Washington National Cathedral

The Sunday Forum: Critical Issues in the Light of Faith

The Very Rev. Samuel T. Lloyd III, host

Cathedral Dean Samuel T. Lloyd III and Jim Carroll converse about “How Catholicism is Changing.” Carroll’s most recent book is Practicing Catholic.

Despite widespread belief that religion never changes, Carroll asserts that Christianity has changed dramatically over time. “It’s a modern illusion of ours that anything in the human condition can be unchanging,” he says.

Churches rather famously resist change. Carroll believes that this resistance comes out of human resistance to change, which can feel threatening. “Human beings are marked by experience,” he says. People are “terrified” that, in deconstructing the meaning of events, they will lose the events’ meaning.

Carroll was born into a Roman Catholic tradition that understood itself as having never changed since Jesus’ time. “I thought of [Jesus] as the first Irish Catholic priest. It came as a big surprise to Catholics of my generation of Catholics that Christian faith had evolved,” he says.

The church was not formed in an instant, but across centuries. In Carroll’s view, one early transformation dwarfs the myriad changes that the church is currently experiencing. After the Emperor Constantine was converted to Christianity, the fledgling church changed from a persecuted sect to a powerful force; and yet the essence of Christianity remained constant.

“The great glory of the church … is exactly in its changing,” Carroll asserts. “And the contest always, then, is to maintain the faithful commitment to the core belief that does come through time, even while the ways in which it is manifested in each generation are different.”

Carroll offers several examples of change in recent decades. As a youth, he was shocked when the Roman Catholic Church excommunicated a priest for teaching that there was “no salvation outside the church”—an ancient doctrine that the Church rejected in the mid 1900s. He discusses the Roman Catholic Church’s doctrinal changes in the wake of the Holocaust, during the Vietnam War, and today. Carroll, a former priest who remains a committed Roman Catholic, says that he has “arguments” with the church about sexuality, divorce and remarriage, the role of women in the Roman Catholic hierarchy—all topics that could lead to further change.

James Carroll is a novelist, essayist, and non-fiction writer whose bestselling book Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews explores the history of anti-Semitism in the West. A former Roman Catholic priest, he has written about the Catholic sex abuse crisis and, most recently, about the American military in the award-winning House of War: The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power. He is a weekly columnist for the Boston Globe and a regular participant in Jewish-Christian-Muslim dialogues at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem.

About Jim Carroll

James Carroll is a novelist, essayist, and non-fiction writer whose bestselling 2001 book Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews explores the history of anti-Semitism in the West. A former Roman Catholic priest, he has written about the Catholic sex abuse crisis and, most recently, about the American military in the award-winning House of War: The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power. He is a weekly columnist for the Boston Globe and a regular participant in on-going Jewish-Christian-Muslim dialogues at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem.