A Buddhist Looks at the Arguments for the Existence of God

© Kenneth Ireland, March 28, 2024

Back to Lenten Practice

Wednesday Feb 14, – Thursday Mar 28, 2024

It has been years since I even noticed Lent, but this year, I prepared myself for the central mystery of the Christian faith. I had been writing about my relationship with Cardinal Avery Dulles, a remarkable man from whom I learned an enormous amount, whom I loved and, as a quirk of fate, happened to be a famous and well-regarded, even revered figure in both the Jesuit order and the official Catholic hierarchy. For several years, while I was a Jesuit, he was my spiritual advisor, and informally held that role for the rest of his life. He was disappointed when I stepped away from the more orthodox expressions of the Christian faith, but he was never harsh or judgmental. He always treated me as a friend and was extremely generous. I am very grateful for our friendship.

Several Jesuits and former Jesuits have been authorized to teach Zen, but I am not in that elite group. I was in the Jesuits for a decade, and when I left, I turned my back. In total honesty, I indulged hostility towards the institutional church like so many gay men of my generation. When I gave myself wholeheartedly to Zen, I discovered traces of Ignatian prejudice in my practice. Uncovering what was not apparent to me has taken years of careful work. My feet were so planted in either camp that I couldn’t distinguish any separation. I became known in my sangha as a Jesuit Buddhist. 

I hit on another sentence to describe my project, “A Buddhist looks at arguments for the existence of God, and a former Jesuit weighs these arguments in the Zendo.” It became important for me to specify that part of my argument had been colored by meditation practice. 

In the few weeks till Easter, I certainly can’t settle any argument about the existence of God, but following the age-old Lenten practice of penance and purification, I hope to clear away some of the underbrush obscuring these old questions, at least for me. 

When I write, I consciously try not to allow academic rules and conventions to hamper me. I know that this can be what we used to call the occasion for sin, but I also don't owe allegiance to any religious authority, and the days of the burning at the stake are over. Although I will try to be as balanced as any aspiring bodhisattva can be, I know that I have a definite point of view, which I will state as clearly as I can and then, like a good Jesuit scholastic and Zen student, try to refute my own argument. I take this work seriously, but I will also have as much fun as possible.

Capitalizing God as an honorific carries many linguistic nuances and preferences. I would prefer to separate us from our preconceptions and not treat God in the preferential way that the capitalization “God” might imply, but I’ve decided to follow the linguistic convention of capitalizing God. I intend it to be neither theist nor atheist, and not derogatory, just neutral. When referring specifically to YHWH, Jehovah, or the Father in the translations of the Jesus gospels as they come to us, I use the honorific “God.’ I may not always be consistent.

And finally, my conclusions surprised me, though I cannot claim to have satisfactorily resolved any of the issues I tackled.

A Jesuit theologian with the papal imprimatur asks me about God's existence.

During our last meeting, Avery Dulles said to me, "I hear that Buddhists haven’t settled the God question.” Of course, he knew the answer: most Buddhist schools are non-theistic; they do not usually entertain the question of divinity, neither affirming nor denying a supreme deity, certainly not in the same way that Christians do. But in Catholic dogmatic theology, statements about the nature of divinity are the coin of the realm. For Avery, the existence of a Godhead, a personal deity, was central, along with expressing or “confessing” assent to its existence.

That afternoon, despite our friendship, or perhaps because of it, I felt Avery was trying to pry an answer out of me that would undermine my Buddhist beliefs. His tone was friendly, loving, even playful, not in any way disapproving or forceful, but he was serious. He was trying to push me towards a more traditional faith because, for him—and for most serious Christians—assent to the existence of God, saying “I believe,” is key to salvation. I couldn’t respond that I still believed in God because, honestly, I was leaning more towards the agnostic end of the spectrum, an answer that would surely have disappointed him. My love for the man overrode any other considerations. 

Avery was a Jesuit through and through, and I might have countered with an invitation to inquiry, but I didn’t have the skill to turn a rhetorical or speculative question into an opening. I didn’t know how my friend would take it, perhaps almost as blasphemy, although my real fear was that he would have just made fun of the question—and me.

We might have waded into the tricky currents of sweeping, generalized truth statements that leave one floundering on rocky shores, or, to return to my speculative ruminations about placing my bet on the right pony, the kind of restrictive notions that Jesuits liked to argue about with Pascal and the Jansenists. Avery would have enjoyed that: this essay honors our friendship.

“Something rather than Nothing” 

First, let’s look at the question itself. “Why is there something as opposed to nothing?” is a religious question, or at least religions worldwide have appropriated it. Any preacher worth their salt will warn you to think about what happens after death. They call up an ontological fear and create an answer to the question: what persists after our experience ends?  

That question seems based on raw emotion, so it’s not scientific or philosophical. It might be psychological, even then, you have to lay down some parameters. I’m going to leave it for another time. My characterization won’t win me many converts among my religious friends who have been trained in the traditional seminary rendition of Saint Thomas Aquinas’s theology. Some of them even call it  “the Big Question,’ encompassing belief and unbelief, who we are, where we are in the universe, and how we got here. Our answers are expected to have the clarity of a clarion bell, dispelling our doubts and clearing the path to salvation. Proponents and believers claim it demands an answer.

The question itself is a canard, or in French slang, a hoax. To clarify the possible answers, let’s give it the hair-splitting it warrants before we begin. The question is designed to introduce the question of God into ordinary discourse and ultimately leads us down a rabbit hole. It is formulated to skew the answer. Any answer is, at best, an assessment of probability rather than a true statement. My former Jesuit philosopher teacher, Ed MacKinnon, argues that the proposition is a statement that can be held by reasonable people rather than a proof as in science or mathematics. (Why is There Something? Edward MacKinnon, Philosophia 51 (2):835-855 (2023). I disagree.

If, for example, we follow Piaget and examine how a child learns about the world, among his or her first questions might be, “What is that?” pointing to Fido. Then he or she might ask, “Can I pet Fido?” “Why did Fido bite me?” or “Is Fido hungry?” but certainly not “Why is Fido there?” You usually don’t get to that before post-grad philosophy and debating Kant’s idea of denotation or Gilbert Ryle’s “Fido-Fido fallacy,” which he and Wittgenstein label “primitive word magic." (Meaning, Use and Rules of Use, Raziel Abelson. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.) In our case, Fido becomes “something with identified meanings vaguely about God,” much like the neo-Platonists who identified the deities of Mount Olympus with ideas and virtues to pass the muster of logic. I am not saying that such questions are out of order, but that they need much more explanation and definition before we are allowed to label “Something” as ontologically real and demand justification for its existence.

Is the question “Why is there something?” even a good question? 

Because I am going first, I will lay out my objections.

Begin with the concept of negation. The question posits “not-Nothing.” However, in this sense, nothing may just be “not everything that presents itself to our minds,” as an extrapolation or inference, not a definition. 

The double negative serves no purpose in the argument other than to get God in the door. “Something rather than nothing” is not even ordinary language. The way we speak in ordinary language does not include the inherent claim that we cannot know “something is something” unless we posit its negation. We are not obliged to imagine a world in which “what is so” is not. That is absurd. 

Joanie Mitchell teaches us, "You don’t know what you got till it's gone.” What do we get when we take away something? Her answer is “a parking lot.” To be clear, her answer to the question is “What’s left, or what did we replace it with?” and not what is this thing (state or condition) that you are naming “Not-a-parking-lot?” 

Ms. Mitchell uses a rhetorical strategy to affirm our knowledge (and appreciation), not an ontological definition of nothingness. Following Aristotle, Aquinas posits an orderly universe governed by natural law in which man has his place to know and serve God. In return, he is promised cash and prizes (which he may or may not receive, which is another problem to which he will return later). At this point, it is enough to say that It is also possible and legitimate in this universe to take away any promised benefits. That is variously called estrangement, hell, or sin. Aquinas knows all this through faith, not reason or empirical observation, though Aquinas does claim that there is no contradiction between faith and reason. When Darwin, Einstein, and Heisenberg et al. blew the supporting physics all to hell, modern schoolmen filled in the blanks with whatever cosmological ideas they fancied, but again, I would point to the neo-Platonists filling their empty blanks with virtue and form when they kicked out Zeus and his buddies. Sleight of hand. Bunk. That’s a technical term.

When Bill Clinton was asked in his famous deposition before Congress if there was a sexual relationship between him and Monica Lewinsky, he initially said there "is" no sexual relationship (US News & World Report, Ronald Brownstein and Kenneth T. Walsh). He went on, “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is. If the — if he — if ‘is’ means is and never has been, that is not — that is one thing. If it means there is none, that was a completely true statement.” Some commentators said this was his pitch to the Talmudic scholars among his judges. I contend that he just needed to get himself out of a hot pickle. Theists using the word “something” as an ontological bridge between science and faith are not much better than Clinton parsing the verb "to be” concerning sex. I don’t need a Rabbi to point to the duplicity because that is why we are parsing the verb “to be.” There has to be nothing out there, or we’d find ourselves in a hot pickle.

Let’s return to little Freddy or Frederica, who learned that Fido is called a dog. Hopefully, they also learned practical ways to avoid being bitten by Fido. They include feeding, training, learning to gauge Fido’s moods, and how to get him into his dog house if needed. But the question remains: how do we get from there to “Why do we have Fido rather than not-Fido?” 

How did this become a religious question, and why is it essential to get the correct answer? I will ask the Buddhist before I ask Aquinas, though I might use him as my reference point when I describe the hot mess that his religionists get us into. I am going to characterize four arguments for the existence of God. I intend to hold them as an object of meditation in a Buddhist way, but as I write them, I find myself trying to demystify them. They each have become almost a caricature of our culture’s way of thinking through these questions.

Instead of proving or disproving that God exists, I propose a more modest goal: to examine the claim that God exists. This avoids what seems impossible — to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that a supernatural being has control and power in the universe, and whose existence or essential being makes the workings of the universe possible. It also sets philosophy on a more solid footing (in my view) — to use the tools that are available to human beings and evaluate various claims solely to determine whether or not they are possible or reasonable, and secondarily, that these beliefs provide us with some guidance about living our lives in a fully human way that is ethical and loving. Based on our understanding of human history on Earth, these questions and their proposed solutions have been debated. That is all we can say with certainty.

On a personal note. I have spent several hours a day for the past six weeks thoroughly reviewing and examining as many of these arguments or claims as possible. My emphasis has been mainly on the scholastic proofs following the Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas that Catholic seminarians have studied since the Council of Trent. In addition to reviewing my intellectual history, I also searched for new work that has been done since I was at Boston College almost 60 years ago. But I was also trying to honor the question proposed by my friend and mentor Avery Dulles before he died: how might Buddhists settle the question about God? I will be 80 in a few months. I have spent far more time in meditation halls than in seminary, which has influenced my views.

Clockwork Orange, or shooting marbles on the Lyceum’s almost perfectly level floor 

Let’s tackle “The Unmoved Mover.” It purports to be the most universal of the arguments, or at least the TV Bishop Robert Barron would have us believe so; it is allegedly the most palatable that believers put forth to their enlightened naturalistic colleagues because it is based on a particular analysis by Aristotle, which also gave rise to the scientific method through his understanding of causality. Its religious formulation might be broadly called “Deistic.” 

Those who claim to follow Aristotelia over the 2400-year crooked path to our discussion talk about the existence of God as the “Unmoved Mover” or the “Uncaused Cause.” However, for each of the five contingency arguments that St. Thomas takes from Aristotle, there are two prongs: observation and logic, the moving parts, and the moving mental parts. One is locked down by observing the world as it is, and the other is abstracted from those observations, with hypotheses or checking questions.

Using the instruments of scientific observation, we can measure speed, distance, force, resistance, gravity, sound waves, etc., all of which seem to give the Thomists a comforting certainty that there is an “unmoved cause” at the very beginning. But is that conclusion supported by science? You can “move” from moved to unmoved using carefully constructed experiments, scientific instruments, and observation. However, tracing back to a primordial mover observation seems to uncover more moving parts, going faster and in all directions. I assert that focusing on one single mover is inconsistent with the data and requires a leap of faith.

For the moment, let’s set aside some of the more irksome consequences of conceiving of God as a personal being and merely describe him as a kind of clockmaker who has set the universe in motion according to a set of observable and predictable physical laws. Thomas Jefferson, a man of the Enlightenment, gave this advice to his nephew Peter Carr in 1787: "Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear." God and reason are synonymous, or God him/her/itself is reasonable. This is a distinction that I am going to have to sit with.

If God sets the universe in motion and allows reason, even divine reason, to dictate or at least guide its workings, does this guarantee that justice, love, and benevolence will prevail?  We no longer need to believe in a revealed God to be a good person, but can we point to the intricacy of the mechanism and say that God exists? But how do you find the benevolence of our universe being swallowed up in a black hole or the 700 species of Ornithoscelida, dinosaurs extinguished by an asteroid that veered off course 65 million years ago? The burden of that proof rests on the Deist. Mr. Jefferson.

Jefferson held a deep conviction in “The Laws of Nature and Nature's God.” We should also examine the proposition that such laws exist without blindfolded fear. In Deist thought there is a hierarchy to the things that God condones or encourages. We know that God exists because of the good order we see in nature. Nature, being revealed as science, allows us to understand the order of the universe. The science of the Enlightenment was based on the unfolding principles of the scientific revolution. 

Driving south on Highway 280 from San Francisco, I cross over the Stanford Linear Accelerator, a huge isolated tubular structure over two miles long that passes under the highway near Sandhill Road. Since 1966, the SLAC has been conducting experiments using isolated electrons traveling at speeds beyond my powers of imagination. Beyond that crude description, I don’t understand much, but I do know that scientists at Stanford won the Nobel Prize for developing a facility that allows us to decipher the actual activity of particle physics. This is centuries and worlds away from Aristotle’s Physics, which I envision being the careful study of the action of marbles on the (as level as possible) floor of the Lyceum from which Aristotle and his students began to measure mass, movement, distance and time which led to his geocentric model of movement in the universe. But rather than fault Aristotle for failing to grasp that our earth was not the focal point for movement in the Universe, I am astonished that his school was able to decipher so much given their primitive instruments of observation and measurement. 

Centuries later, these crude experiments would lead to both Newton’s Apple, Thomas Aquinas’s cosmological proofs for the existence of God, and after the Council of Trent, most Catholic priests were taught in seminary that the Universe was created ex nihilo by a Being who set the world in motion. The question remains: has it been shown that there was an urge or force at the beginning that initiated the inevitable, linked causal incidents we observe?

Hiking into the Source

What happens when a meditator searches for the Unmover or the Source of all of it? In the hours of silent meditation, within our inner world, we might imagine that we have traced many thoughts, feelings, and stories to their source. You’d think the search for an Unmoved Mover would be a cakewalk.

Late one Fall fifteen years ago, I sat in a week-long retreat up along the Klamath River in a small cluster of vacation cabins with Jon Joseph Roshi. For one of our afternoon meditations, Jon asked a long-time practitioner to lead us up into a cavern where he had done some photography. He was a spry old bird, perhaps having a decade on me but moving with the grace of a man many years younger.

That afternoon, we were to follow one of the several small gushing mountain streams that fed the Klamath. The walls of the ravine were steep. Though the rains were not torrential, it was very wet. We were to climb in silence, practicing walking meditation, kinhin, as best we could. It was a challenging, narrow path; the small, fast-moving stream dropped off sharply to the north. I had to concentrate more on where I was stepping than on my exhalation. I needed a stick to stay balanced. The thick green moss covering the stones, the only toehold, was slippery. They were laid out by nature's architect, who’d thrown out the handbook for a comfortable and safe ratio for step and tread. It was proving more difficult than initially advertised. Our spry photographer probably thought it was a stroll in the park. I did not.

Perhaps after a half-hour’s climb, we reached a pool. The combination of boulders tumbling down the ravine, plus beavers or storms felling the tree trunks, closed the remaining gaps and formed an expanse of perhaps 10 meters of still, mirror-like water. The stream seemed too narrow for the salmon run, but I still knew there was life under the mirror that reflected the tall pines with the bright blue that gave them an almost Technicolor background. I could also hear the soft sounds of what were probably small rivulets feeding my source, but had reached some kind of source. It was not the Big Bang beginning; it was not ex nihilo, but it was a beginning.

Buddhists are trained to look for change. We call it impermanence. Even more than karma, change is the one immutable law in the Buddhist Universe.  When I asked my first Buddhist teacher what “Impermanence” meant, he said, “You’re going to die, and along the way, the world is always changing.” When we look for change, for the moment of change, that observation changes our world. When I finally reached the still pool high above the Klamath, which might have been the beginning of something, I felt my racing heart and the quickness of my breath as I became aware of small, almost imperceptible drips between the rocks higher up. This makes pinpointing or even imagining a First Mover hard, if not impossible. It also makes positing an Unmoved Mover so vague that it is meaningless, or at least extremely limiting. I’ll go with vast and holy.

What would Kaiser be writing these days?

The Synod is the most significant event since the Second Vatican Council—that is, unless you read the press rather than theologians. According to my news feed, it is a dud. If I include the right-wing “traditionalist” media, it is the work of the devil. 

I wonder how our great friend and companion, Bob Kaiser, might be reporting on these events. We could all use a good dose of Kaiser’s prose at his propagandistic best.

I admired Bob Kaiser. No matter that the world seemed to turn against him, he remained a dreamer, though I can hear him complain loudly that he was a realistic one. His vision took root in Rome during the Second Vatican Council: an incarnate Church deeply rooted in faith, nourished by the Lord Jesus, guided by the wisdom of the faithful called and gathered together to ponder and pray, would prevail; that the Lord Jesus through His Incarnation blessed our world with a vision to make all things holy: churches, men and women, study, and politics, the whole enchilada.

He wrote and spread his enthusiasm. He sold an inspired dream in which all the pieces fell into place as if Providence had ordained it, and the whole mess would begin to function as it should. Sex, imagination, and creativity played a huge role, as did prayer, the discernment of spirits, and holding fast to the promise of the Ecumenical Councils. He called this Ignatian DNA. Father Ignatius was always present for Kaiser, as for most of us. 

Another key is that Kaiser’s vision was shared. Of course, we all know and appreciate the great lengths he went to share his insights with us, his Jesuit companions—even when we couldn’t pronounce the word “autochthonous” and thought it was missing a vowel. Sharing entailed advocating a position, but in a broader sense, it also meant that the church, the gathering of fellow Christians, shared a vision for what is possible in a world redeemed by the Lord Jesus.

As corny as it sounds, Kaiser was a cheerleader. He had journalistic objectivity when required but was unequivocal about where he stood. His vision was boldly democratic—the last fruit of the Enlightenment, which began to emerge in the turbulent world of the first Jesuit explorers and missionaries.

And Bob, you encouraged me to write. I still can see the sea of red ink when you returned my paper “Xavier meets the Zen Roshi,” which I asked you to edit. Thank you.

I am no longer connected to the church in the same way I was when I graduated from college or was a young Jesuit, but my first impression is there is barely a blip on the enthusiasm meter—certainly nothing like when John 23 said, “I want to throw open the windows of the Church so we can see out and the people can see in.” The windows have been thrown open, and everyone inside looks bored to death.

It may be a case of the press coverage skewing the argument. Let me try to put on my Kaiser glasses and take a very biased look. 

Pilgrim’s Progress

I watched some of the opening salvos and prayers at the Synod on Synodality. It comes at the end of Pope Francis’s apostolic visits to Asia, then Europe, a horrendously long journey for an 87-year-old man with mobility issues. Francis began the first long leg of his trip to Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, East Timor, and Singapore from September 2nd-13th; then, with barely time to catch his breath, he visited Luxembourg and Belgium from September 26–29th, returning to Rome to begin on October 2nd the last session of what might be the nail in the coffin of the monarchical church. He is the Pope and well taken care of, but I am exhausted just thinking about the effort required for so much travel. 

I followed as much of the journey as possible on YouTube, local TV news coverage in Asia, and the official Vatican News Service. I currently live in Asia. I have friends in Singapore and Bali. I know Jesuits and former Jesuits who live and work in India, Thailand, and Nepal. It is very different from Europe or South America, as are the Jesuits working here. I studied the photographs of Francis's private meetings with his brother Jesuits wherever his plane landed. Something I found very encouraging was that he always began by opening the floor for questions and never, as far as I know, delivered any cautions or admonitions; certainly nothing like my early days of Jesuit training more than 50 years ago.

Six countries in just over two weeks. It's not the kind of slow-moving travel I favor. I want a chance to absorb a bit of local color and adjust the clock of my biorhythms. But Francis and I have different missions. He spent a few hours and perhaps even slept in former colonies; he visited the courts of colonizers; he held court in two of the smallest and richest city-states; he touched ground in the world’s largest Muslim majority countries as well as two of the four surviving Catholic monarchies; in one of the poorest Catholic new nations, half the population attended his papal mass; and then he attended a celebration of the oldest Catholic University in the world founded in 1424. (For a more detailed look at the itinerary *). 

I was curious about Francis’s attitude toward meeting these cultures outside the Vatican bubble. His stump speeches were very carefully worded, very “correct;” they seemed open and welcoming. He’s been the Pope for more than a decade, so he has a trusted staff. He is inclusive; he is inquisitive, and he is a reformer. His message was pretty much the same at every stop, so I concentrated on his body language and facial expressions as carefully as I could when he was introduced to hundreds of diverse people. 

At times he seemed to exude a kind of joy, something that I most remember in John 23 and John Paul the First. Frankly, I am more comfortable with that than the seriously burdened look of John Paul the Second or Benedict, whose smiles felt like, against their better judgment, they were following a commandment or a recommendation from the Papal PR team rather than experiencing real joy. Perhaps that is a professional hazard whether your moniker is the Bishop of Rome or Pontifex Maximus. On Francis’s face, a bit of absolute joy still shines, though he shows the wear of years of trying to do the most impossible job in the Catholic Church. Serious work, indeed.

This may be a byproduct of taking the world and our responsibilities seriously. It is not the ecstasy of understanding the chorus of birds' songs that Francis’s namesake experienced, but Francis of Assisi was a mystic, not the practical workaholic charged with modernizing an antiquated, creaky, and too often corrupt regal court. Ignatius’s final years in Rome were largely administrative, too, but we do not have live footage of his daily routine. 

I want to talk about three public conversations that I witnessed.

My god, he’s getting dressed down! 

I followed the progress of Pope Francis’s visit to both campuses of the oldest Catholic University in the world on the occasion of its 600th-anniversary celebration. Even with a few interruptions, that's a pretty good run.

At the Old University of Leuven, which occupies the magnificent ancient buildings, the primary language is Dutch. Francis graciously thanked his hosts and gave a short blessing or prayer in Italian. Then, a striking woman stepped up the rostrum and began to address him in Dutch. A woman in charge, she wore no signs of belonging to a religious congregation. She smiled; she seemed equally gracious and respectful, but I could see that she spoke to Francis as an equal, believer-to-believer, not as his subject in a medieval court. Google suggests that she was probably Bénédicte Lemmelijn, dean of the theology faculty.

There was no simultaneous translation available on YouTube. The Pope had a translator standing at his back, but I had no such luxury. However, I decided not to rush to Google to get an authorized translation into a language I understood. Instead, I tried to listen to the words spoken without fully understanding and watch her deliver the unspoken.  

Soon it became clear. She was politely and respectfully dressing him down! Of course, their body language, tone, and facial expressions told some of the story. She did not hold back. I was captivated. Francis appeared flummoxed, not shaken but clearly thrown off his game. The ceremony ended. It did not seem cut short, but when it was over, Francis was taken out past a good student choir that sang in either old Flemish or Dutch. Then, without much ado, he was whisked off to Rome for the opening of the Synod. 

I knew, in a way that defies logic and rational thought, that I had witnessed the salvos of a debate that neither party will be able to win conclusively, given our limited human resources. I didn’t know anything about the shape of the argument other than it was more vast than either party realized. It was shielded by the norms of doctrinal debate and the history of reform, but it is now impossible to sweep it back under the rug.

After 20 minutes scanning various news reports, entirely European, I was able to sketch the outline of the dispute. I will summarize the argument as objectively as I can. The theological, religious studies, and philosophy departments at Leuven had prepared a paper for the Papal visit concerning the role of a professional, academic theology faculty in today’s world. They stated that they intended to be objective, using all the tools available as scholars and researchers to examine today’s faith landscape. One phrase struck me: “[T]heology as a scientific discipline is not a ventriloquist of the church.” 

Then the committee expressed a concern. “Throughout the history of the Church, women have been made invisible,” the letter read. “What place, then, for women in the Church?” The Pope gave a response that I knew by heart: “The Church [is] female, noting that the Italian word for it, “chiesa”, is a feminine noun.” Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, a climatologist at UCLouvain University, replied that Francis had “failed to rise to the occasion. . . . To reply that the Church is a woman is really missing the point of the question – about the Church’s respect for women and their role in the institution and in society.” 

The Pope could not let this pass in silence. Speaking at the French campus of Louvain, Francis said, “womanhood speaks to us of fruitful welcome, nurturing and life-giving dedication.. . . For this reason, a woman is more important than a man, but it is terrible when a woman wants to be a man: No, she is a woman, and this is ‘heavy’ and important,” he said. This argument wasn’t even going to fly at the more conservative campus. In a press release issued just moments after the pope’s speech, UCLouvain criticized Francis’ remarks on women as “conservative” and “deterministic and reductive.”

The line of questioning got under his skin. Responding to the criticism with journalists on the plane back to Rome, he returned to his argument about women's place and role, “if this seems ‘conservative’ to some people, it is because they do not understand, or ‘there is an obtuse mind that does not want to hear about this.” 

I hear a chorus of critics telling me that I could not have fleshed out this argument simply by listening to an unfiltered Dutch speech without translation, picking up a few words in a short statement in Italian, some body language, and the inflection in the speakers’ voices. And the critics are right. But I know that given their arguments' positions or merit, neither side can claim victory and that an unresolved dispute will continue unresolved. 

One man stood for thousands.

The second conversation I want to talk about is a speech by one man at the “Penitential” ceremony, which began the current Synod session in Saint Peters. Laurence Gien, standing in front of bishops, cardinals, all the members of the Synod, and Pope Francis himself, gave testimony about the trauma of being molested by a priest. He said he was “just trying to appeal to their better selves.” 

The sanctuary of Saint Peters was bare. The clergy did not wear vestments, and although they seemed to be seated by rank, the separation did not seem as rigid as when they wear their miters. Francis's slightly elevated chair was on the east side. There were some prayers, and a choir, with a predominance of young women, sang. But again, it did not have the formal feel of a papal ceremony. 

After a reading from the Hebrew Bible, Gien was the first to speak. A dignified man in a simple black suit stood facing the pope on the opposite side of the sanctuary and began to describe in some detail his molestation when he was 11 years old. I think he said, “Sixty years ago.” It had such an impact on me that I had to review it. Here is the YouTube link; Gien begins at the time mark 8:46.

Gien said he was “just trying to appeal to their better selves.” I am still searching for the words that adequately describe my reaction. The Church has been searching for words since the extent of the abuse and the attempted cover-ups first came to light. Gien’s personal description was so explicit that it took my breath away. He even described the act itself: “Far from Rome, in a small town in Southern Africa, a predator honed in on me … on a beautiful South African morning, he led me by the hand to a dark place where, in the screaming silence, he took from me what should never be taken from any child.” No one in Saint Peter’s looked away, though I noticed that some senior clergy avoided eye contact at difficult points in the narration.

Gien said that the Church had looked away for too long. He called for transparency, but there was no call for reparations or punishment. He simply said that these incidents should have been reported to the authorities. He also said that the effects of this kind of abuse can never be erased and that they ripple out into the wider church. 

Many details regarding compensation, prevention, and punishment must still be worked out. I would personally like to see an investigation of Timothy Dolan’s transfer of 57 million dollars into financial instruments, among them a trust he established for the maintenance of Catholic cemeteries to avoid paying compensation to victims of abuse in Milwaukee. I did not see Dolan among the cardinals at this ceremony. He’s one of the churchmen elected to represent the US Church at the Synod; he is known for his hostile response to the victims of clerical abuse seeking reparations; he is also one of the most responsible for the Americans’ lackluster response to Francis’s call for a Synod; I do know that he was in New York on the 19th of October for the Alfred E. Smith political dinner where he hosted Donald Trump. The Synod closes on the 27th. Dolan clearly knows who butters his bread.

This was a remarkable moment. What was secretly hidden has come to light, but senior officials can no longer obstruct victims motivated by protecting the Institution’s good name or assets.

“The Church cannot be understood without being rooted in a place and a culture.”

When I decided to dedicate time to observing the Synod and comparing notes with my experience during Vatican II, I asked myself, where are the theologians, or more specifically, who are the best creative theologians working today? Who are John Courtney Murray, Gus Weigle, Hans Kung, Urs van Balthasar, Edward Schillebeeckx, Yves Congar, Augustin Bea, and Henri de Lubac in today’s church? Who are the men and women Kaiser would be asking to his legendary Sunday night dinners? 

But what do I really know about doing theology? As a Jesuit theology student, I read something from the luminaries I listed, usually 10 to 20 mimeographed, pirated pages from a larger text or article. There was some casuistry afloat that Jesuit seminarians were not obliged to pay the high price of textbooks, including royalties to the author because they were Jesuits. I cannot remember ever spending a semester with one book in its entirety. This was how I might open my argument that I cannot recognize essential theology—due to my inadequate Jesuit training.

However, I’d witnessed great theology being done, although I was hardly aware of it. During the year that I lived in a small community on the Upper Westside with Avery Dulles, he finished “Models of the Church.” He taught courses, so days were consumed with class and student meetings, but every night after dinner, when all the dishes had been washed and put away, he would go to his room, surrounded by stacks of books—this was very pre-Google—and he shut the door.  

Avery was very conservative by disposition. There was no firebrand reformer like Hans Kung, but in retrospect, the open way Avery embraced several of the Reform models was itself radical. He would share some of the issues with us from time to time over dinner, but the work, at least the portion that we witnessed, was solitary. We did not knock and invite him to watch a TV show with us. But from long before 1972-3 in a sprawling shared apartment on 102nd Street, this is how theology was done. Even in the intense work at the old Woodstock leading up to Vatican II, individuals worked alone and came together to test one another and present a unified, coherent position. All that changed at Vatican II, and I’d like to think that Kaiser’s Sunday soirees also had something to do with it. 

Cardinal Jean-Claude Hollerich is a young Jesuit Cardinal from Luxembourg whom Francis chose as the Synod's General Rapporteur, indicating a high level of confidence and trust. He was also a member of the Japanese Province, as were Pedro Arrupe, Father Adolfo Nicolás Pachón, and Father LaSalle, whom I revere as the first Jesuit Zen Master. 

Cardinal Hollerich introduced the Synodal module focused on “Places " by stating that the Church “cannot be understood without being rooted in a place and a culture.” This phrase caught my attention. I would describe it as “theological anthropology,” or at least that discipline will have a significant impact. It also feels like an extension of the Ignatian missionary impulse without the colonial jingoism that accompanied those first brave explorers, missionaries, and saints. I would describe it as “theological anthropology,” or at least that discipline will have a significant impact. 

If it is a theological proposition, it seems like the exact opposite of a universal church where one size fits all, that the good news of liberation Jesus delivered in the first century of the common era transcends language and culture, the theological template of the church triumphant; it will require our best minds to unpack it and our most prayerful Christians to work with it in the various cultures they encounter. That cannot be a solitary pursuit. Working together will be the norm. Observing the panels that I’ve witnessed during the Synod, they are much more diverse than I’d imagined; they include religious women, laymen and women, many people of color, and many languages other than the traditional European church languages, though Italian seems to be the lingua franca.

This theological inquiry dovetails with the personal work I’ve been doing for over 50 years. Suddenly, the Synod’s inquiry became interesting again.

Going to Battle under a False Flag.

I began my survey of the Synod prepared to criticize Francis; I was looking for evidence that his dream of a Synod on Synodality was insignificant, bogged down, and unable to move past Curial politics to what matters. The Synod's day-to-day work seems geared to ensuring that “Sector Eight” functions smoothly. I looked at Francis during a deliberation or a ceremony, and I thought I saw a bleak and frustrated expression, as you might expect after spending years defining terms and conditions while carefully and deliberately sidestepping urgent questions lurking in the shadows. 

We’re at the end of an era. Speaking from the Chair of Peter as an oracle, Francis cannot transform our modern world. I don’t think Popes ever could, although it’s part of the script religious monarchs inherit. (I discussed my view of the Infallibility doctrine in “Vatican I was a Colossal Mistake”). But once or twice in a century, it might be possible to bypass this repetition of history and begin anew. Did Francis miss this opportunity?

The Lord Jesus preached a vision of humankind transformed. He did not teach us, love us, live, die, and then live again so that we could all say our prayers in Latin and cower before Irish priests lecturing about the evils of masturbation. He did not throw the money changers out of the Temple at the risk of his life so that priests in his name could make deals with Mafiosa to stuff their pockets. He did not preach freedom, love, and salvation so that nuns recruited by colonizers would savage indigenous children on the tundra or the savanna and subjugate them to the whim of European elites. He did not form an old boys' club with a peculiar set of initiation rituals for this new elite, or worse, afford cover for pedophiles to abuse children. Once in a great while, an opening appears, giving us a chance to wipe away the insidious accretions of the past and start afresh. That was the promise of Vatican II.

I focused on the concerned look on Francis’s face and the lack of enthusiasm in Paul Six Hall rather than the politics of reform. I could barely detect a smile among the delegates. Perhaps everyone was simply trying to be “recollected," but I doubt it. Francis is trying to reset the stage for Vatican II's promise to finally take hold, but the forces of the clerical monarchy are still too strong to die with a single blow, especially because Francis is determined to use collegial decision-making to kill the demon. Vatican II brought out the best of theological thinking that had gone into hiding during the reactionary authoritarian pontificates of almost every Pope called Pius since Vatican I, but it only took a few years before the entrenched monarchy and the aristocrats who love the money and power began to write their revisionist history and mount an aggressive campaign against reform. Francis’s critics have started their attack, and we can see that this clique is perhaps more underground but still alive and kicking in the halls of the Vatican and elsewhere.

Jesus said a person's enemies will be those of his own household (Matthew 10:36). When I began to see Francis’s critics emerge, I realized that I had been wrong in my initial assessment of the Synod. It was pretty clear that many Americans in the hierarchy had become enemies of Francis--they told us. But some are passive-aggressive and try to hide. They use False Flag tactics to discredit or implicate their rivals, create the appearance of enemies when none exist, or create the illusion of organized and directed persecution.

In my view, the tactics of the devout cult that reveres Latin Mass burn all the oxygen in the room and stifle any real conversation. That is the intention. They parade a pious front to avoid criticism but are filled with too much self-pity to merit serious consideration. Sentimental arguments based on nostalgia are False Flags. Go ahead. Pawn your freedom for an “et cum spiritu,” but do it on your own time. 

However, when I recognized the tactic, I saw evidence that Francis’s Synod was succeeding. He is playing a long, deliberate game to replace Papal fiat with a far more open and democratic process. It will take more time than he has, so he is laying the foundation and will have to wait for death to cancel a lot of the votes for monarchy. 

Some of the questions that the Synod cannot answer cannot yet be answered. Best leave them that way. All the churchmen Francis talked with on his journey were dressed in almost identical costumes; they were from many races and ethnicities, but, at least in my sample, they were almost all men. To grasp all things is the only way to bring the word of God to all men and women, and it will take some time before women's voices gain parity. Francis can say that the word for church is feminine, but that does not settle the conversation. I don’t know how it will play out, but neither does Francis.

What would Kaiser do with all this? He would write. He would not hold back. He included a vast array of theology in his dream. His lease on a rather luxurious apartment in Rome became, at least in legend, the hotbed of the most forward-thinking theologians and experts at the Council. To quote Cardinal Hollerich, Kaiser cannot be understood without being rooted in a place and a culture. The church you reported on with your genius, Bob, continues and changes, probably not fast enough for your taste, but it is changing.

I confess, Bob, that you still inspire me. I miss your voice, the breath of your vision, and the depth of your commitment. Hand it to Francis; he is trying to be all things to all men. I know that you, Bob would approve, and so do I. I pledge to do my best to carry on the dream. 

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*Luxembourg's population is 672,050, and Belgium's is much larger, at 11,870,000. Those countries are two of the last four remaining Catholic countries with royals as constitutional heads of state. Queen Mathilde of Belgium is one of only four women allowed to wear white in the presence of the Pope, and I can’t pass over in silence that Belgium was one of the last notoriously evil colonizing powers. 

Indonesia, with a population of 281,190,067 in 2022, is the largest Muslim-majority country in the world. India has the largest Muslim population as well as more than 4000 Jesuits, the most of any country in the world. East Timor’s population of 1.341 million fought for independence twice--from Portugal in 1975 and Indonesia in 2002. Papua New Guinea, with a population of 10,329,931, has one of the richest biodiverse environments remaining on Earth, 

Singapore, with its 5.637 million people, has more than 35% who identify as Christian; Anglicans number 22,000, which seems small given that it was one of the last colonial holdings of the United Kingdom in Southeast Asia. It gained independence on 9 August 1965. 

Louvain University, founded in 1424, has 30,760 on its new French-speaking campus, but from what I was able to observe of language, customs, and Francis’s somewhat perplexed look, the smaller Old University of Leuven occupies the very old medieval buildings and is primarily Flemish or Dutch-speaking.