Paul J. Griffiths, 47, has a degree in theology and teaches about the Catholic faith, but he’s not a theologian. Instead, Griffiths—who also holds a master’s degree in Sanskrit and classical Indian religion and a doctorate in Buddhist studies—is the first chair of Catholic studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago, a position he has held for three years. Before that, he taught about the philosophy of religion at the University of Chicago. His journey of faith—from a non-religious upbringing through the Anglican Church and finally to Catholicism—mirrors his trek from his native England through extensive travels in Asia to settling in the American Midwest. A naturalized U.S. citizen, Griffiths and his family were received into the Catholic Church in 1996.

 The Catholic New World: Why is Catholic studies important academically, as opposed to theologically?

 Paul J. Griffiths: That’s one of the interesting restrictions on me here; I’m not supposed to present what I do as theology.

 I think from the point of view of this university and other public schools as well, Catholic studies is one of a long list of tradition-specific or group-specific programs they want to develop. That goes along with other religious programs like Jewish studies or Islamic studies; it also goes along with ethnic studies of various sorts, and all these things are academic creations of the last 25 or 30 years.

 One reason is that we’re interested in serving the students that actually constitute our student body. At this school, about half the undergraduates are Catholic. In addition, there’s sort of a more principled justification as well. Catholicism historically has been very important, and it still is, in all sorts of ways—intellectually, institutionally, politically—and that’s its own reason for studying it. Especially in Chicago. You can’t get too far in talking about Chicago without talking about the Catholic Church.

TCNW: What do you think sets Catholics apart?

 PJG: There’s nothing quite like the Catholic Church. You can make a case that it’s the longest running institutional form in the world. That fact and the fact that it’s so complicatedly connected with historical and political events makes it different, I think. The Catholic Church is the only genuinely influential transnational entity that isn’t a corporation. What you’ve got in the world now is nation-states like this one, this empire-building one we live in, and you have increasingly powerful transnational corporations. But the only other thing that is really transnational is the Catholic Church.

 TCNW: How much influence does the church really have, given the current situation?

 PJG: That’s a difficult question to answer. On political events? I think a fair amount. If you look at the cataclysmic events of the last 30 years, beginning, say, with the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the various revolutions in Eastern Europe, I think the Catholic Church had a great deal of influence on that—very clearly in Poland. Of course the pope is Polish and wields a great deal of influence there.

 More recently, it’s hard to know what influence exactly the church wields. In the last (several) weeks, the pope has scolded Tony Blair, telling him he shouldn’t be following the United States into the projected Iraqi war. He sent a papal envoy to see President Bush. At the very least, they listen to these people. … To some extent, the church is the only radically unaligned voice to speak on some political events.

 As far as influence on other things, non-political events, that’s much more subtle and complicated. I think it differs huge amounts in different parts of the world. It’s notorious that U.S. Catholics do not function as a political bloc; there is no Catholic vote, and so there is no influence of that sort in North America, or in Great Britain or Western Europe, for that matter. But that’s different in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia, where the Catholic Church is growing rapidly and Catholics do tend to behave more as a group—which creates its own problems. That’s part of the problem in Nigeria, where Catholics and Muslims are not getting along. So these things are complicated.

TCNW: Do Catholics behave less like a group in North America and Western Europe because there are more of them? Smaller groups seem more likely to stick together.

PJG: Right, the oppressed minority is bonded by that experience. But part of it is that political and economic life in Western Europe and the U.S. is very different from that in other parts of the world. What those political and economic forces tend to do to everybody, not just Catholics, is create interest groups that have to do primarily with socio-economic status and not other things. Catholics tend to vote their pocketbooks like anyone else. If you’re a poor Catholic you vote like a poor person; if you’re a rich Catholic you vote like a rich person in this country and the same is true in Europe.

TCNW: Do you think the Catholic Church has spiritual influence beyond the world’s billion Catholics?

 PJG: Yes. I think the present pope is an important part of that. He’s got a profile that makes that possible. There’s a certain spiritual weight there. At the same time, so many of the church’s teachings are so profoundly unpopular with nearly everybody in the industrialized world, and clearly those are not being listened to. So it doesn’t come out in that way, but it does in other ways. … When the pope comes to the U.S. and says, “Look, it’s really time you stopped putting people to death for criminal offenses,” he’s at least listened to. There’s no doubt in my mind that the consistent witness of the church about that has been one of the factors in the increasing tension about the use of the death penalty in this country.

 It really does depend on how countercultural teachings are. With respect to contraception and abortion, there’s no discernable effect.

TCNW: You were baptized in 1977, the year before you got your theology degree, and then seven years ago you were received into the Catholic Church. Can you tell me a little bit about those religious transitions?

 PJG: I was born into a notionally Anglican family. You can see how notionally in that my oldest sister was baptized as a baby and the rest of us were not. My parents were not serious Anglicans, although we went to church on Christmas and Easter and for weddings and things. I began practicing more seriously in my late teens, kind of a common conversion experience I suppose, and that was led to me to study theology as an undergraduate and be baptized. Then for 20 years or so, I was a happy Anglican, or Episcopalian here. But after I left England, it seemed less and less clear why I was Anglican. It was clear why I was Christian, but Anglicanism seemed a bit more odd, and it began to seem clear to me that being Anglican and being English were very closely connected. If I wasn’t really English anymore, it didn’t make much sense.

 I was traveling a lot in Asia at the time, and I was very impressed with the world presence of the Catholic Church and the ways in which it’s become inculturated, for example, in India. The contrast with the remnants of the Anglican Church there was quite striking. The Anglican Church in India tends to be kind of a frozen remnant of late-Victorian Englishness. The Catholic Church on the other hand was completely inculturated, very Indian.

TCNW: Not a frozen remnant of the Middle Ages or the Renaissance?

PJG: Absolutely not. Quite the other thing. I was very impressed by that. That, and other things as well. The teaching documents issued by the present pope became increasingly seductively attractive—Evangelium Vitae especially was a transition point. He was really trying to present the Gospel to the world, and no other church was really doing that. Also, oddly, the publication of the new Catechism in English in the early 1990s. I was doing a lot of adult education in the Anglican Church, and I started to use it because it’s very usable. But it seemed very odd to be using a Catholic object to teach in an Anglican church. So I also gradually moved closer to the Catholic Church. I also had to persuade my wife, which took a year or two. We were all received at St. Thomas the Apostle (Parish) in Hyde Park.

TCNW: You’re writing a book on how Catholics think. How do Catholics think, and do you fit into that?

 PJG: I think there is a Catholic intellectual style, and I’m trying to instantiate it in my own thinking.

 By intellectual style, I don’t mean a set of conclusions. I think it’s rather a way of going at questions, a way that’s thoughtful, serious about tradition, always in conversation with tradition, that is opposed to the Enlightenment view that all truth is arrivable at by the disembodied individual sitting and thinking all by herself in an armchair. Of course the particular tradition that it’s engaged with is the Catholic one.

 I think you can recognize the Catholic style of thought across the liberal-conservative divide, so that some of the archetypically Catholics of our day, or sort of the more respectable ones like Michael Novak and Richard Neuhaus, and on the other hand, the more liberal, moderate Catholics, like Margaret Steinfels and people like that—they’re all recognizably thinking like Catholics. It’s just that they’ve ended up in different substantive places and they’ve drawn different conclusions from the tradition.

 But it’s a very different way of thinking from the way of thinking that dominates a university such as this one.

TCNW: How is Catholicism different in the United States?

 PJG: I think what’s distinctively American about American Catholicism is that it’s more like Protestantism here than anywhere else. What I mean by that is most American Catholics, I think, treat their Catholicism as a private option, something they’ve been given by their upbringing or something that they’ve adopted one way or another. But it’s not constitutive of them. That’s what I mean by it being like Protestantism. The ideal of Protestantism, in many of its forms anyway, is the individual alone before God, preferably with the Scripture open, so that leads to a privatized view. I think in America, Catholicism has gone far down the road toward that. That’s not the situation in Asia, for example. … This distinctly American flavor I think has to do with American economic life, and it happens to everybody. American Jews are like that, too. I think it’s because the in whole framework of (American) economic life, the highest value is personal choice, in purchasing, for example, and in regulating our personal, intellectual and spiritual lives.

 I was very struck shortly after 9-11 when President Bush made his big speech. One of the central themes running through that was our freedom to consume, to buy, and one of the central encouragements was that we should continue to do that. So if the freedom is to consume, then religion becomes one more thing to choose.

 One of the differences I see here (at the university), where many of the students are first generation immigrants, is that the immigrant groups are not yet like that. Perhaps there hasn’t been time for that to really kick in. Perhaps that’s just the traditional immigrant story. … It’s interesting to watch.

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