Religious 'bigotry' or 'doctrinal differences'?

Many Protestants think so. Not surprisingly, Catholic apologians don't. But, surprisingly, a noted rabbi doesn't either.

First, though, the background.

Tuesday last the Vatican restated the primacy of the Roman Catholic Church. That is, and as The Associated Press reported it, "other Christian communities are either defective or not true churches and Catholicism provides the only true path to salvation."

Which, of course, offends many good and God-fearing Protestants and Jews, some of whom argue that such a position is not just arrogant egotisticalism but about as far as you can get from the ecumenicalism that Catholic leaders say they still embrace.

"Outrageous!" said one caller, deeply religious and equally troubled. "How dare they!" said another. Letter writer Karen Peto of West Newton was appalled. "I was taught, like many others, to be respectful of other peoples' religious beliefs and not berate them," she said. "The pope overstepped his boundaries."

And, as would be expected, some editorial page cartoonists had a field day.

The Hartford Courant's Bob Englehart depicted Jesus quoting Matthew 18:20 -- "For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am among them." He then depicted Pope Benedict offering a "correction" -- "Where two or three Catholics are gathered ... ."

Pat Bagley at the Salt Lake Tribune drew Benedict with his arms crossed and back turned outside the Pearly Gates. Says St. Peter, on his cell phone to God, "He claims to be your bouncer."

It's bigotry, pure and simple -- the Dominus Iesus, that is, not the critics -- right?

No it's not, insists Bill Donohue, a former LaRoche College professor and president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights. He's a self-described "big mouth" who relies on an extensive e-mail address book to flame critics perceived as anti-Catholic bigots.

(In the interests of full disclosure, Mr. Donohue and I went a few national rounds in February 2006 over a Donald Collins commentary that appeared on the Trib's op-ed page.)

So, I e-mailed Donohue: "(H)ow is Benedict's restating the primacy of the Roman Catholic Church not the same kind of bigotry that you regularly decry?"

First he referred me to a statement in support of the pope's position by his friend Rabbi Irwin Kula (more on that later). But I pressed Donohue for his position. Not a polemic, mind you, but a scholarly response.

"Jesus did not found many churches," he wrote. "He founded only one. The root cause of the Protestant is 'protest' and what exactly is it that Protestants are protesting save the Catholic Church from which they broke away?"

Donohue says he has many evangelical friends, some of whom maintain that his religion is a "false" religion. "That is not bigotry -- it is a statement of their sincerely held beliefs; they are not meant to be derogatory.

"But when Bob Jones University said that my religion was a 'Satanic counterfeit,' that was a clear example of bigotry. That's the difference."

Continued Donohue: "The (Dominus Iesus) says, 'It is possible, according to Catholic doctrine, to affirm correctly that the Church of Christ is present and operative in the churches and ecclesial Communities not yet fully in communion with the Catholic Church ... .'

"Those are not the words of bigotry but of doctrinal differences," he said.

So, one man's "bigotry" is another's "doctrinal differences"?

Just to be clear, Donohue reminds that the pontiff's intended audience was "liberal Catholic theologians, many of whom have confused the laity by offering their novel interpretations of what they conveniently call 'the spirit of Vatican II.'

"What the pope is doing is bringing clarity to what the official Vatican II documents actually said," Donohue noted.

The implication is that this restating of the Dominus Iesus is an internal matter. But the external fallout cannot be ignored.

Back to Irwin Kula, an eighth-generation traditional rabbi who heads the National Center for Learning and Leadership, author of "Yearnings: Embracing the Sacred Messiness of Life," and a friend of Bill Donohue.

The media and liberal religious leaders do not understand what Benedict is trying to do, he told me in an e-mail. Far more than "a restatement of history" (my phrase, not his) of a long-held Catholic doctrine, "the pope is saying something theologically and philosophically far more subtle and challenging," Rabbi Kula said.

"(He) is bringing together two strands of history (emphasis in the original) that have not yet been brought together -- the knowledge that the Church is the one true Church (one might call this pre-Vatican II understanding of the truth and is what petrifies (church) liberals and Jews) and the deep commitment to ecumenism (one might call this post Vatican II)."

Kula's bottom line: "The pope is claiming that absolute truth and ecumenism (emphasis in the original) can be held together ... ; they simply have not been articulated together so starkly and we do not know if they can be genuinely held together."

The Catholic League's Bill Donohue is blunt when he states there "is too much phony interreligious dialogue being conducted and, for my money, the only dialogue worth the effort must be grounded in honesty and civility. That is exactly what the Vatican has done."

But, and in the spirit of Donohue's "doctrinal differences," the Catholic Church should not be surprised when critics retort, as French social essayist Salomon Reinach did in 1904, that "Religion is a sum of scruples which impede the free exercise of our faculties."

Put more simply, such a doctrine may be too full of itself for its own good.

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