Close Encounters of the Catholic Kind

Dan Beecher For those of us who don't know, talk a bit about what that means.

Dan McClellan Oh, yeah.

Dan Beecher Sure.

Dan McClellan Explain yourself. You have a very educated audience.

Dan Beecher I can't just say quasi-Marcianite and walk away from you.

Dan McClellan Hey, everybody. I'm Dan McClellan.

Dan Beecher And I'm Dan Beecher.

Dan McClellan And you're listening to the Data Over Dogma podcast, where we increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion, and we combat the spread of misinformation about the same. How are things today, Dan?

Dan Beecher It's a good day. It's a good day because we get to interview somebody, and that's always fun having- All right ... a different voice on the show. It's always a nice time. So, why don't you introduce our lovely guest?

Dan McClellan Happy to. Today, we have the pleasure and the privilege of talking with Dr. Michael Peppard, who is professor of theology at Fordham University, as well as associate director of the Curran Center for American Catholic Studies. Michael, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the show. Thanks so much for having me. I'm excited to talk about some data and actually a little bit of dogma maybe, too. A little bit of dogma too.

Dan Beecher We'll get all of it. We'll just squeeze it all in. We'll figure out how.

Dan McClellan Yeah. And there are actually two books that I hope we get to talk about a bit during the show today. I'm holding one up that doesn't have the dust cover because I am not pro dust cover. But this one is called "The Son of God in the Roman World," which is what? 14 years old, something like that by now?

Dan Beecher Yeah. That's right.

Dan McClellan 14.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan Wonderful discussion of Christology in Mark, which I think does a wonderful job on some stuff we'll get to later. But much more recently and much more topically and relevant to today's show, "How Catholics Encounter the Bible." Both of these are with Oxford, aren't they? Yes, they're both with- Those are with Oxford, and then the middle book- ... Oxford University Press ... the "World's Oldest Church" about Dura-Europos was with Yale in between those. Oh, was it the library that was- No. It just would've made sense considering their role in the excavation there for book number two.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan Yeah. Oh, I have missed that one somehow, but Dura-Europos is such a cool place. I'm going to have to circle back around for that one. But I think what we're most interested in tonight is how precisely Catholics encounter the Bible, which is not how Catholics read the Bible- Right ... which is something that you actually made a point of explaining why that was the title that you chose in the book. Could you explain for those who are wondering, why would you write the title that way, Michael? What was the logic here?

Dan Beecher Sure.

Dan McClellan Happy to. The way this book came together was, and in part goes all the way back to my childhood, which I also talk about with some trepidation on page one, basically. But the more proximate cause was an email from OUP, from Oxford University Press, from Steve Wiggins, the editor for Bibles and Biblical Traditions.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And he kind of said, "We don't have a book about Catholics and the Bible, about Catholic biblical interpretation, and that seems like we should, and we've heard that maybe you'd be a person who might write one like that." There aren't actually that many practicing Catholic biblical scholars, even though there's a lot more than there were 100 years ago. There still are a relatively smaller number than some other faith traditions or those of no faith tradition. So they got my name, and they said they wanted it to be called "How Catholics Read the Bible." And I just kept pushing back and saying, "I'm not going to write a book called that. And I might write a book about Catholics and the Bible, but they don't read it." And Steve laughed, and he said, "That can't be true." And I said, "Well, it's kind of true, Steve. I've been out there in the field." And I said, "I'm willing to grant that 5% of Catholics globally do something like pick up a copy of the Bible, open it, and read it as an individual act, but I'm not willing to go more than 5%. And so if you want a realistic book about Catholics and the Bible, reading will be there, but it's going to be kind of subordinated to a lot of other modes of engagement with the text." And we settled on the word encounter because I thought it was capacious enough to bring in lots of different modes of engagement and different types of hermeneutics. And I also thought Pope Francis uses the word encounter a lot, and that's kind of apropos of the Catholic moment. So, that's kind of how it got in there.

Dan Beecher I love that. You open the book by sort of setting a scene, an average traditional Catholic church, and you have us imagine this church as we sit in a pew and the service is about to start, and you look around, and ain't no Bible there. And then even when the service starts, a big book is trucked out. Still not a Bible.

Dan McClellan Yeah. What's going on with that?

Dan Beecher Talk a bit about that and sort of set that scene for us and talk about why that's not a Bible. What are we looking at?

Dan McClellan What's happening?

Dan Beecher Well, what are we looking at?

Dan McClellan So there's the kind of phenomenological answer to your question of what's happening in the room, and then there's the historical answer to your question of how did it come to be this way. The phenomenological answer, kind of the religious experience answer to that question is that most of the world's Catholics don't have any texts at all in the room. If you think about when I'm visiting in Latin America or visiting a Catholic church that doesn't have a significant budget, there's frequently nothing printed at all. There's no printed materials anywhere.

Dan Beecher When you are there to pray, you listen, and you look, and you kneel, and you smell, and you taste, and you're having a multi-sensory experience, but you're hardly ever reading anything.

Dan McClellan So even the idea that there would be a pew Bible, so-called, or the idea that someone might carry their personal Bible with them is very much a Protestant framing of what happens when one worships, a traditionally Protestant framing. I also need to add for your listeners right away, because they haven't read the book yet, that when I talk about Protestant framing and make this a book that does kind of draw into contrast Catholic encounters with the Bible and Protestant encounters with the Bible, I do so out of a position of love and a somewhat divided identity, having a very devout Protestant evangelical side of my family and a very devout Roman Catholic side of my family. So I do have significant religious experience of both traditions that I can draw from, and also a lot of participant observation in all kinds of different Christian denominations over the years. The historical answer I go into much more in the book, but in short, three-fourths of Christian history has not had a printing press.

Dan Beecher And so- Right ...

Dan McClellan if you're going to say that you need a printed Bible to be Christian and worship, then you're saying three-fourths of Christian history didn't have it, and many of the worship experiences today. So, as you both well know, the combination of the printing press and the Reformation, they go hand in hand there in the 1500s.

Dan Beecher It does make sense, right, that the impetus for the Protestant Reformation, Martin Luther takes the Bible and starts to say, "Hey, we need to center onto this." And so, yeah, Protestantism is basically suddenly a laser focus on the Bible itself, where traditionally, for centuries before that, the church, the sort of Catholic unified church, had been something less focused on the Bible itself and more sort of the Bible is something that props up the church or that informs the church, but the church is the thing. Well- Would you say that that's correct? That is part of the truth for sure, that the church is the thing and that ecclesial structures and ecclesial structures of authority have interpretive magisterium, we would say, in the Latin West have magisterium.

Dan McClellan But, or and, in addition to that, I would say that Catholics have always been a people of the Word, and they've always been a people of the story.

Dan Beecher Mm-hmm.

Dan McClellan And the Word and the story are a mode of having an encounter with the person of Jesus Christ. So the Bible is a means of doing that, but the Catholic tradition has not been sola Scriptura, right? So there are other means- Right ... of doing that. That person of Jesus is encountered in the Eucharist, the body blood of Christ, the Lord's Supper. That person can be encountered in mystical prayer. That person can be encountered through the visual arts. That person can be encountered in pilgrimage. That person can be encountered in all sorts of other ways besides the printed page. So, that's kind of where I would go with it. I'm not telling Catholics not to read the Bible. I still am a biblical scholar in the Catholic tradition at a Jesuit university who tries to get my undergraduates to read more of the Bible.

Dan Beecher It's not that I'm pushing them away from that.

Dan McClellan Yeah. But I try to be honest in a kind of lived religion approach about what actually happens in the Catholic tradition.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan Well, and like you said, three-quarters of Christian history has not had a printed Bible. The lived experience of Christianity is a rich tapestry that I think a lot of people do a disservice to, particularly on Twitter, when they reduce it to just, "Get a Bible, read the Bible. That's all that matters."

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Which is a misrepresentation of their own lived experiences and the way they're engaging the Bible themselves. But you kind of take a metaphor that John Dominic Crossan came up with in the book. Can you talk a little bit about the altar, the sides of the altar, and how this informs your discussion of the different ways that one can engage the Bible in the Catholic experience? I would love to. I think John Dominic Crossan doesn't get enough credit, honestly. I think he's so brilliant, and he's so clever, and his turns of phrase are just amazing. So when he wrote a memoir called "A Long Way from Tipperary," I went out and got myself a copy, and I wanted to see what this man's life was like. How does an Irish monk end up at DePaul University in Chicago and writing seemingly a book a year for many, many years filled with great insights? So in his So I said the origin story was kind of my parents and also OUP asking for this book. But, honestly, this one line in Dom Crossan's memoir is also another part of the origin story when he's talking about his experience of growing up Catholic in mid-20th century Ireland, pre-Vatican II, which was in the 1960s and did a lot of church reform, liturgical reform for the Catholic Church.

Dan Beecher So growing up pre-Vatican II, he says, "When I first heard the words epistle and gospel, they were not parts of a book, but sides of an altar." And he becomes a New Testament scholar.

Dan McClellan When I picked the book up, I knew of him as a New Testament scholar.

Dan Beecher Yeah. So the fact that he then goes on to say he didn't even know epistle and gospel as in book form until he went to seminary.

Dan McClellan Right? He didn't think of it in that way. And so another thing I do in the book is that right before the writing of it, my father on the Catholic side passed away in 2019. So I was going through all of his stuff and deciding what I might bring to my house, and one thing I grabbed is this little book called "Concise Catholic Dictionary," and it was clearly from his childhood. And I thought I'll just grab that and put it on the shelf for later with some other of those kind of items, rosaries and whatnot. And then when I was writing the book manuscript, I'm like, "I wonder what it says in this dictionary under the word epistle."

Dan Beecher And sure enough, you go there and you look up what it says for epistle, and it does not refer you to one of the 13 letters of Paul or anything like that.

Dan McClellan It refers you to the liturgy. It refers you to the reading, like when the reading happens during the mass.

Dan Beecher Oh, interesting. Talk a little bit about that because in the book you talk about when you're talking about that sort of epistle and gospel being sides of an altar- Yeah ... you go through what the Catholic mass kind of looks like in terms of the readings of the Catholic mass. So just give us a sense of that, because this is kind of the first way in which a Catholic does, and maybe the primary way in which a Catholic does encounter the Bible.

Dan McClellan Absolutely right.

Dan Beecher So you're right. I should've said more about, to close the loop on that epistle and gospel point, because in a traditional... Now, you need an asterisk here because there's a lot of Catholic church architecture that is not this way. But if you take a kind of traditional Catholic church with a linear nave and a central altar, there were two different pulpits, or two different places from which one could read and speak.

Dan McClellan And one was for announcements and the psalm and if there is a first reading from the Hebrew Bible, Old Testament, it would be there. If there's an epistle reading, it would be there. And then the other side of the altar has a more ornate, usually taller, usually grander pulpit from which the gospel is proclaimed, meaning a reading from Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John. And then that's where the homily or sermon is delivered, usually about the gospel reading.

Dan Beecher So prior to Vatican II, there's hardly any Old Testament readings at all in the mass.

Dan McClellan Hardly any. A few a year. It's really, really limited. So there really is a big change after the Vatican II about that, but that's why the readings were called the sides of the altar, gospel, and epistle, because those are the two main readings. So the ghost of Marcion is always with us. And there was a bit of a Marcionite liturgical expression of what was in the word.

Dan Beecher So- For those of us who don't know, talk a bit about what that means, what a Marcionite means.

Dan McClellan Oh, yeah.

Dan Beecher Sure.

Dan McClellan Explain yourself. You have a very educated audience.

Dan Beecher I can't just say quasi-Marcionite and walk away with it. They are, but you have to at least bring me back into the conversation because I'm easily lost, so.

Dan McClellan No. To put it simply, Marcion is known for two main things. He's second century, ends up being kind of like an arch heretic, but he's very popular at the time, has a lot of followers, and seems to be a very innovative and intelligent early Christian who thought that the revelation of God in what was called the Old Testament in Hebrew scriptures, the revelation of God that came there was revealing a different God than it was revealed by Jesus and his person. And so Marcion was the first real canon maker and created an early Christian canon by eliminating what we think of as the Old Testament. So that's what I meant by...

Dan Beecher So talk about how that comes into play during in sort of the Catholic... You go to church- Yeah ... and you hear a couple readings and somehow this Marcionite idea comes out. So how does that play out?

Dan McClellan Sure. So I should divide kind of pre-Vatican II and post Vatican II because they're quite different. So before Vatican II, I would say the liturgical expression was Marcionite. It really had subordinated the Old Testament so much that hardly any practicing Catholics knew the stories or knew these prophetic teachings. So part of the Vatican II liturgical reform was to provide, as they say, a more rich- ... a more rich treasury of the word of God, and they say that they want all the principal pages of the Old Testament to get their moment during the mass. So post-Vatican II, there are three main readings and a psalm. So if you count the psalm as a reading, then you have four main readings at every Sunday mass.

Dan Beecher Weekdays is less.

Dan McClellan But you have an Old Testament reading, a psalm, an epistle, and the gospel. So on the face of it then, you'd be like, "This is great." And in fact, when Protestants come to Catholic mass with me, one of the things they often say is like, "Oh, actually, there was quite a bit of scripture read. That was more than I thought there would be." And actually, a lot of time at an evangelical church, you just have one reading. And so actually you're getting four readings.

Dan Beecher That's pretty good.

Dan McClellan And I said, "True, but they almost never preach on the non-gospel readings still."

Dan Beecher Mm-hmm. Every once in a while, you'll get a Catholic homilist, a priest who will preach about one of the other readings, but the whole thing liturgically is designed to culminate in the proclamation of a story from the life, ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus. So that absolutely is the framing.

Dan McClellan So in chapters one and two, just to bring it back to how I structure the book, I decided to structure the book in terms of descending frequency of the modes of encounter. Meaning chapter one is how does a Catholic encounter the Bible at a Sunday mass? And that's the one thing that you can pretty much guarantee if a Catholic is practicing Catholic, they're doing that. And you can't guarantee much about anything else in the book, right? That they're doing. So it's structured that chapter one is about how is what's called the lectionary structured, which is a cycle of readings. How is a lectionary organized, and how do people then experience it? And then chapter two is called "The Old Testament and the Gospel," and it's about this foundational juxtaposition of text pairings, right? So a gospel text is chosen for the lectionary, and then a text from the Old Testament, from the law or the prophets or the writings, is chosen to thematically correspond in some way.

Dan Beecher Did I understand it correctly that these are actually chosen not by the priest at that parish but- Right ... by a larger organization within the church?

Dan McClellan Yeah. And they were chosen at the end of Vatican II and haven't changed really too much since. So they were chosen by a group called Study Group 11, which was Study Group 11 of the Second Vatican Council. And when I was researching the book, I went to a Vatican II archive at Notre Dame and photocopied... They have all the notes, all the meeting minutes from Study Group 11. We didn't have them here in New York, so I went there. And it's all in Neo-Latin, and the version they had actually have a lot of marginalia, too, of notes in French and German and various people who are part of the meetings on these meeting minutes. So I came away quite impressed actually with the scholarship. They really were studying what scholars were saying about the Bible and were trying to incorporate it into the structure of the lectionary. So in fact, the very idea of Synoptic Gospels and John, meaning Synoptics being one unit and John being another unit, that finding from the world of scholarship is reflected in the Sunday lectionary of the Catholic Church in the sense that there's a three-year cycle of readings with Matthew in year A and Mark in year B and Luke in year C, and then John is like a free-floating spiritual master- ... who just gets plugged in. The Bread of Life discourse gets plugged in- Yeah ... in part of Mark, and the Samaritan woman at the well and the man born blind and Lazarus get plugged in during Lent, during scenes of special kind of heightened attention. And so they really did draw a lot from scholarship in the construction of the lectionary. Sorry, I could really go down a lot of rabbit holes here. Well, you- So do you want to bring me back to your questions?

Dan Beecher Well, you did. I just wanted to briefly, because I've got it pulled up here in the book, you did talk about what Old Testament books they drew from for their- Yep ... Old Testament readings.

Dan McClellan Yep. And it's all Isaiah.

Dan Beecher There's so much Isaiah, and then a little- It's mostly Deutero-Isaiah, even.

Dan McClellan Deutero-Isaiah.

Dan Beecher It's Deutero. That's right. It's Deutero-Isaiah- Yeah ... and then a little Genesis, a little Exodus, and then the rest is some paltry things here and there- ... and some from some books that I didn't grow up with because I didn't- Yep. It was very late in my life when I learned that Catholics had a different Bible than I had.

Dan McClellan Yep.

Dan Beecher That was surprisingly late in my life. But yeah, that's interesting.

Dan McClellan One gets the impression from this, you talk with respect, if not reverence, for this process, but at the same time are kind of, to some degree, critical of the way this is a very carefully curated experience through carefully curated lenses designed to present the Biblical texts in a rather limited and narrow way. And do you find this as a-- obviously, if only 5% of Catholics are regularly reading the Bible, their biblical engagement could be called a bit of a liability, but do you think that this, in some way, kind of is a bit of a hermeneutical straitjacket when it comes to the way Catholics, if they do get into the Bible, where they're going to go, what they're going to read, how they're going to interpret it? Does this kind of pigeonhole the Bible for Catholics?

Dan Beecher It's a good question.

Dan McClellan Yes. So I'm going to answer it in a few different ways. Well, the first is to say that Catholic knowledge of the Gospels is pretty solid- Yeah ... if you're looking at practicing Catholics, because of how the liturgy is structured, and how the year is structured, and how Holy Week is structured. And one thing I say about talking about my dad in the book is when I'm kind of comparing him to his wife, who reads the Bible every day, and my dad never did, and I say as a teenager, "Well, how do you know what's in it, Dad, if you don't ever read it?" And his answer is, "I know the stories."

Dan Beecher Mm.

Dan McClellan And he thought he was telling the truth. He's like, "I know these stories. I went to Catholic school."

Dan Beecher His whole life, he went to Catholic mass every week.

Dan McClellan He's like, "I know the stories.

Dan Beecher I don't need to read it."

Dan McClellan And I think about the Gospels, he was telling the truth.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan But if you ask my dad to say, "Tell me the story of Esther," he literally would be like, "What?"

Dan Beecher Well, that is one of the blind spots that- He literally would not know what you're talking about. You point out that one of the big blind spots is that women are not centered- Yes ... in this.

Dan McClellan So I tried to choose my spots very carefully, as we do when we are being critical scholars about a living tradition, and a tradition that I don't have an interest in it being less alive. I don't have an interest in it being- ... I don't have an interest in it being harmed.

Dan Beecher I really don't.

Dan McClellan Right.

Dan Beecher It's like patriotism.

Dan McClellan You want your country to be better and call it back to its ideals. You want your church to be better and call it back to its ideals. And so I try to choose my spots very carefully, and what I chose was in one of the lectionary chapters, I choose its presentation of Jews and Judaism, and the way in which the presentation of Jews and Judaism even falls short of the ideals of Catholic theology- Mm ... as articulated by official Vatican documents. So I'm not even calling for some radical revolution in the Catholic theology of Judaism or the Catholic theology of the Old Testament. I was calling for just to line up the lectionary with what you're already saying in your theological documents.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan So I believe that that section of criticism is, I hope it's unimpeachable because it's really intra-Catholic. It's about getting Catholic theology, and Catholic hermeneutics, and Catholic liturgy to talk to each other and be coherent. The second spot I chose, not everyone in the Catholic Church will like, which is the treatment of women in the lectionary. So I argue that the lectionary is functionally the Bible for Catholics. So if it's functionally the Bible for Catholics, then we have to be much, much more careful about representation of stories. So I go through in some detail-- And it's not like I'm the first to do this. I am standing on shoulders of giants here. But I kind of go through and say, "Here are the patterns of omission of women in the Sunday readings," and often even in the weekday readings.

Dan Beecher And you look, it's just very hard not to see it as intentional, Dan's.

Dan McClellan It's very hard. I would love to believe some of it's subconscious, but some of it just feels very, very intentional.

Dan Beecher Mm. The exclusion of Phoebe from the whole lectionary just feels too close for comfort.

Dan McClellan We don't want it in there. Never mind Junia. Never mind Junia, right?

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan But just because of the living office of deacon and the questions about ordination of women to the diaconate, that one is really hard not to see as an intentional omission. But I end that chapter with something I didn't even notice till I wrote this book, and I was teaching Proverbs 31. Is it about the- The eshet chayil.

Dan Beecher Yes, exactly.

Dan McClellan So when I was teaching that text, it was a similar time to when that text appeared in the lectionary, and I actually had the experience just as a churchgoer where I was like, "Wait, what did they leave out?

Dan Beecher They left out some pretty interesting stuff." And so- Sorry, can you elucidate what the stuff- Yeah, sure, sure, sure ... that was left out is? I know Dan would be able to figure it out.

Dan McClellan No, that's fine. So there's this section in Proverbs, I think in my Catholic study Bible, the subtitle is "The Ideal Wife" or something like that. That's the kind of heading you get, and this is a pretty amazing person as it exists in Proverbs. This is someone who is ... is organizing domestic life. This is someone who is, I would say, running a business. I think of the cake song. She is touring the facilities and picking up slack. But yeah, she's managing the household. She's going off, she's making business deals, she's buying property.

Dan Beecher Exactly.

Dan McClellan She's doing all this kind of stuff. And she's doing all the works of mercy, too, and she's bringing good name to her husband at the city gates. This is amazing stuff. And when you go to look at the part they excerpted in the lectionary, she's not a global business leader. She's not buying property. She's not making international land deals. She's not bringing that kind of honor, and it really made me mad. It made me mad because this is not necessary. You don't have to omit this to make... What, it makes the reading, what, 20 seconds shorter? It's really not a big deal.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And there's nothing doctrinally challenging about these sentences.

Dan Beecher It just gives a really full picture of a biblical femininity that in the lectionary version is a shadow or a sketch of that.

Dan McClellan And it really bothers me. So those are my two- Is it focused primarily on domestic responsibilities? That's where the- Yes ... the reading goes?

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan Okay. Yeah, so it kind of makes that figure seem like she is in the home and not fussy and doing nice things. Fair enough. And so I came into it more mad about Phoebe and, oh, also the Hebrew midwives vanished. That one really got me mad. So when I started doing more research into... Regina Bos Claire is a scholar who's written a lot about this, and when I was doing research into her writings and kind of going through it all myself, I decided, all right, these are my two spots where I'm going to take this on. I have a lot of other things I could criticize, but I'm going to choose these two.

Dan Beecher Well, I mean- You had another question, Dan, or you had a different way of asking that that I've now forgotten. Oh, if you've forgotten it, trust me, we've forgotten it. I need to take notes here. I'll come back to it. It's fine. We're just jamming, man. We're just jamming. We're just having a good time.

Dan McClellan Now, you talk about some things that I think Dan and I both appreciate. I want to share the first time I ever visited St. Peter's in the Vatican.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan I walked through the door after waiting in line for a very long time, walked through the door, and I was just kind of like, where to go? And I turned to my right and there's the Pieta.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And I was floored.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan I was like, "It's right there. It's right there." And went over and the lighting was very dramatic, which I appreciated very much. It kind of heightened the experience.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan But Catholicism and art, obviously, this is something that a lot of Protestants are very unhappy about, but not just art, statuary, reliquary, all this kind of stuff is a central part of the Catholic experience as well. How is the Bible translated through artwork and presented to a Catholic worshiper? Well, I start with... I'm glad you had that experience, by the way, of the Pieta. It is pretty exciting, especially if you don't know it's going to be right there. No clue.

Dan Beecher It sneaks up on you.

Dan McClellan It's got you.

Dan Beecher Ha.

Dan McClellan Well, I start with the Pieta in the book because I would argue it is the most viewed work of biblical art in history. I think if you kind of run the numbers on who's seen it in person, on how many visitors to the Vatican there are each year, and then you run the numbers on how many photos and reproductions of this there are, I think it probably, apart from the cross itself, I think it is probably the number one.

Dan Beecher Probably Our Lady of Guadalupe is one below that. But anyway, getting lost there.

Dan McClellan So I start with the Pieta because it is that, and it captures the two figures that are most emphasized in the Catholic biblical tradition of Jesus and his mother, Mary. It also captures the two sides of the Catholic imagination, meaning grace and suffering.

Dan Beecher And those who study the Catholic imagination in the arts, in literature, in film, often note that Catholics, they kind of can't let one exist without the other.

Dan McClellan They have to have these as two sides of the same coin, two sides of the same human experience, and you're never just going to have grace. You're never just going to have suffering.

Dan Beecher And so this- Let me just jump in and just say- Yeah ... sorry, that the Pieta, for those who don't know- Yes ... is an image of Mary holding Jesus after his death.

Dan McClellan Yes.

Dan Beecher His dead body is laid across her lap and she's holding him.

Dan McClellan Thank you. And so Michelangelo- Was a 22-year-old when he carved the Pieta, so don't feel bad about yourself. I'm a musical person, but I'm not a visual or arts person, so it truly boggles my mind that any human can do these things.

Dan Beecher Yeah. But right.

Dan McClellan So this type of image is a devotional prayer image. It has a forerunner- Usually called the Vesperbild in German, and you can see medieval versions of the Vesperbild in medieval collections from the 1300s and so. But Michelangelo's is, of course, the most famous and the most beautiful.

Dan Beecher What he does is he manipulates the age of Mary by making her face very young so that when you're looking at the...

Dan McClellan It's not intended to be a historically representative image. It's an image that invites the viewer into a prayer experience that oscillates between two periods of time where you're feeling this is a mother and child when he is a baby, and this is a mother and child when he is an adult who has just been crucified. And you can't stay just in one. You're flickering back and forth. But if you ask anyone who's Catholic who doesn't read their Bible, they would assume this scene happens in the text.

Dan Beecher Mm-hmm.

Dan McClellan And so the reason I start with it is that it's the most famous example of Catholic biblical art, but it's literally not in the Bible. And so how do you reckon with that? How do you reckon with that fact that Catholics traditionally imagine things between the lines?

Dan Beecher Mm-hmm.

Dan McClellan And this is where I joked about the data and the dogma part of your podcast title because there's no textual data of Mary holding Jesus' body off the cross.

Dan Beecher Right?

Dan McClellan The body comes off the cross and goes to Joseph of Arimathea in the text.

Dan Beecher Mm-hmm.

Dan McClellan And Mary is there in the Gospel of John right near the cross, but it's not narrated that she holds him. But this imaginative filling in the gaps is happening all throughout the history of biblical hermeneutics. And so if the mother's there, of course she would hold him. Of course she would.

Dan Beecher What mother wouldn't?

Dan McClellan Of course, it's not in the text, but yes, that is part of the story, and it becomes part of the story through the visual arts. So I decided to... Well, when I started, I was going to have one chapter on the visual arts. It ended up being two chapters. They're also very long chapters. So it's about 30,000 words. It's about a third of the, maybe more than 30,000 words.

Dan Beecher It's a lot of the book and a lot of image permissions, Dan. Don't write books with pictures.

Dan McClellan Oh, I was once in charge of getting image permissions for an illustrated Bible guide.

Dan Beecher Oh, gosh.

Dan McClellan So I know how much of a headache it is. And also that's why I do my own artwork.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan There you go. I don't have to go get any permission. And now I've got friends. I've done artwork for Francesca Stavrakopoulou.

Dan Beecher There you go.

Dan McClellan I've done artwork for Candida Moss. I do artwork for lots of folks. So yes, I know how much- I'll have to hire you for the next one. Well, I'm not cheap.

Dan Beecher But- Now it's all ChatGPT, man.

Dan McClellan It's all free.

Dan Beecher It's all the robots that'll do the art from now on.

Dan McClellan But I- Well, I just wanted to kind of wrap up that answer because you asked me why the visual arts, and I talked about the Pieta for a long time. But the real answer of why the visual arts is it gets back to an earlier part of our conversation that I think it's honest. I think it's honest and authentic about how Catholics encounter the Bible and how they experience it. What I wanted to try to figure out was during the formative periods of Catholic biblical art, what kind of a Bible are they seeing?

Dan Beecher Mm-hmm.

Dan McClellan What is the biblical canon and the kind of hermeneutic that's suggested by the visual canon? And so I worked with Robin Jensen, I worked with Felicity Harley McGowan, I worked with a few other colleagues who are early Christian art nerds like me, and I said, "This is what I'm putting together as kind of the visual canon of late antiquity," and they helped. They said, "Oh, you've got to take this one out, add this one." And I feel pretty confident that we're being representative of what was there. And so I kind of trace it up from late antiquity into medieval iconography and even into liturgical drama to try to get the pre-Reformation sense of things. So that's why I was recording. Before it all got chucked. Well, it didn't get chucked. It's still there, but it's- Well, it's still there, but there were an awful lot of folks who said, "This isn't for us anymore."

Dan Beecher Yes.

Dan McClellan Which I think is I'm fond of, and I don't know if you think this rings true. I'm fond of saying that prior to the Reformation, the main focus, not the only focus, but the main focus of Christianity was how genuine is your love of God?

Dan Beecher Mm.

Dan McClellan And then the Reformation turned the main focus into how true are your propositions?

Dan Beecher Mm-hmm.

Dan McClellan And the Reformation, I think you lose so much of the lived experience of Christianity when you turn it into just about propositions and texts.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And that's one of the things that I love so much about visiting places where Catholicism is a dominant tradition or some kind of orthodoxy is. I can still remember the first time I visited Athens. I got up in the morning to go for a run and went up Philopappos, which is I think the best view in Athens. But I was running around the Acropolis, and there was this little half-submerged-in-the-road church just tucked up on the northern side of the Acropolis. And there was smoke coming out of the door, and I heard chanting, and I just sat down and smelled the smell of this incense and listened to these people singing, and it was an incredible experience. And I got up and kept running like, "Man, why can't our church do this?" But I think it's more of an all-encompassing experience of ... of Christianity. It's something that touches a lot more of the senses, and I think resonates with a lot more of the human when it comes to trying to deeply entangle this within the human psyche and the human experience. I think the Catholic and Orthodox traditions are way out ahead, which is, I think, one of the reasons they don't have to always be arguing about interpretations of the Bible and who's not reading the Bible enough and all this kind of stuff. So, it's a frustration of mine that that is a source of criticism for a lot of folks when it comes to Catholicism.

Dan Beecher Sure.

Dan McClellan Well, I appreciate that you have that sense of its beauty and of the power of ritual to form human lives and form human culture. You bring up the Eastern Orthodox. You have to draw your boundaries somewhere. I'm already writing about how the world's largest human organization deals with the world's most famous book. So, it was already a pretty daunting task, but- Yeah ... my Greek Orthodox colleagues that I work with, they've read it and they agree.

Dan Beecher There's many similarities.

Dan McClellan You could write a companion book about Orthodox traditions that would be quite similar.

Dan Beecher Honestly, there's a lot of the comparisons to Judaism as well. Not the visual arts piece, but there's quite a few similarities in terms of the hermeneutics of encounter that my Jewish colleagues and I have discussed. Sorry, there's a question that's been needling me that I wanted to get to. As we were talking about the arts and about, you say in the book that Catholics are people of the imagination.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher And these artistic representations, the Pieta is sort of, as you said, reading between the lines of the book and imaginatively filling in scenes that should've been there, like why wasn't that there sort of thing. But I also think about ways that that could go off the rails.

Dan McClellan Sure.

Dan Beecher Because imagination is obviously boundless, and I think about there's a comfort in the Protestant idea of let's nail some stuff down.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Let's keep it tight. Let's keep it uniform. So there's the beauty of the Catholic imagination, but then what happens when my imagination clashes with your imagination, or you look at art and this imagining is one thing, and then there's Hieronymus Bosch just goes completely off the charts and gets- Right ... crazy about things. So, is there a downside to this imaginative encountering of the Bible?

Dan McClellan Sure. In terms of conflict, you could say something like Martin Scorsese's version of "Last Temptation of Christ" in the 1980s, one of the most controversial films in the history of Hollywood. And so, an imagination also that comes out of Kazantzakis' novel, right? So we have a Greek and an Italian combining their imagination. But an imagination of the person of Jesus, the person of Mary Magdalene, Holy Week, the cross, that is so different definitely leads to a great amount of conflict, even as there's a lot of philosophical and theological depth to that story and that film.

Dan Beecher But Dan, I guess, just the Catholic side of me would say that there's way more positives than negatives in terms of the imaginative process.

Dan McClellan And I would also say that Protestants are also doing it. They're not willing to admit it and that it- ... because then it feels like eisegesis or reading into the text. An example that I think I give in the book, I actually can't remember, but one that I use a lot is about the Annunciation, and I think I do say this because I close the book with the Annunciation. So the Annunciation is, sorry, in the Gospel of Luke 1 when Angel Gabriel announces miraculous pregnancy to Mary, and only narrated there. It's a one woman, one-minute story that has an outsized influence in global history.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Okay, so why do I bring it up here? If I take a room full of Christians of different denominations, fundamentalist, textual Protestants included, and I say to them, "You know the story of the Annunciation. Imagine it in your mind, where is she? Where does the story happen?" And I'll tell you what, very few people will say, "I don't know."

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan If they're devout Christians, they will tell you where it happens.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan The text does not tell you where it happens. Well, and this is an inevitability.

Dan Beecher Anytime- Yeah ...

Dan McClellan you want to try to represent it artistically in film and in song, anytime you want to try to figure out motivations, what's going on, how to reconcile stuff. Just asking a Protestant to reconcile the nativity accounts of Matthew and Luke, you have to be very imaginative.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan You do. You have to fill in lots of gaps. And so when "The Chosen" is a television series that is doing an awful lot of that- Yes And it seems to me that it is aimed at a primarily Protestant audience.

Dan Beecher Yes.

Dan McClellan And so I think it's an inevitability. You can't get around this and still actually make the Bible something that's informing your life and your experience. And so I think there's some picking and choosing going on here when it comes to when it's a problem and when it's not.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan I love "The Prince of Egypt." When it opens up, I'm like, "Well, those buildings are on the wrong side of the Nile."

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan I can be critical of that, but at the same time you have to fill in the gaps. And there's a point at which you go from seeing a bunch of pictures to seeing live animation and- Yeah ... you just have to get to the other side of that. And so, yeah, I think that's a kind of a silly complaint or criticism, but at the same time, I think there is value in recognizing, hey, just so you're aware, this is the product of Michelangelo's imagination. This is not actually something narrated in the text.

Dan Beecher And- Right ...

Dan McClellan far too many people talk about the story of the Exodus, and really, they're just recalling "The Prince of Egypt" and- Sure ... things that aren't in the Bible.

Dan Beecher And it's hard to imagine even a Protestant whose idea of hell isn't informed by Dante. You know what I mean?