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From Doubting Thomas to Doubting Peter?

Doubt is not the passageway to mystery.

Ralph Fiennes stars as Cardinal Lawrence in the film "Conclave". (Image: Screen shot / Trailer on YouTube)

Ralph Fiennes is a remarkable actor. And if he wins an Academy Award for his brilliant performance in Conclave, this section of his masterfully delivered homily to the College of Cardinals, of which he plays the Dean, is likely to be cited frequently:

Let me speak from the heart for a moment.

St. Paul said, “Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ.” To work together, to grow together, we must be tolerant, no one person or faction seeking to dominate another.

And speaking to the Ephesians, who were, of course, a mix of Jews and Gentiles, Paul reminds us that God’s gift to the Church is its variety, this diversity of people and views that gives the Church its strength.

And over the course of many years of service to our mother, the Church, there is one sin which I have come to fear above all others: certainty.

Certainty is the great enemy of unity. Certainty is the deadly enemy of tolerance. Even Christ was not certain at the end. “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?” he cries out in his agony at the ninth hour on the Cross.

Our faith is a living thing precisely because it walks hand in hand with doubt. If there was only certainty and no doubt, there would be no mystery and, therefore, no need for faith.

Let us pray that God grants us a pope who doubts….

No, let’s not.

We ought not pray that God grants us a pope who “doubts” that Catholicism makes manifest the truth of the world and its destiny, for our healing and salvation. We ought not pray for a pope who “doubts” that the name of Jesus “is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in Heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father” (Philippians 2:9-11). We ought not pray for a pope who does not grasp, with St. John Henry Newman, that “ten thousand difficulties do not make one doubt.”

We ought not pray for a pope who inverts the roles of Thomas and Peter such that Doubting Thomas becomes Doubting Peter.

Doubt is not the passageway to mystery. In the Christian understanding of the term, a “mystery” is a supernatural reality whose meaning can never be fully plumbed intellectually, but which can be confidently grasped in love. Nor is certainty “the deadly enemy of tolerance.” Ignorance, arrogance, and false belief are the deadly enemies of tolerance. Some of the most intolerant people in the Western world today are those who have abandoned any notion that truth can be known with surety, and who seek to impose their skepticism, relativism, and nihilism on everyone else through the coercive force of the law.

Nor is faith an irrational dive into the unknown, a psychological comfort blanket in a frightening world of doubt. “Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1).

And Christian faith is “a living thing,” not because it walks hand in hand with doubt but because it grows, as the grace of God and the use of our God-given intelligence drive us ever more deeply into an encounter with the mystery of God’s creative, redeeming, and sanctifying love. The living parts of the world Church today proclaim Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, with humility but also with boldness and firm conviction. The dying parts of the world Church wring their hands and offer the Gospel of Maybe.

We should certainly pray for a pope who knows his limitations and who understands that the charism of infallibility does not make him an oracle of wisdom on a myriad of issues. We should certainly pray for a pope who knows his need for sage counsel, who invites respectful criticism and squarely faces his errors of prudential judgment: a pope who does not govern autocratically. We should, above all, pray for a pope who kneels before the divine mystery as revealed in Scripture and Tradition, and who understands that he is the servant of the Deposit of Faith, not its master.

But a pope who doubts? No, thank you. Humility, yes. But doubt? No. A willingness to acknowledge the difficulties that many have in accepting Christ? Yes. But doubt that Jesus Christ is the unique savior of the world, the one who reveals the full truth about both God and us?

Please God, no.


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About George Weigel 529 Articles
George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow of Washington's Ethics and Public Policy Center, where he holds the William E. Simon Chair in Catholic Studies. He is the author of over twenty books, including Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II (1999), The End and the Beginning: Pope John Paul II—The Victory of Freedom, the Last Years, the Legacy (2010), and The Irony of Modern Catholic History: How the Church Rediscovered Itself and Challenged the Modern World to Reform. His most recent books are The Next Pope: The Office of Peter and a Church in Mission (2020), Not Forgotten: Elegies for, and Reminiscences of, a Diverse Cast of Characters, Most of Them Admirable (Ignatius, 2021), and To Sanctify the World: The Vital Legacy of Vatican II (Basic Books, 2022).

23 Comments

  1. Interestingly if not alarmingly Pope Francis early on in his pontificate chided clerics who believed with unwavering conviction, as if, Francis said, ‘they have all the answers’. So, as regards Weigel’s pointed critique of Fiennes’ ‘masterful’ sermon and the doubting Peter, this is the masterful stratagem of the enemy at large who during this recent decade has sowed the seed of presumptive legitimate questioning as a requirement for unity.
    Although there’s a catch, as Weigel alludes. That all conviction of truths fall under this paradigm. Francis preaches a doctrine of doubt under condition of forming unity while dogmatic in his own convinced perspective. It’s a case of a doubting Peter who has no doubt where he wants to lead the Church. A Church of brotherhood, wittingly or not absent of conversion to the truth.

    • Francis’ favorite strawman involves mocking faith in truth because his personal esteem is not rooted in actual faith. It is involved in the politicians credo of giving the masses what the masses want. Tragedy is for God, if there is a God, to sort out.

      • Indeed. The mighty God who is, who was, and will continue to be carries a fearsome baton that was used multiple instances during Israel’s sojourn in the Sinai desert to sort out and resolve the rebellious and their rebellions. We might have arrived at a similar moment.

  2. About today’s disbelief in belief, this from novelist Georges Bernanaos:

    “Purity is not imposed upon us as though it were a kind of punishment, it is one of those mysterious but obvious conditions of that supernatural knowledge of ourselves in the Divine, which we speak of as faith. Impurity does not destroy this knowledge, it slays our need for it. I no longer believe, because I have not wished to believe. You no longer wish to know yourself” (The Diary of a Country Priest).

  3. I haven’t seen this movie, I have no intention of seeing it.

    Not one of the main characters is a PRACTICING, BELIEVING Catholic and, this being the case – they just don’t get it. No matter how great their skills, they just don’t get it.

    • “Certainty is the deadly enemy of tolerance.”
      Catholicism is the deadly enemy of Freemasonry.
      Sacred Tradition is the deadly enemy of Bergoglioism.

      I think they got it…

    • And I believe neither Robert Harris (author of the novel “Conclave”) nor the main cast of the film version are practicing Catholics. That is a shame, since the movie seems to have excellent acting and production values. If there had been enough conscientious Catholics involved, I suspect “Conclave” would have been better.

      • And if Catholics were Catholics instead of anti-Catholic bigots, we would have the “vibrant Church” pollyana George Weigel sometimes likes to refer to.

      • Well, would a book like that have been written by a devout practicing Catholic in the first place?
        I haven’t read the book nor watched the film but from what I know, it seems unlikely.

  4. It’s unfortunate that more people will cite the “truths” in this Hollywood-homily than those contained in the Doctrines of The Church.

  5. ‘Let us pray that God grants us a pope who doubts…’

    Perhaps
    But who has the wisdom to cast these aside for the eminently reasonable decision to bet on God.
    Pascal’s Wager

  6. Weigel is right. We are going to be treated to this “homily” many times in the upcoming awards season.
    Good to have the counter-homily ready.

  7. A heretical movie that has the elected pope really being a transsexual has no place being referenced as legitimate to anything other than the world’s hatred of our Blessed Lord Jesus Christ.

    Utter, despicable trash, and shame on all who participated in making it.

  8. What is doubt and what is faith? As a former atheist, who now believes in God with 100 percent certainty, not 98 percent, doubt enters the equation only in evaluating my own worthiness.

    As a physicist, I marvel at the struggles I observe between colleagues who are confounded by the meaning of what Quantum physics has revealed. Some are believers, many stubbornly refuse. Double slit and paired particle experiments suggest, actually imply a conscious awareness that permeates the entire universe, even in such infinitesimally tiny particles like electrons, which can behave differently when observed or not observed.

    Physics, viewed honestly, has reached the point of illustrating a God infused material reality.

    Yet the lengths some scientists will go through to try to prove this can not be true can be quite comical. For those not skilled in higher uses of calculus, I can assure you that you can perform sophistry combining math and with abstract ideas. Brilliant minds have a hard time accepting that ultimately, they, as creatures, might not be any better perceived by a would be creator than those of low IQ.

    It has never been certainty that represents any threat. It has always been about simple pride.

    • A co-inventor of the mentioned Calculus, Leibniz, also asked the metaphysical and ultimately religious question about all of existence: “Why is there anything rather than nothing?’”

  9. About a fictional transexual pope who doubts, in the literature of social science this dilemma is old hat.

    Two quotes and an observation:

    FIRST, the early 20th-century novelist, Andre Gide, a conflicted bisexual and the first to go public, is described this way:

    “The problem was to discover an ethic broad enough to embrace ways of behavior which society condemned–and in the process to reconcile things that were customarily treated as radical opposites. Gide, we may repeat, remained a Protestant at heart: he thirsted after morality and a clear conscience [….] He sought to prove that one could be an ‘immoralist’ and yet live with dignity and responsibility and human sympathy” (H. Stuart Hughes, “Consciousness and Society: The Reorientation of European Social Thought, 1890-1930,” Vintage, 1961, pp. 363-4).

    SECOND, the Catholic convert St. Augustine, thinking more deeply and honestly than about mere custom or what “society condemned” said it this way:

    “…it is no monstrous thing partly to will a thing and partly not to will it, but a sickness of the mind. Although it is supported by truth, it does not wholly rise up, since it is heavily encumbered by habit. Therefore there are two wills, since one of them is not complete, and what is lacking in one of them is present in the other” (Confessions, Bk. 8, Ch. 9:21).

    THIRD, surely, the pseudo-reconciliation of mere “polarities” is a halfway marriage between sociology and moral theology—as in the cross-bred John Paul II Pontifical Theological Institute for Marriage and Family Sciences (?). A challenging synthesis in even the best of hands, but personnel is policy. And, now on Vatican letterhead, the novel and halfway blessing of homosexual and all irregular “couples” (Fiducia Supplicans).

    Plus, a post-synodal Study Group #9 to develop “Theological criteria and synodal methodologies for shared discernment of controversial doctrinal [!], pastoral [!], and ethical [!] issues.”

    Now only “ethical,” and no longer moral? But who am I to judge?

  10. The good Dean of the College of Cardinal is quite adamant of his certainty in this matter. Therein lies his contradiction, humanistically of course.

  11. One of the very best articles ever written by George W. Bravo!

    And as a lifelong professional physicist and astronomer, the brief comments by E.J. Baker are music to my ears! Long live TRUE science – it leads to God.

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