Note: Earlier this spring, Ignatius Press published “True Confessions: Voices of Faith from a Life in the Church.” The author delivered these remarks at the University of Dallas on April 19.
I’d like these comments to do two things. I want to share some general thoughts about True Confessions: why I wrote it, how I wrote it, what I found, and why I hope people will read it. And then I’ll offer a few words about the current situation of the Catholic Church—especially in the United States, but also in the context of Rome and its current ambiguities.
Briefly put, I wrote the book because I could. I’ve worked in and around the Church for 46 years; 23 of them as senior aide and chief of staff to Charles Chaput, an exceptional man and a great bishop. When you do that, you see and experience a lot of things that people on the outside of Church structures—and even more so, people outside this country—never see and often don’t understand. Or don’t want to understand.
I dealt with the human, the legal, and the political fallout of the sex abuse scandal for 18 years as part of my duties. But more often—much more often—I saw the integrity and self-sacrifice, the joy and the hope, of the priests and people I worked alongside. So I’ve never lost confidence in the Church. Not for a moment. I love the Church, her pastors, and her people more today than when I started. Yet at the same time, a faithful life in the Church is a lot like a long and successful marriage. The framework is love, the spirit is trust, but the candor can get pretty blunt. And True Confessions has a boatload of candor about what’s right and wrong in the Church.
I started my career as a screenwriter and story analyst in LA, and the title True Confessions comes from the 1981 film of the same name. It’s a long way from an exercise in piety, but as films go, it’s profoundly Catholic, and one of my favorite movies. I also had Augustine’s Confessions in my head as I wrote because, like Augustine, we confess our sins, but we also confess our faith. Baptism makes all of us confessors of Jesus Christ, his Church and her teachings. The central question of a Christian life is whether we’re true to what we claim to believe, or if we’re lying to ourselves and everybody else when we call ourselves Christians. Every one of the men and women I interviewed for True Confessions believes and actually lives what the Church teaches, or at least sincerely tries, often at personal cost. In other words, they don’t lie when they pray.
Which brings me to the book’s methodology. At first I thought I’d write the grand analysis of the Church in the United States. But others have already done that very well. So I settled instead on a mix of personal commentary and in-depth interviews, 103 of them over a 17-month period, with bishops, clergy, religious, and laypeople in 25 states across the country. And I focused on committed, faithful Catholics. The tepid, the dissenters, and the chronic complainers already get plenty of media attention. I wanted to know what faithful people think; why they have hope; why they have joy; why they love and stay in the Church at a time of external hostility and internal confusion. And I think True Confessions delivers on that.
So why should anyone bother reading it? Let me put it this way.
We live in a pivotal time because we’re in the middle of a new reformation; literally a “re-formation” or deep restructuring of the way we think about the world, its organization, and ourselves; what it means to be human. The key social, cultural, and political issues of our day are all anthropological. And Psalm 8, verse 4, asks exactly the key question: What is man that God—assuming a God exists—would care for him?
In other words, is there anything transcendent or special at all about us as human animals, beyond our ability to think ourselves into one crisis after another. In the real world, we’re never as smart as we think we are. So again and again, the blowback from our mistakes is always a huge surprise. Without the humility and wisdom that come from a deep faith in God, humanity is not much more than a Sorcerer’s Apprentice. And the magic we play with can have very unhappy results.
Tocqueville wrote that, “If faith be [absent in a man, then] he must serve; and if he [seeks to] be free, he must believe.” Put simply: No God, no freedom. When God leaves the stage, the state inevitably expands to take his place. Without the biblical God, we invariably end up with a disguised form of idolatry. And it usually involves politics, because politics is about getting and using power.
This is why any discord that enfeebles the Catholic community and its witness from within is so corrosive, not just for the Catholic Church, but also for a culture of true freedom. Pope Francis has championed some important elements of Catholic teaching. His commitment to the poor is beyond question. But his criticism of American Church leadership and the nature of Catholic life in this country is not merely unwarranted. It’s ill-informed, damaging, and often just mean-spirited.
Along with his strengths, Francis has an uncanny ability to create ambiguity, which then feeds confusion and conflict, which then actually weaken the Catholic witness in this country at a time when that witness is urgently needed.
So again, why bother reading True Confessions?
Read it to learn what faithful American Catholic bishops and priests, deacons, religious, and laypeople actually think — not what others think they think, or claim they think, or want them to think. On matters of religion, our mass media are often ignorant at best, and hostile at worst. Yet there’s a tremendous amount of energy and hope in the authentic, believing Church. And I saw it again and again in my interviews. As believers today we’re dealing with too many problems to count, including a decline in our numbers. But we’re not powerless. If we remember Church history, it’s never really been different. When I interviewed Cardinal Timothy Dolan—who has his doctorate in Church history—he stressed that there’s never really been a “golden age” of tranquility for the Church; she’s always in a cycle of growth, stasis, decline, and renewal. Fear—fear of the future and fear of our problems—drives out love and saps the spirit, and if we really believe in the Gospel, there’s no excuse for it. In the long run, numbers do matter in the renewal of a culture. But character and conviction matter more. And so do courage and endurance. They come first; the numbers follow.
I’ve been a fan of Dietrich Bonhoeffer—the great Lutheran pastor murdered by the Third Reich—for more than 50 years. But it was my wife Suann who reminded me why he’s so relevant here, right now, to True Confessions as a text and also to our times. So I want to end with him because there’s a delicious irony in suggesting a Protestant patron for our Catholic moment.
When he spoke of the Catholic Church, Bonhoeffer described himself as a friendly critic and critical friend. He wrote much of his great book Ethics at Kloster Ettal, a Benedictine monastery. I think he’s important for us today because he cofounded the “Confessing Church” movement in Germany at a time when many Christians in Germany’s mainline Lutheran Church were eagerly submitting themselves to a murderous regime and grafting its doctrines onto the Gospel. The Confessing Church refused to do that. And its pastors and members paid the price. But they remained true to the Word of God.
We’re a very long way from Germany in the 1930s. Our circumstances are drastically different. But maybe not quite so distant or so different as we’d like to believe. The obligations and the privilege of our Baptism haven’t changed. We’re all of us called to be confessors of Jesus Christ; confessors of his Church and her teachings—in our private actions but also in the public square; which, by the way, underscores the importance of this institute and the work of its faculty, staff, and supporters in forming the next generation of leaders. Jesus said the truth will make us free. He didn’t say anything about it being convenient, and it very often isn’t. But when our confession of faith is true, when it comes from our heart and reshapes the course of our life and the focus of our loves . . . then we can call ourselves Christians.
And if True Confessions helps some people see that and live that, then it was worth the effort.
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Sounds like a timely and most worthy read.
The book is outstanding. The interview with the bishops is worth the price of the book. The extended interviews with Father Fessio and Archbishop Chaput, who should have been named a Cardinal, are just icing on the cake. Regarding the above remark “We’re a very long way from Germany in the 1930s.” Watching the news the past few days – perhaps not.
I totally agree with the author’s concluding remarks about the need to have the Bonhoeffer inspired Confessing Church movement as model for the Catholic Church in the U.S. at this time. I especially see the need to have Bonhoeffer’s vision enshrined in his involvement with the Barmen Declaration that asserted the Church’s opposition to Nazism judging it to be contrary to the Gospel. The Confessing Church model for the Church in the U.S. is needed to combat the creeping Evangelical Church originated and partly Nazi inspired White Christian Nationalist movement into the Catholic Church.
Could you please explain what Christian Nationalism looks like & why it should involve a certain shade of complexion? I don’t see a connection & especially not in the case of Catholics who are members of a global Church & of every size, shape , & ethnicity
The current go-to authority on anything WCN is the Yale University Sociologist, Philip Gorski. Read his short introduction here:
https://library.fes.de/pdf-files/international/20764.pdf
Or watch his lecture here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqeaHrHUt7A&t=9s
Or take up and read the book he co-authored with Samuel Perry, “The Flag and the Cross: White Christian Nationalism and the Threat to American Democracy”:
https://www.amazon.com/Flag-Cross-Christian-Nationalism-Democracy/dp/0197618685/ref=sr_1_1?crid=U94HDJQQQD2H&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.rpYpZDpf16CrM1W1ym8mA3gfDVuIY1Np9a3A5p9Y5VtWe8LNmF1vx-QkCRcvk2516jXTx-1G-eKwt-3iUjxQtPwuZ1a3_uvE1gIUWl11kWUEHZ04gMy5QPqbVUAoLfNM0pRCQ5RAkamJLlSDwSidl_iNXzut0uOVt1Qo7lFjkLTcQL_IX1RESJqnJsxdbjfRTw_qKW0ZvPIgv42ckjhRiWvnpZx25Pw1B3NtKaTW2C8.gK_u16s2ucrkax4ydu_PXVSt7BbTqky8A56AINUac7c&dib_tag=se&keywords=flag+and+cross&qid=1714083782&s=books&sprefix=flag+and+cross%2Cstripbooks%2C163&sr=1-1
For a synthesis and big picture of WCN and its root, that is Racism, from a Catholic perspective, I invite you to take up and read the book: “A White Catholic’s Guide to Racism and Priviledge,” by Father Daniel Horan, OFM. This one I personally found to be a theologically and biblically helpful vademecum.
Deacon Dom,
I appreciate you taking the time to reply and provide those links but the very first one I read accused Mike Johnson our current Speaker of the House of being a “White Christian Nationalist. ” I quit reading right there. Just no.
We are simply Catholics. We have different Rites but the shade of our complexion signifies nothing. And encouraging beliefs in discredited 19th Century ideologies like “Race ” or eugenics benefits no one.
Oh no! White people! Who believe in God! And who vote for Trump! How bad can it get? (Well, I live near Portland, Oregon, which has been nearly destroyed by people who hate Christians and Trump, so perhaps I’m a wee bit jaded by reality.)
“by Father Daniel Horan, OFM….”
The same lousy theologian who promotes homosexuality and transgenderism and rails against any Catholic who upholds Church teaching about sexuality, marriage, the body, etc. Horan’s work should be avoided. It’s quite lousy and is openly opposed to Church doctrine in several ways.
Very telling that you would promote any of the garbage produced by that apostate Horan, “Deacon”. You two are peas in a pod.
You are correct. The Catholic Church ideally does not discriminate on skin complexion. However, in reality White Christian Nationalism comes marching into the Catholic Church like a Trojan Horse through the unknowing Catholic branch of the MAGA movement.
Anything to deflect attention from the decades-long march into the Church of the White Christian Abortionalism movement, featuring men including Joe Biden, Ted Kennedy, John Kerry, and Mario Cuomo, among others. Keep in mind that these “Catholic” men, for decades, put their weight behind a movement that pinpointed black women and their babies. And now, of course, if one does publicly denounce Donald Trump with all required feverish hatred, you risk being called a racist, insurrectionist, etc., etc. It’s as boring as it is stupid. I think Trump is a blustery, arrogant, pompous blowhard. But, then, Joe Biden had that nonsense down decades ago. But Trump, unlike the really professional pols, at least gave some thought to the economy, got the U.S. out of some wars, and did some real good in the pro-life arena. (Oh, wait, I’m a White Christian Nationalist for simply stating facts, aren’t I?) Personally, I find it quite amusing how Trump, who already owns a few hotels and mansions, lives rent-free in the heads of so many leftist conspiracy theorists.
Biden recently made the sign of the cross during a pro choice laden campaign stop – very disturbing to say the least.
So Trump is the classic “lesser of two evils” candidate? Perhaps. But there is that attempted coup business, which makes some people wonder what a second term might entail. Not a “Christian Nationalist” but with a whiff of gangster.
Yet conspiracies abound, and there is a favorite one for each of us. We are all victims of culture and ego, knowing just enough to feel confident.
Mr. Meyer it’s a shame that people don’t understand how diverse Donald Trump’s voter base is. It may be largely Christian and perhaps nationalistic in a non interventionist way, but it’s surely not exclusively “White “.
I’m MAGA. I hate Deep State Washington. That’s why I’ll vote for Trump – because Deep State is out to destroy him.
They’re definitely attempting to keep him in court & off the campaign trail Deacon Edward. It feels like we’re in a banana republic or Stalin’s Russia.
What is the “deep state?” Please explain.
We feel the person who is most qualified should be in charge – didn’t always happen that way in the past, I agree.
Your comment about evangelicals is both profoundly ignorant and a blatant, disrespectful lie.
Not all evangelicals are the same. Many have been and are earnest Christians living holy lives to the best of their understanding, but there are also many so called evangelicals who have caused must destruction, division, bigotry and hatred. We must recognize both the good and bad. I speak as a former evangelical Protestant who is now an evangelical Catholic.
Yes, because the people screaming “death to Jews” and calling for the annihilation of Israel might look like militant progressives and their Moslem terrorist allies, but secretly they’re MAGA Republicans and Southern Baptists.
Dom:
As you indicate you are a disciple of “Rev.” Horan who as Carl Olden indicates preaches for fornication, sodomy etc etc, you (and “Rev.” Horan et al) would definitely not want to have a “Confessing Church,” because that would mean being in a church that does not serve the state.
The Confessing Church in Germany refused to serve the state, and refused to accept the “Church Tax” by which churches collaborated with the state, including the Nazi regime.
The “self-named” synodal church in Germany serve the state, and do its bidding, in exchange for huge cash from the Church Tax.
In a sort of imitation, the US dioceses and USCCB also serve the state, the BIG STATE (and its allies in BIG CORPORATION BIZ, BIG CORPORATE CAPTIVE MEDIA, BIG CORPORATE CAPTIVE NGOs, and BIG CORPORATE CAPTIVE UNIVERSITIES), and work tirelessly to take BIG FEDERAL CASH, while pretending they serve God (and not the state). It’s hard to pretend, but they keep at it, because….pretenses must be observed.
Perhaps someone will aptly name the church you and “Rev.” Horan prefer to devote yourselves to.
But don’t fall into the trap of marketing yourself as desiring a “confessing church,” because you would have to give up the LBGTQ sex revolution, and the BIG FED cash flows, and the warm feeling you get by believing that your political beliefs are sacred.
Whether you call it White Christian Nationalism or White Catholic Nationalism, this portion of the Church made up of white conservatives will be and in fact is now giving away the demographic center of gravity to the multiracial progressives. It will be a second Lost Cause.
I think demographically speaking the center of gravity’s moving in the direction of people of faith because those are the ones having children in above replacement level numbers. The rest of us aren’t.
We shouldn’t assume conservatives come in any particular colour. Social conservatives are much more the case in Latin America & more of those immigrating here are Evangelical & Pentecostal. Not progressives.
Francis X. Maier writes: “We live in a pivotal time [….] or deep restructuring of the way we think about the world, its organization, and ourselves; what it means to be human.” AND, of Pope Francis: “…his criticism of American Church [sic Church in America] leadership and the nature of Catholic life in this country is […] ill-informed, damaging, and often just mean-spirited. Along with his strengths, Francis has an uncanny ability to create ambiguity….” AND, then, in the United States, “we’re a very long way from Germany in the 1930s.”
FIRST, about those other “pivotal times” of the 1930s, a simplifying resentment of dysfunctional parliaments and other broad grievances gave us this: “Austria was then like an old mosaic; the cement, binding the various little stones together, had grown old and begun to crumble; as long as the work of art is not touched, it can continue to give a show of existence, but as soon as it receives a blow, it breaks into a thousand fragments” (Mein Kampf, end of Chapter 3).
SECOND, of our own different but still “mosaic” times, and the perennial Church, how better might a polyhedral, lapidary and synodal Church avoid the “crumble”? Perhaps not by ideologically branding and belittling as “backwardist” or “bigoted and rigid,” the Church in America, or now another “special case” of all of continental Africa, plus many other national bishops’ conferences, plus some sidelined Catholic successors of the apostles out of step on resuscitated ecclesial “issues” with the vanguard of appointees, experts, and now study groups?
THIRD, if synodality is correctly “not a parliament,” then how might this roundtabled and mosaic collage (formerly a “college of bishops”)—even including the “non-synod” (!) Der Synodal Weg—be better centered?
Better centered, perhaps, on the most recent papal addresses on the four “moral virtues”—the guideposts of the Catholic Social Teaching as the negation of all ideology (including forwardist progressivism); and on the three “theological virtues”—which are inseparable from the Deposit of Faith in its entirety, including the Catechism and Veritatis Splendor and moral absolutes.
Maier SUMMARIZES that “The key social, cultural, and political issues of our day are all anthropological.” Yes, the underlying moral and other less temporal realities…In the Apostolic Age of early centuries, the fog of “ambiguity” and disguised reductionism was about the nature of God and the Incarnation (Arianism and even Nestorianism); today it’s about the nature of Man (radical Secularism).
In our advance into a new and stark Apostolic Age…is Christian “anthropology” itself also being fed to Moloch? Not only in child sacrifice, euthanasia and gnostic gender theory–but even in Fiducia Supplicans’ ambiguously anti-scientific and pseudo-sacral blessing of “irregular” and anti-binary situations?
In this way can the Church really “stretch the grey area”? Or, are we in bed with the Big Lie?
I am not a frequent movie goer, but I do agree with you that “True Confessions” was a terrific movie. Rober Duvall is one of my favorite actors.
I have not read your book, but I did just read the summary on Amazon, and the reviews. There is certainly nothing wrong with writing about positive things going on in the U.S. Church, as long as they are not listed as typical, and I do not know if you do that or not. One of the “name” reviewers on Amazon indicates that the book gives a portrait of the vitality of the Church in the U.S. I don’t think that I could agree with that. For example, I just read that the city of Baltimore is reducing from 61 parishes to 21 parishes, and they are not alone in doing this. Every measurable statistic reported by CARA on the Church in the U.S. is in decline.
You state that you report what bishops, priests and deacons think, but I would be more interested in what they preach and do. I have not heard a homily by priest or bishop on a current moral issue in years (decades?).
One of the reviews said that the only bishops you mention by name are Chaput and Dolan. Was there a reason for this?
Again, I could not agree with you more about the movie “True Confessions.”
True the learned, successful in practice of the faith have much to offer to a troubled world with faith among the lesser on the wain, dramatically. We’ve had, as Maier quotes Church historian Cardinal Dolan, many periods of trial and dismay. Now if I say we’ve never had anything comparable to the decline of belief as at present, the repeated echo ‘That’s what they said at the last and the before that up until the persecution of Diocletian.
Well, hold on. What about 70 AD and the virtual apocalypse of Roman wrath. Yes, they were Jews mainly who suffered. Although the Apostles anticipated end times. John, the Apostle Jesus loved exiled by Domitian to Patmos wrote the Apocalypse as the Book of Revelation was once called, believing as scholars interpret John that emperor Domitian was the Antichrist. Likely so, since we recall Our Lord said we do not know the time until it occurs. Many of us again, including noteworthy churchmen tend to believe we’re living now in that moment. An indicator is that never in the history of the Church has the underpinnings of Revelation and Apostolic tradition been so severely damaged, perhaps beyond repair. At least beyond our immediate capability including those Francis X Maier interviewed and whom we look to for wisdom and guidance.
Those in most need, the woebegone are those with deficient catechesis and poor follow from the pulpit. The vast body of the Church is far from faith and practice most in a growing apostasy. Our mission is to reach them. We’re all, those of us with faith and knowledge the new missionaries of the Church whether by writing, preaching, example we are bearers of Christ.
I’m half-way through the book and consider it essential reading. I thank Mr. Maier for sharing his well-earned insider’s knowledge.
I appreciate Mr. Maier’s nod (understatement) to Deitrich Bonhoeffer. Bonhoeffer is not well-enough known.
To Mrs. Cracker’s questions about so-called Christian White Nationalism, I recently read an article that I found clarifying. The title will come to me in about half an hour, I’m sure.
Mrs. Cracker above – The Myth of White Christian Nationalism, Kenneth L. Woodward, First Things, May 2024.
Thank you very much, Cleo. I’ll check that out.
I appreciate Deacon Dom replying to my question, I really do but I’m not going to take ridiculous calumny against Speaker Mike Johnson seriously. I find that very disappointing. One can disagree with a brother in Christ over politics but not slander them that way.
https://www.firstthings.com/article/2024/05/the-myth-of-white-christian-nationalism
Thank you margaret!
Perhaps the FBI WAS justified in investigating certain Catholic groups in the US!
Probably not James. I mean the FBI had one of their own Catholic agents working for Russia for years if I remember correctly. They might want to take a closer look at their own people before borrowing from silly lists like the SPLC’s
“Hate Groups”. And if I recall, none of those listed in the FBI memo were diocesan approved TLM communities. Though it’s not the FBI’s business in the first place whether we attend diocesan or SSXPX Masses. They aren’t arbiters of Catholic compliance or orthodoxy.
As Mrscracker already suggested, probably not Mr. Connor.
On the other hand, if the imagined purpose of the Church is now understood to be providing service to the state, then serving God first, when the state promotes what God outlaws, is a crime against the state, and the FBI would understandably be investigating and surveilling the Church. You perhaps agree with that?
Eric Metaxas has just released “Religionless Christianity,” which goes into great depth in making a compelling analogy between Deitrich Bonhoeffer and his times, as well as his heroic response to those times, with our own. Well worth reading. Metaxis is an expert, bar none, on Deitrich Bonhoeffer, and has been a voice sounding warnings for we Catholics and Christians since his last book, “Letters to an American Church”. He doesn’t mix words, his points are biblically based and rooted in historical fact. Metaxas makes it clear we are fiddling while the world is catching fire once again, and maybe for a third catastrophic time. His message: WAKE UP!