Some in the online community have expressed confusion over the claim made by Pope Francis in Singapore that, among the religions, there are many paths to God. I have seen his statements dissected, debated, defamed, defended, emended, parsed and parodied, lauded and condemned. Yet, after years of study of the writings of the popes and the official documents of the Church, I find nothing all that surprising in what the current pope said. My reading has indicated — and continues to verify — a fluid continuity and mutual reinforcement among the thoughts and words of the men who have been graced with this office.
For example: the language of “ways” is not alien to the tradition; indeed, it appears in the 1965 proclamation of Pope St. Paul VI, at the beginning of Nostra Aetate, the Declaration on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions:
“Religions found everywhere try to counter the restlessness of the human heart, each in its own manner, by proposing ‘ways,’ comprising teachings, rules of life, and sacred rites. The Catholic Church rejects nothing that is true and holy in these religions. She regards with sincere reverence those ways of conduct and of life, those precepts and teachings which, though differing in many aspects from the ones she holds and sets forth, nonetheless often reflect a ray of that Truth which enlightens all men.”
Nor is the term “dialogue” in any way an innovation. From the same source:
“The Church, therefore, exhorts her sons, that through dialogue and collaboration with the followers of other religions, carried out with prudence and love and in witness to the Christian faith and life, they recognize, preserve and promote the good things, spiritual and moral, as well as the socio-cultural values found among these men.”
Note that the multiplicity of these “ways” neither logically contradicts nor in the least deprecates the Way, Jesus Christ the Savior. Note, too, that the spiritual and moral goods part and parcel of independent religious ecologies are not superseded by the fullness of truth, but stand on their own as objective values to be preserved and promoted.
In his great encyclical Fides et Ratio, Pope St. John Paul II invokes the existential quest across times and cultures as to the nature, origin and destiny of man:
“These are the questions which we find in the sacred writings of Israel, as also in the Veda and the Avesta; we find them in the writings of Confucius and Lao-Tze, and in the preaching of Tirthankara and Buddha; they appear in the poetry of Homer and in the tragedies of Euripides and Sophocles, as they do in the philosophical writings of Plato and Aristotle.”
Implicit in this relentless search for meaning, the pontiff identifies a “spiritual heritage of humanity,” which rests on the inherent complementarity of our planet’s cultures. “Every people,” he tells us, “has its own native and seminal wisdom… as a true cultural treasure.” How can this wisdom be other than propaedeutic, as regards the plenitude? As St. John Paul has stated, “the Church is no stranger to this journey of discovery, nor could she ever be.”
However uniquely privileged our custodianship of truth, with all its attendant obligations, faith does not elevate us as Christians above the role of “partner[s] in humanity’s shared struggle to arrive at truth” — for on this earth the Church is ever a pilgrim. The divine essence, as St. Thomas Aquinas tells us, cannot be comprehended (that is, known perfectly) by anyone other than God — not even by the human nature of Christ! The magnitude and the mystery of God excels us at every turn. Before God, the whole composite of human knowledge and experience falters, yielding to an eternity of wonder, gratitude and awe.
Furthermore, Christian faith never entails a complete spiritualization. As Christians, we have a sort of “dual citizenship”; our membership in the household of faith does not and cannot nullify our historical and cultural belonging. Thus, each new synthesis of faith and each pre-existing culture is in itself a “way,” an authentically new expression of what has been handed on.
Precisely because faith is not a phenomenon purely spiritual, it encompasses matter, of necessity. It is via material creation that God draws near to the cosmos, as the cosmos is drawn into God. Pope Benedict XVI, meditating on the material element of water in the sacrament of baptism, makes a very salient observation on just this basis:
“Not only does a basic element of the cosmos enter, a fundamental matter created by God, but also the entire symbolism of religions, because in all religions water has something to say. The journey of religions, this quest for God in different ways — even if they are mistaken, but always seeking God — is assumed in the sacrament. The other religions, with their journey to God, are present and are assumed, and thus the world is summed up; the whole search for God that is expressed in the symbols of religions, and especially — of course — in the symbolism of the Old Testament which in this way becomes present, with all its experiences of salvation and of God’s goodness.”
Taken this way, the Baptism of the Lord truly “fulfilled all righteousness” (Mt 3:15); as he was plunged into the Jordan, the inchoate ways of coming near to God having been “baptized,” as it were, recapitulated and sanctified in the person of our eminently humble Savior.
But what of the claim that Christianity is the true religion? Has Pope Francis not offered a silent, subtle, unperturbed repudiation? Let us now turn to Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger who, in Truth and Tolerance, Christian Belief and World Religions, graciously offers a definition of religio vera, by which true religion means that Christianity’s point of departure is neither myth nor politics, neither poetry nor power. Christianity’s stance is metaphysical, directed to Being, and therefore to rationality:
“For that to happen, for Christianity to see itself as the victory of myth-removal, the victory of knowledge and, with that, of truth, it had to consider itself as universal and be brought to all the peoples, not as a specific religion repressing others by virtue of a type of religious imperialism but as the truth which renders the apparent superfluous.”
Christianity is, therefore, the true religion — the religion of the Logos. It is concerned with truth telling, truth seeking, the veneration of the Truth — to the point of being a scandal to the civic religions of the ancient world. As such, its concern must be for all peoples — and how else could one fully internalize the religion of the inherently dialogical Logos, but by dialogue? In the thought of Ratzinger, a self-enclosed privatism is destructive to Christianity; an exclusionary model cannot stand up to the demands and criticisms of an atheistic humanism which aspires to humanity’s universal good. He, too, shares in the solicitude toward journeying mankind:
“The concentration on what is Catholic, which at first glance seems to be directed exclusively inward, this is revealed in its original impulse to be an emphatic orientation toward those today who are searching… Only when we see this clearly can we rightly understand the purpose of Vatican II.”
This search has always been the objective of the best of humanity of all times, in all cultures. In Jesus of Nazareth: The Infancy Narratives, Pope Benedict describes the Persian or Babylonian priests, astronomers, and/or philosophers whom we know as the Magi of Luke’s Gospel; he writes:
“We could well say that they represent the religions moving toward Christ, as well as the self-transcendence of science toward him. In a way they are the successors of Abraham, who set off on a journey in response to God’s call. In another way they are the successors of Socrates and his habit of questioning above and beyond conventional religion toward the higher truth.”
In the introduction to Salt of the Earth, journalist Peter Seewald recounts how, in one of their first meetings, he had asked then-Cardinal Ratzinger how many ways there are to God; Seewald writes, “I really didn’t know what he would answer. He could have said, ‘only one’ or ‘several.’ The Cardinal didn’t take long to answer: As many, he said, as there are people.”
Faith is not an extrinsic program that can be indoctrinated or imposed; Christ is the Way because only he has access to the heart of each individual, such that he can form believers into a common Body. Perhaps what is most elucidating is Pope Benedict’s treatment of the Parable of the Prodigal Son — a parable, ultimately, of the “magnanimity of the Father.” Of the Father, Benedict states with uncharacteristic brevity: “He gives freedom.”
Nor is the Christian’s possession of the Way equivalent to having a path. Of the faithful brethren of the household who have cherished a secret envy, Benedict writes, “They, too, are still in need of a path [emphasis mine].” Perhaps these many paths are due to our insufficiency; God, in his creative love, forges a path specifically tailored to each soul — for his journeying toward us will ever be of greater consequence than our journeying toward him.
Image: Vatican Media
V. J. Tarantino is co-founder of Sacred Beauty, a Private Association of the Faithful in the Diocese of Bridgeport. She has studied ancient and Medieval metaphysics and has devoted her adult life to the service of liturgy (study of liturgical texts and norms, the cultivation of sacred elocution, musical performance and composition, the beautification of sacred space, and the organization and direction of public Eucharistic Adoration) and to immersion in the writings of the Doctors of the Church and of recent Popes. Her writing can be found at https://questionsdisputedandotherwise.substack.com/
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