How to Start a Rumor

Maybe everyone should make up their own mind about NT Wrights anti-Catholic bias after reading NT Wright Responds to Richard Neuhaus in First Things, published by the Institute on Religion and Public Life, founded by Richard John Neuhaus, himself:

Second, there is no “pervasive edge of anti-Catholicism” in the book [=Surprised by Hope], which is in no sense a denominational polemic. Most of my main targets are in my own church. (Does that make me “anti-Anglican”?) In the quest to speak clearly about eschatology, classic Roman Catholicism is a friend and ally. Among my greatest encouragers has been Gerry O’Collins, formerly of the Gregorian University. When I taught there as a happy guest six years ago, including being introduced to the man Neuhaus calls “John Paul the Great,” I don’t think anyone would have noticed the slightest tinge of anti-Catholicism. Indeed, some of my Reformed critics regularly accuse me of being far too friendly to Rome, but that is another story. More poignantly, on my last visit to a dear but sick friend, before his untimely death, I found him reading Surprised by Hope , and he professed himself delighted. He was Kevin Dunn, my “opposite number” and occasional golf partner, the late Roman Catholic bishop of Hexham and Newcastle.

Nor was I “refuting Catholic ecclesiology” when I quoted Douglas Farrow”and neither was I ignorant of the fact that Doug, a good friend these past twenty years, has recently converted to Roman Catholicism. Doug was rightly attacking a particular form of ecclesial triumphalism, which occurs in many traditions, including some parts of Catholic tradition at some, not all, periods in history”but also occurring, particularly, in various types of liberal Protestantism. In any case, that part of the book was hardly central or particularly load-bearing for the whole.

More important, I was not attempting to claim that the present pope was coming round to my way of thinking or that I was offering him “tutelage.” I was merely noting, as anyone familiar with Cardinal Ratzinger’s work surely knows, that in his 1977 book Eschatology , he offers a remarkable account of purgatory in terms of the fire spoken of in 1 Corinthians 3 and states that this fire, which is a metaphor for the all-consuming meeting with Christ himself, “cannot be quantified by the measurements of earthly time.” This is a careful and explicit rejection of some aspects of what some Roman Catholics had sometimes taught in earlier times” just as he refers to “what were in part objectionable and deformed practices,” presumably meaning the sale of indulgences and the like.

In other words, Ratzinger was arguing, long before I started writing on this subject, (a) that traditional expressions of purgatory in terms of a linear, temporal progression are mistaken; (b) that at or after death the redeemed person meets with Christ in a moment of fiery judgment that burns away all the dross, and that this is what the traditional language of “purgatory” is attempting to refer to; and (c) that the Reformers were right to react against some practices that had grown up around the doctrine as some people taught and perceived it at the time. All I was doing was hailing this fine piece of work by a great Roman theologian of our day.

As for suggesting that I would do well to consult the pope’s new encyclical, Spe Salvi , and what it says about purgatory”well, Neuhaus should himself read not only what the encyclical says about purgatory (since it repeats exactly the argument Ratzinger had made thirty years earlier) but also my grateful comments on that encyclical in The Tablet last December. Do your homework, Neuhaus, I wanted to say again and again.

Why should Neuhaus imagine such unseemly and pervasive anti-Catholicism? He thinks it is because I “must justify [my] separation from the centering authority of the ancient Church.” How bizarre. Of course, I know that many people brought up in the Germanic world, presented with a stark choice between a very Protestant (and latterly existentialist) Lutheranism and a traditional Catholicism, found themselves facing that sort of question. As Neuhaus said to me over lunch recently, many good Lutherans are taught to remind themselves every day why they are not Roman Catholics.

Or was there something else?