –– it becomes clearer what that relationship is. Unfortunately we are afraid of relationships because they seem to be possessive and so the statistics on marriages are rather frightening. Here, we [Americans] are starting not to get married. Are we a people who are capable of marriage? Capable of being submissive to anyone, that is of giving ourselves totally to anyone? That is the the deeper problem behind the problem of all of these words.

SWEARINGEN: Recently my parish priest read a humor-filled book entitled, "The History of Stupidity." It takes the reader, gently, through many of the beautiful opportunities we have missed by refusing to allow religion and science to work together when possible. Galileo, of course, was right. The Earth does move. The Church, as we know, was not too thrilled with Galileo, however, at the time.

The deepest cause for panic always seems to stem from the theory of evolution as defined in Darwin’s "The Origin of Species and the Descent of Man" versus creationism as described in the Book of Genesis.

Many Catholics, I find, are not aware that the Pope has embraced scientific evidence and tells us that it is perfectly acceptable to believe in evolution as long as we understand that God is responsible for the order in the universe and is the continual source of life. Using that which we’ve learned about ourselves through science and that which you know about yourself through faith –– can you explain the view of man’s origin that best satisfies your mind as well as your soul?

GEORGE: What you’ve got in the popular press is Biblical fundamentalism, where the creation stories in the Book of Genesis are taken as if they were newspaper accounts, versus an understanding of evolution exclusively in a mechanistic sense, as Darwin developed it. Evolutionary theory, which is more than a hypothesis as the pope said, is much greater than Darwin. When we are just presented with Darwinism and fundamentalism, both are false starts. Our own sense of scripture tells us that this is the inspired Word of God. It is correct in the context in which it is given to us, which isn’t our own. So we have to go back and look at the literary context and we can understand what kind of accounts the creation stories are. They’re not meant to be cosmology. Nonetheless, they tell us, clearly, that only God who is infinite can make something out of nothing. In the beginning, God then created out of nothing and has formed and shaped what has been created. And those accounts permit many, many different scientific explanations –– as long as the passage from something into nothing, which science can’t tell you about, is not denied. Science only tells you about things that already exist, develop or are rearranged.

A mechanistic theory of evolution, such as Darwin’s theory, is incompatible with the Faith. Not because it contradicts some literal interpretation of scripture but because it doesn’t understand the nature of God and who we are as creatures –– finite creatures, unable to explain our own existence. This is true for most Catholics –– we are not literalists the way that fundamentalists are in our approach to scripture and we are not unscientific or against the use of reason to understand reality.

There’s a long history of going back and forth between faith and science to the mutual benefit of both. In the case of astro-physicists, for example, today that dialogue has never been more fruitful. The Vatican continues to finance an observatory, and there are astronomers on the Vatican payroll. That’s one example of how the Church wants to continue the dialogue with science. As long as we have a sense of God as the Creator and also of God as provident, One who accompanies us through life and continues to sustain us, we can look at the scientific data and recognize that it is hypothetical always. Evolutionary theory is not complete. The whole area of macro-evolution is not as well substantiated as micro-evolution, or evolution within species. I don’t think this should be a question that exercises Catholics as they understand their faith.

SWEARINGEN: You may be surprised to know how many I find arguing over this subject.

GEORGE: Even in Catholic circles?

SWEARINGEN: Yes. Not within churches as much as over some dinner tables.

GEORGE: Hmm.

SWEARINGEN: Many are surprised to learn that abortion is also legal in several European countries, including Italy. The number of abortions in those countries is drastically lower than in the U.S., however. When discussing this issue with European friends, Catholics and non-Catholics alike, a similar thread seems to be a contributing factor. European adolescents are often required to take years of philosophy classes. Regardless of religious beliefs, the question of logic and being able to come to conclusions by way of a mathematical proof is often essential to whether or not a person is considered intelligent.

Europeans often laugh at the American inability to reason. Basic logic perhaps make Europeans more aware that: a) there is a choice, and that choice is the act of intercourse, b) life does begin at conception simply because to be alive means to be growing, and growth begins at fertilization as science has proven, and c) the politician who calls himself or herself an environmentalist without including human life in this all-encompassing love of sea, sky and land is being hypocritical. Why, in an age when Americans have allowed political leaders to form their own spiritual beliefs, do pro-choice candidates fail to use the simple argument of logic?

Would pro-life political candidates better capture the attention of Americans by using this argument of intelligence rather than one of morality?

GEORGE: There is something to this. We are not usually trained to think philosophically in the same way that European cultures are. We are trained to think psychologically. And that has historical basis in the right to the pursuit of happiness, which is a subjective right. Without defining happiness it becomes, then, up to each one to ask, "What is the source of my personal happiness?" That drags us back to psychology. When Freudianism became very popular, psychological explanation, bound up as it is with an understanding of sex as necessary for happiness, took over in this country in a way that did not happen elsewhere. That an active sexual life is necessary for personal happiness or personal fulfillment is something of a dogma in the American creed. The good result is that we are trained to be in better touch with our feelings than other peoples. We learn from feelings, and being in touch with them means that they don’t necessarily imprison us, as they do if we are not in touch with them. So, there are benefits to that psychologized culture, but there are difficulties. We usually ask, "How do you feel?" It is very important to touch base with people’s feelings. So if you say that the only way we can go discuss the question is purely logical, you’re not going to get an audience. We’re just not shaped that way.

Europeans have their own problems. Many of them can argue logically better than we can, because of their education. But they have problems of belief and of having a dialogue that doesn’t lead to abruptness. When we have a dialogue, there is often a respect that remains throughout the argument. That is not often the case in some European circles.

Though there is more tolerance here, that tolerance can be a trap too. It says "You have your way, I have mine and, therefore, there is no way we can ever agree. So let’s just forget it and do whatever each one wants." That’s the bad side, but I think we have to live where we are. Arguments of logic surround the pro-life issue in abundance, but they are all trumped by the argument of fulfillment as the result of choice. So even though you have objective truth and logical truth on one hand, once you put that up against the freedom of a mother or personal choice –– you lose. Choice is the basic value of our culture. You can’t bring in objective truth against personal freedom.

Freedom is the primary value in this culture, and we must attempt to approach people in a way that is different from the European context. I think, for example, that the argument around partial-birth abortion changed the terms of the debate because people could see quite clearly what was going on and they weren’t ready to accept it. But even with that, many still can’t say killing a child is worse than sacrificing personal choice.

SWEARINGEN: One side thought. Why is it, if we are offered a true separation of church and state, that one must pay for abortions at county or state hospitals by way of his or her taxes?

GEORGE: [American society believes that] your conscience is not as important as somebody else’s choice. You can believe what you want, but you shouldn’t use your beliefs to prohibit others from the choices they need to be truly free. Again, choice is the value that trumps everything else.

SWEARINGEN: In a truly democratic society, perhaps we should be provided a little box to check off on our taxes?

GEORGE: Oh, I agree with you. But the response to that is that public policy is a matter of compromise and your taxes may be used to pay for many things you don’t like ––a nuclear arsenal, for example. That’s the price you pay for living in this kind of society. Freedom of choice is still very important and so you have exemption clauses for Catholic institutions, for which I am grateful. They’re trying to do away with that in California, I understand, which is quite chilling. They’re creating a culture where the Church can’t exist freely and where people don’t have genuine freedom of conscience. We have to be very alert to this, but we have to use arguments that make some sense in this culture. Even if they are not the best or strongest logically, they’re the strongest existentially and personally.

SWEARINGEN: What were the most influencing moments or factors in your formation as a priest?

GEORGE: Prayer is always the most important element in the formation of anyone who is a believer. I was trained to be a priest in a religious order and the religious rule certainly was a major factor in giving me a vision of things and a kind of inner discipline that prepared me to meet many challenges in life. And I am grateful for that preparation. It is a question of cooperating with God’s grace each day.

SWEARINGEN: What has been the most significant challenge for you as Archbishop of the Archdiocese of Chicago?

GEORGE: Learning the archdiocese. It’s a big place. It takes a long time to see how things work. I think I have a sense, after two and a half years, where the buttons are. I still don’t know why nothing happens when you push some buttons (with more laughter). I was born and raised here, so I have a sense of the city and how it is laid out. But I was gone for so long. I don’t know the history of the last 40 years because I haven’t lived it from the inside. I’m now trying to understand who are the major players in the administration as well as how the priests think and what is important to them. That is the greatest challenge –– to learn what I need to learn in order to be an effective archbishop here.

SWEARINGEN: How do the needs here differ from those of past appointments?

GEORGE: Two ways. One is the complexity, because it is much bigger. Basically, a bishop is a bishop is a bishop. But the complexity of the context of the particular diocese changes. The second is the public nature of being Archbishop of Chicago –– which is something I am still trying to grapple with. People pay attention to you, when you say things, because you are Archbishop of Chicago. I don’t think that everything I say is of particularly transcendent importance, though I have to learn better how to handle that public role. In one way, it is very gratifying. In another, it’s disconcerting when people place more importance on the things you say than you would yourself. Yet, somethings I say I believe to be quite important, and people ignore them. In the life of the city, the Archbishop is a rather prominent figure. That wasn’t true in the two other cities where I served as bishop.

SWEARINGEN: The greatest teacher is the one who always remains a student. What is it that you would most like to learn in the next 12 months?

GEORGE: I‘d like to learn to come to some sort of diocesan organizational pattern that will move the mission more easily than it is moved now. Beyond the organizational concerns, I’m trying to learn some Polish. I’ll never be able to learn the language very well, because it is enormously complicated. I would like to at least be able to read parts of homilies in Polish because there are many Poles here in Chicago. That’s something I’d like to be able to do over the next 12 months –– or 12 years.

SWEARINGEN: Our world has seen more technological advancements in this last century than at any other point in human existence. The reality of this fact sometimes overwhelms me. We find new ways to communicate, many of which can bring us closer together in thought instantaneously. Do you feel that mankind is evolving in such a way that it is becoming more conscious of itself? If so, what do you hope Catholics will become most conscious of in this new millennium?

GEORGE: The technological advances of this century are designed to overcome distance in space and separation in time. The communications inventions –– television, internet, flying, space travel –– each of these is a way to overcome the barriers of space and time. But we’re still left, in the midst of great human progress, with great human suffering, with evil and death. That is where the Faith is always necessary because it is Christ who has overcome those differences, who has come out of death alive in a way that leaves Him free, totally free. He’s not bound by space and time. And this is our future as well, in God’s own time.

The Faith continues to speak to these developments. [The Church] was born in what was then a universal empire –– at least for the West –– and the Church now finds herself again facing a global civilization that is developing very quickly in culture, in finances, and to some extent in political developments like the European union. We’re at home. We’re a Catholic Church in a global society, and yet we have to find our way in that, too. Like any phenomenon, globalization is evangelically ambiguous. There are wonderful things about it. For example, we find it much easier to defend human rights. Also, there are things that are quite problematic, like the global economy that masses enormous wealth in the hands of some people and leaves others, still, quite marginalized. We have to evangelize the culture of the globe now. That’s why the pope is calling for a new evangelization in a new millennium that is a new moment in human history. It’s an exciting but daunting project, because we don’t have the answers. But we know we have to keep asking.

Is mankind becoming more conscience of itself? In a way, except what is mankind? If you’re saying that human self-consciousness is somehow different than the sum-total of individual thinkers, I don’t think that’s so. Nonetheless, our individual self-consciousness is much broader now because we see ourselves in a global society.


Carrie Swearingen writes from Evanston, Ill.

This article appeared in and was reprinted with permission of National Catholic Register, January, 2000. For subscription information, please call 1-800-421-3230. This unabridged version was printed for parishes within the Archdiocese of Chicago.

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