Elder Ballard’s supposed anti-Catholic bigotry

You may or may not have noticed the very recent tempest — there’s always a tempest, but its focus constantly changes — concerning a brief, passing, unscripted remark made during February 2014 by Elder M. Russell Ballard of the Council of Twelve in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Referring to Catholics, he remarked before a local group of Latter-day Saints that “they don’t know who God is. They don’t know who the Savior is; nor do they know who the Holy Ghost is.”

For a critical reaction to his remark that isn’t rendered basically unreadable by deep and unreasoning hostility — the same can’t be said, unfortunately, for all of the comments posted in response — see Jana Riess’s blogged reply here.

Elder Ballard is being pilloried in certain predictable quarters as a bigot, an out-of-touch throwback to the supposedly bad old days of Mormonism, full of hate, and so forth.  He’s portrayed as having “denounced” Catholicism.  Even more moderate quarters, though, have expressed regret.  And some have voiced the confident hope that a more-univeralist, less exclusive Church is on the horizon, and that that glorious dawn will arrive once the current generation finally exits the scene.

To the last, I’ll simply say, in passing, that a non-exclusivist Mormonism would be unrecognizable as Mormonism.  Joseph Smith’s claim of Restoration would be both pointless and incomprehensible without the implication of an apostasy.  Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery’s reception of Aaronic and Melchizedek priesthood authority would be redundant if other claims to such authority were deemed valid.

Instead, I would like to very briefly address the regret that some commenters have voiced.  (I know that little can be done to win over those who want to portray Elder Ballard as a hateful anti-Catholic bigot, which I’m entirely confident that he’s not.  But perhaps I can help a little bit even there, if somebody is willing to listen.)

The critics should perhaps dial it back a bit, and consider the principle of charity in reading others.

Elder Ballard was presumably speaking more or less off the cuff, as Latter-day Saint speakers and especially Latter-day Saint leaders commonly do on such occasions.  Had he been speaking from a carefully prepared text, he might have nuanced his remark more, or differently.  He can certainly clarify it and/or defend himself, if he chooses to do so.  (Perhaps he already has, and I’ve missed it.)  But what he said doesn’t seem to me untrue (from a standard-issue, mainstream Mormon viewpoint) nor even remotely novel.

Some have purported to summarize what Elder Ballard said by representing him as declaring that Catholics don’t know God.

Well, in an important respect, that’s certainly true:  They don’t.  None of us does.  Not fully.  Not adequately.  Not as completely as, someday, we hope to know him.  “For now we see through a glass, darkly,” wrote even the great Apostle Paul at 1 Corinthians 13:12, “but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.”

But Elder Ballard wasn’t referring to that.  He was plainly suggesting that Latter-day Saints know who God is in a way that Catholics don’t.

Please notice, though, the way in which I formulated that:  I spoke of knowing who God is, not of knowing God.  There is, to my mind, a clear significant difference between the two modes of expression.  And it’s significant that Elder Ballard, too, used the first, not the second.

Lots and lots of stories tell of princes in disguise, and similar things.  Clearly, it’s possible to know a person and not to know who that person is — at least, not fully.  There are, for example, accounts of kids going door to door singing Christmas carols in Princeton, New Jersey.  At one house, the long-haired old man who answers the door tells them to wait for just a minute, goes and fetches his violin, and then accompanies them on several carols.  Did all of them realize that he was named Albert Einstein, and that he was among the greatest scientific thinkers in history?  Did the people who went to that nightclub on Colorado Boulevard in Pasadena and heard the guy playing the drums there know that the drummer, Richard Feynman, was a professor at Caltech, a Nobel laureate in physics, and one of the foremost authorities in the world on quantum theory?  The peasant girl might know her young suitor very well and love him dearly, but she may not realize that he’s the heir to the throne.

Elder Ballard seemed to be saying, simply, that Catholics are theologically wrong about God in several respects.  That they misunderstand precisely who he is.

There’s nothing whatever new in this.  Catholics and Mormons disagree about the nature of the Godhead in dramatic ways.  Mormons believe God to be embodied.  Catholics don’t.  Catholics believe in Nicene ontological trinitarianism.  Mormons don’t.  Mormons believe humanity to be genetically related to God, as it were, in a very literal way that Catholics don’t.  Catholic theologians often speak of God as the Unmoved Mover; Mormons don’t.  And so forth.

Catholicism is precisely as far from Mormonism on such points as Mormonism is from Catholicism, and it would be disingenuous to pretend otherwise.

I suspect that Elder Ballard didn’t mean a whole lot more than that in the two sentences that have so inflamed some critics.

Jana Riess, speaking up against what she sees as a rather total devaluation of Catholicism by Elder Ballard — a devaluation that I simply don’t see in his comments — tells of how much certain Catholic music has meant to her, as well as certain other things Catholic, including the writing of Thomas Merton.

I don’t take a back seat to her in that regard.  I hope that my respect for Catholicism has been evident over the years, here on this blog, in various newspaper columns, in other things I’ve written, and in many public lectures and firesides that I’ve delivered.

I read Thomas Merton while still in high school.

I’ve met with very high Catholic leaders at the Vatican and elsewhere — one of them even invited me and some friends, as his guests, to attend a function with Pope John Paul II at the Roman Basilica of St. Paul Outside-the-Walls — and I respect them enormously.

In September 2006, while I was on a lecture tour in Australia and New Zealand that was focused on Islam, Pope Benedict XVI gave a lecture at the University of Regensburg, in Germany.  Some of his remarks struck both Muslim and non-Muslim observers as bigoted toward Islam, and an international controversy ensued.  I soon found myself being asked to respond to him both in lectures and during several radio interviews.  Unlike Elder Ballard’s comment, the Pope’s speech was written out, and I managed to find a copy of the German original online.  And, although I’m both a Mormon and an Islamicist, I was perfectly happy and willing to defend him, on multiple occasions in both countries, against what I regarded as gross and inflammatory misinterpretations.

I, too, love much Catholic music.  (Singing Schubert’s Mass in G with a choir in Cairo, for example, remains, for my wife and for me, one of the musical — and spiritual — high points of our lives; I’ve written about it several times.)

I studied one-on-one for several months with Father Georges Anawati at the Institut Dominicain d’Etudes Orientales in Cairo, and, like most everyone else who knew him, loved him.

One of my sons is named after St. Thomas Aquinas.

I’ve drawn considerably from Catholic liberation theologians for my thinking about Mormonism and social trinitarianism (some of which will shortly appear in Interpreter: A Journal of Mormon Scripture).

I don’t consider it even remotely “bigoted” or “hateful” or “denunciatory” to acknowledge that, from the standpoint of Mormonism, Catholicism gets some things quite wrong about “who God is,” “who the Savior is,” and “who the Holy Ghost is.”  And I fully expect that informed, believing Catholics will sometimes do us the credit of frankly saying precisely the same thing about Latter-day Saints.

Posted from San Francisco, California