 Good evening. I'll mark up to go to the director of the LBJ Presidential Library and I'm delighted to welcome you here for our evening with Gary Wills who will discuss his brand new book, The Future of the Catholic Church with Pope Francis, which is released today. This is day number one of its publication. When Pope Francis became Pope in March of 2013, two years ago, as the first Jesuit to hold the position and the first from the Americas, he faced many challenges. Can he bring significant reform to the Catholic Church and should he? Mr. Wills is as qualified as any to address this topic. A renowned Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, his many works through the years include What Jesus Meant, Papal Sin, Why I Am Catholic, and Why Priests. He is also a frequent contributor to the New York Times Review of Books and a professor emeritus at Northwestern University. I am further delighted that my LBJ Library predecessor and friend, Betty Sue Flowers, will serve as the moderator of tonight's discussion. Betty Sue was the director of the LBJ Presidential Library for seven fruitful years. Before that, she was a professor in UT's English Department, Associate Dean of Graduate Studies, and the director of Plan 2 Honors Program. Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming Dr. Betty Sue Flowers and Mr. Gary Wills. Well it's wonderful to be home again. Earlier I saw a lot of familiar faces here and so it's lovely to see old friends too and to make a new one and Professor Wills who feels like an old friend to me since I read a number of his books and I've always learned a great deal from them. I know you'll want to ask him questions too, so what I've asked for is that we'll have a conversation and then towards the end we'll open it up for any of your questions. So if you have questions and we don't cover what you're interested in, I think there'll be microphones and we'll have the lights up and have a quite larger conversation here. Professor Wills, I really enjoyed your book. I think all of you should get it and read it if you haven't already because while it's written with a lot of passion for Catholics and non-Catholics alike, it seems to me, I'm curious as to why you think this is so significant for a larger audience. What about this book? Well there's only one God after all and the Pope, the new Pope, still new to me, said there's only one Holy Spirit and he doesn't guide only the Catholic Church. In fact he said it has guided the Muslims, the spirit he has guided the Muslims, and that we can learn from the treasures that they have accumulated. Now that's something that the Catholic Church that I grew up in said there's only one true religion as if we had God and it was a monopoly. We were even told you can't go to a Protestant church because that would be countenancing error. We've outgrown that for a long time but for a long time we also said the New Testament has superseded the Old Testament. God's no longer on the side of the Jews. It took a long time to beat down that terrible, terrible idea. The Second Vatican Council finally did it and now we're getting people calling for a Holy War against Muslims and the Pope, one of the most significant things the Pope can do I believe, I wrote a piece in the Washington Post this last Sunday, is head off the Holy War. You know we tend to equate Muslims with 9-11, with ISIS, etc. Gallup did a long, years long, most extensive survey of the 35 most Muslim nations after 9-11 and asked the question do you agree with what happened at 9-11 and 93% said no, of the Muslims said no. Only 7% said yes. And now we have people like Senator Lindsey Graham who want us to go to war with a billion and a half Muslims. This Pope in his major statement so far, the joy of the gospel said that the Quran is a great spiritual classic. Now if he can help us avoid the absurdity of fighting another of God's people that could be his greatest contribution. Do you think that he can make a difference? I ask that because if the Pope seems not to be able, as some people say, to change his own church how could he influence another religion? Well I don't want to change his own church because that would mean it's a monarchy, a dictator, change only comes from the top. One of the things I argue in the book is that change comes from the bottom and it has constantly done that. It's doing it now. We have to be careful about our terminology. I've already slipped once so far. Most people when I talked about the church and meant the hierarchy. The church is the people of God, not the rulers. It's like our America. I and many people are very critical of the American government. That doesn't mean we don't love the country. It's one of the reasons we are critical. The same thing is true about the church's hierarchy. We have lived down many errors that the hierarchy was trying to hold. For instance, right now 80% of Catholics over 80 in their fertile years practice contraception. The priests don't really worry about that in the confessional or in their sermons. The bishops have because it was clear to them from Rome that under the last two popes your path up, your career, depended on passing the litmus test that the popes had imposed. So they didn't pay attention to what was going on in the pews. They just looked up to the hierarchy above them. Well, we've had that happen all kinds of ways that when the hierarchy takes an outlandish position, the people under the Spirit's guidance just ignore it. When Pius IX, when he issued his condemnations of democracy, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, etc., he was losing his earthly realm and panicking, and was a little mentally unbalanced anyway. Gladstone, the Prime Minister of England, said, oh my God, my Catholic constituents are not going to obey me anymore because they're all against democracy. Lord Acton, the great Catholic historian, said, you're worried about that? He said, I can tell you real scandals about the hierarchy, murderous, incestuous, terrible, crusading popes. Don't worry about it. We just don't pay attention when they say such silly things. So you have a greater trust in the people of God than the pope of God. After all, the hierarchy was not always there. It grew up slowly. When the pope was Cardinal Ratzinger, he was asked, aren't you upset that so many Catholics don't follow the church's teaching on abortion, on contraception, on married priests, on women priests? And he said, no, that doesn't bother me at all because doctrine is not determined by votes. Well, what doctrines are more important than the incarnation, the trinity, the redemption? Those were all decided by votes in the early councils in the fourth and fifth centuries. There were hundreds of bishops that met at Nicaea and elsewhere and voted. And there was a minority and a majority. The majority won, and that's why we have those doctrines. And the bishops who were voting, by the way, had been elected themselves, elected by their presbyters who were not only elected by the people, but dragooned by them. In those early centuries, if you were chosen by the people of God to be a priest, you had to become one and you couldn't escape. Ambrose had that happen to him. Augustine had that happen to him. And then once you became a bishop, all bishops were just for the city. There were hundreds of bishops in Italy alone, hundreds in Africa alone. Once you became a bishop, you could never leave. The people, you were the people's possession in a way. So for a long stretch of the Middle Ages, no bishop could become Pope because we'd have to leave his people. Abbots became Pope, deacons did, aristocratic sons of important people did, but no bishop. So that's how far we've traveled. And we're moving back. So when the earthly realm was taken away from Pius IX, he thought the whole church would fall apart. It didn't, of course. So over and over, the people of God have been guided. John Henry Newman said that the laity have sometimes been more faithful to doctrine than the hierarchy. He was silenced for doing that, of course, as John Courtney Murray was silenced for saying the American system of separation of church and state is okay. Rome quashed that. But funny things happen when the people in the hierarchy are at odds. The hierarchy all of a sudden discovered, oh, there is something good about the separation of church and state because John Kennedy was running for president, the first Catholic president. And all of a sudden, since Kennedy had referred to his help from Father Murray, Father Murray was returned to good standing with Rome. So there's a constant struggle back and forth when things become unlivable and irrational. For instance, the interdict when the Pope would deny the sacraments to everybody living in a realm that he was fighting with. That was never formally renounced. It just fell into unuse. The same with indulgences. The same thing is happening with confession right now. People are just not going, so it will drop out. Yes, you said the confession booths were being used as janitorial closets now. And there are a number of reasons for that. It had changed a lot in the past, but the sex scandal made people all of a sudden say, maybe it's not a good idea to have priests sitting alone in a little box listening to sexual sins all day. You know, I find it very interesting that you just tackle some of the most difficult issues head on. For example, women priests. You talk about the future of the church. After all, this book is the future of the Catholic Church, but you talk about it by going into the past and showing that the future that we might think we can just forecast from the way it's been is not true because it's not been that way. So you talk about the future by going to the past, which I think is a very interesting… Well, I don't predict the future. I have no power to do that. I hope for the future. But the point of the book is not to be afraid of change, not to preclude it, not to say if the Pope looks like he's changing something well. He's not a Catholic because Catholics never change. So it's a kind of inoculation of the fear of change by going back and seeing just how thoroughly we have changed, constantly, by the way, on basic things. The whole of the reading of the Church of Supercession in the Jewish… Now, the Old Testament was canceled by the New Testament. It's no longer a calling from God. That was very hard to shake and it finally happened only with the help of the Holocaust, you know, how horrible. Catholics couldn't keep up the old idea that the Jews were banished people, cursed people after the Holocaust. And so even priests who had for years tried to claim, well, you can say that Christ canceled the Old Testament without being guilty of anti-Semitism, which was clearly not true. It became harder and harder for them to claim that. And so finally, at the Second Vatican Council, the bishops went against Paul VI. Paul VI still believed in supercession. He gave a sermon in Rome during the Council in which he said that the New Testament is canceled the Old. So there was a case where the bishops finally came to their senses because the theologians had finally come to their senses and the people no longer wanted to have that hatred of Jews as part of our burden of life. And so the Pope's attempt to head off the change failed. You know, I think those stories of all the changes, which is what this book is about, undercut systematically what you could say the man or woman in the street tends to think, who's not Catholic, tends to think there's always been a pope since Peter. There have always been priests. We've always had this natural law against abortion, against birth control. And in each case, you show that always is not true. No, it's not true at all. Thank God. You know, Gilbert Chesterton kind of made me start thinking about this when I was in my teens. In his book has a chapter called The Five Deaths of the Faith. He said that the church has not always been the same because it didn't change. In fact, as a matter of fact, the church really died over and over, not only by external pressure, but by internal rot, by failing in all kinds of ways. And then it didn't die after all. It seemed to have perished. It seemed to deserve perishing, but it didn't. And he said, this is the real wonder of the church that somehow the spirit saves the people of God and the rulers. They're both interacting constantly. There's a struggle and there's never been a total split. Although people have left, the Protestants did and we've split off from the east, all of those which are terrible errors on everybody's part. But the Catholic church he was talking about at the time has survived because it learned to live through change. I compare it the church to Buster Keaton in the movie Seven Chances. He's running downhill, long sloping hill and there are big boulders cascading after him, running him down. He trips over some. Some knock him aside from other ones and he keeps going and survives all the way to the bottom and then he has to turn around. Another bigger threat comes up and he has to run up the hill through all this continuing rain of rocks. I say, that's my image of the church. One of the most interesting conversations you have, whether in this book or in another place, is about Peter and Paul. And when we think of the Pope as coming from Peter, you show how this isn't so, that Rome wasn't the center of Christianity. On top of that, that Peter was chosen because he was flawed. I mean, that this is a metaphor for it. Can you talk about that a little? Well, Peter is a kind of a mess in the gospels. He's always wrong. And yet, he's chosen as a leader of the people for one reason. After he denies Christ three times, as I say, he's always wrong. He runs away. He denies Christ. There's the sword episode with the ear. Well, yeah, that was denying Christ too. Christ didn't want him to do that. He had to heal the ear. But he says, you denied me three times. Tell me, do you love me? Of course you know I do. Do you love me? Three times, he says, do you love me? That's why he's a leader. You know, this Pope has said repeatedly now, we have paid too much attention to law and not to grace, to the church and not to love, to the Pope and not to Christ. Now, that's really grounds for hope. I love the epigraphs that you have here in the epilogue. And I want to read a few of them and just have you talk about this notion of surprise. This is epilogue, the future, a church of surprises. All of these are from Pope Francis. I await the surprise of each day. Dear brothers and sisters, we are afraid of God's surprises. He always surprises us. The Lord is like that. I would like to speak of three simple attitudes, hopefulness, openness to being surprised by God and living in joy. And finally, God is always a surprise, so you never know where and how you will find him. You are not setting the time and place of the encounter with him. Yeah, isn't he amazing? He understands symbolic language very well, the name he took, the place he lives, what he wears. You know, authority tries to distance itself from the mundane to be inaccessible. When the Pope was shown the papal palace that everyone else lived in, he said, I can't live there. It's not because of luxury versus austerity. It's because of needing people around. He said, I can't live alone. I need people around. So he went back to the Casa Santa Marta, which is a transient place. It was built to house the bishops at Conclave in very equal spare rooms assigned by Lot, and he was living there when he was part of the Conclave. He's now moved into a slightly bigger room because the arrangement for the Casa Santa Marta is of no communication with the outside world. The bishops never had that, the cardinals rather, never had that when they were living in the papal palace. In the Conclaves before, they lived on cots with bales of curtains dividing them in the hallways and offices of the papal palace. So that's why this was built. It's a way station, really, not the establishment of power. He lives there. He goes to the communal dining room. He says mass in the adjacent chapel. Everyone else uses papal symbolism to say, I'm not like you. He does everything he can to say, I'm like you. Which reminds me of someone, Jesus. You pointed out that he's the only pope who's taken the name Francis, which I think to a Protestant is a bit surprising since we tend to really like Francis. And we wonder, why no pope has taken the name Francis? Well, the first reason is that he was not a priest. After all, most popes want to emphasize the majesty of the priesthood. He's choosing someone who is a layman, always a layman. Also, he's choosing someone who is radical. Francis was so radical that his own followers had to tame his teaching as soon as he died. They all had to back off from what he was saying about poverty, et cetera. And then the movement splintered into all kinds of variations because some people were saying, no, no, he did mean absolute poverty. And I was saying, no, no, no. So Bonaventure and others tried to heal the wounds of this movement. It was a terribly radical movement. He was a subversive character, that Francis. Don't you think Jesus was too? Absolutely. And that's what the pope says. He says, you have to be a revolutionary to follow Jesus. That's a hard thing to hear. It's a great thing to hear. Did you have any surprises writing this book? Oh, I'm always surprised by history as I learned more about it. I have I have hunches and I follow them up. Not so much in history. I'm surprised by Francis. I was already when I finished writing that book and I'm even more so now that he's had more time to do more. And we have to remember he's walking a very fine line. No other pope has had a living pope in good graces. Just a few steps away from him in the Vatican. And the Vatican itself is full of loyalists to both John Paul and Benedict. And liberals have said, why did he keep Miller as the head of the Doctor of the Faith congregation? Well, Miller is the executor of the papers of Benedict. He could hardly reject the man who was in that position put there by Benedict. And Georg Gainsfein, the personal secretary of Benedict, is still the prefect of the Holy Palace. So he has to live with that. He's not in the joy of the gospel. He cites constantly, not only Benedict and John Paul, but Paul the sixth. Hardly ever quotes John the 23rd. He's following John the 23rd's example. But he wants to stress I'm not the enemy of the past. I'm not the enemy of the hierarchy. He could hardly be. So he has to pull us together so far as he can. He admits that he failed as the Jesuit provincial in Argentina because he didn't hold the factions together. He said I was too young. I was immature. And probably the fact that he had, there was a rift between him and other Jesuits helped him in a way. Wonderful coincidences like this do make you unbelieve in the guidance of the Spirit. Probably he was made a bishop and then an archbishop because he was at odds with the Jesuits. John Paul hated Jesuits. I interviewed the acting general in Rome of the Jesuits shortly after John Paul took office. And he said Pedro Lupe, the general whom John Paul distrusted, had had a stroke. And the acting general of the order, very popular, was an American, Vincent O'Keefe. And his first audience with the Pope, he said I don't have your experience. I don't have your authority. He said one thing I do know. The priests who are leaving now, most of them don't want to leave the church and they have great ways they can contribute to the church. Their training is something they want to use. They love to use. So why are we denying them laicization? Why are we saying they can't act as Catholics in good standing? And the Pope said to him, they broke their word. They broke their oath. They were out. And when it looked like O'Keefe was going to be elected general, the Pope for the first time took away from the Jesuits the power to appoint their own general, put in his own chosen man. And Father John O'Malley, the great Renaissance historian, Jesuit, says that many Jesuits think he was trying to kill the order at that point because he was bringing in all these new orders and favoring the ones who were really towing the line. Opus Dei, the legions of Christ, legion of Christ, Focolare, communion and liberation, all of those new, very conservative things were showered with favors while he was downplaying the Jesuits. You know, reading your book helped explain to me this mixture of politics in the church and then the very human failings. Why so many bishops covered up all the scandals, the sexual scandals. And you pointed out that they did pass this litmus test. There were no rebellors amongst them. They were church protective by design. So we have a very select group of church people in that position. Yeah. No, the hierarchy was made very tame, the last few. And what's going to be interesting now is that any bishop around the world now knows that your career path is not helped by passing all those litmus tests. And so they're not going to do it. Again, he has, when in his appointment of cardinals, he's gone outside the normal and to less recognized places. He's trying to cut down the careerism of the bishops. They are, they have been terrifically career minded, towing the Roman line in every way possible. I just find it so interesting that he's appointed so many already and that we may have a different future even just because of that. They're different people in there. But also the bishops themselves are changing. I find that tone even in my church, they're all talking less about dogma and more about charity and love and the poor. Because they, their careerists, they know that now the career is to be more like Jesus. Surprise. That's a surprise. Well, is there a particularly Catholic perspective on the big C Catholic Catholic perspective on the world, you think? Yes and no. We do have, we Catholics, our memories and connections and love of all the good things that in the church. My education by the Dominican nuns changed my life. My time in the Jesuit seminary changed my life. My heroes from Chesterton and Newman and Augustine, et cetera. Well, Augustine was not a Catholic because he was a Christian. There wasn't a Catholic. I think you're going to have to explain that. Well, there was no Catholic church until the Protestant Reformation. You know, and not a distinguishable. We shouldn't really call Augustine a Catholic because he wasn't set over against the Orthodox or the Protestants, et cetera. They were just Christians then, as they always should be. So yeah, there is a Catholic sensibility. In many ways, the priest sociologist Andrew Greeley had a lot of wonderful books about the Catholic sensibility, which is all very strong. But we should never guard that by saying that makes us better than other Christians. There's a wonderful passage in the Gospel of Luke where, for the first time, Jesus sends out the disciples on their own to cast out devils and preach the kingdom. And they come back and he says, well, how did it go? And John says, terrific. But we came across a man who was casting out devils in your name, but he wasn't one of us, so we made him stop. And he said, why did you do that? If they do it in my name, they're not against me. Well, all those Christians who are doing things in Jesus's name are on our side, on Jesus's side, on our side. So when I was on Stephen Colbert at the end of a session, he said, you're no better than a Protestant. And I said, you got me. What makes this Pope exciting is that we're no better than a believing Muslim. We're no better, certainly, than a believing Jew. We're no better than anybody who is seeking God, finding God, being guided by God. And we have to keep our own sensibility, but not our own pride. That was the idea that you served Jesus by pride. How did we ever get into that hole? We're human. Yeah, exactly. I want to leave some time for questions from the audience. I have a lot more questions of my own, but could we have the lights up and the microphones? So if anyone has a question, I don't know who I'm talking to when I say, could we have the lights up? Yeah. Some spirit in the back. Oh, they're coming up. I can see you vaguely now. Here's one right here. Right there. Do you have the microphone? I do. Oh, okay. Go ahead. At times it seems that Pope Francis has been more popular outside of the Catholic community than within it. How do you think this will change, how do you think this will affect his leadership and the standing of the church in the larger global community? Well, I don't know what, who are the Catholics that he's not popular with? Certain conservative groups, certain, you know, those who... Yeah, but do you think they're a majority of the Catholics, the conservatives? As I said, I think that over 80% of Catholics practice contraception. Do you think those people don't like Francis? As we found out, the radical Muslims are a minority in the Muslim faith. The Catholic conservatives are a minority in the Catholic community also. They're a very loud minority. They're like the Tea Party. Loud minorities shouldn't make us think that they're the whole picture. Thank you. Thank you. Yes. I would like just an analysis or response to something that I've been mulling over that I've heard. The first thing is that when the Catholic Church gets in trouble, they come up with an older pope who will not be presumed to last too long, so as to affect too much damage, but will get them off the hook. And the second one is what was known, was it at all anticipated that this little individual from America was going to have the capacity to be so incredibly popular and influential by the curiae who I'm told they're the guys to watch? Well, I'm not quite sure what that question means. It's true that sometimes it helps a pope to be older, I mean a pope to be papabile, especially when there's been a long reign of preceding pope. And that was what happened with John XXIII. After Pius XII, that huge long reign in which there was a freezing of biblical scholarship and all kinds of things, they chose an old guy from Venice and thought, well, he'll die soon. And John XXIII did die pretty soon, but he often did an awful lot in that time. So maybe that was one of the reasons that this pope was chosen, but you should be careful getting what you wish for as they found out with John XXIII and they may find out with Francis. Yes. So there may be a theme to these questions. So one of our priest at church after he had a chance to see a little bit what Pope Francis was doing, he said if he was a pope he'd get a food taster. So maybe that's why the pope goes to communal dinner. But I'm curious as to your thought just along the same line as to, so we know that the pope is shaking things up in a lot of ways in Rome as well, and then how business is done in the Vatican. And there's been a lot of people concerned that there might be some backlash down the line. And so if we think about, we hope, I personally hope Pope Francis has a very long tenure as pope, but are you concerned at all that after that, that given some of the things he's doing and we hope will achieve that there might be in the next selection of pope that kind of push to go back in a lot of different fronts? Well, we shouldn't ask too much of a pope. He depends on us. The question is, will we change? John XXIII didn't dictate change from the top. He opened the way with the council and encouraged the bishops to do what they were doing. And it was not the initiator of many of the changes that the Second Vatican Council brought about. And when he died, Paul VI was even less the initiator. It depends on us, the people, to make what we think our spirit guided choices for ourselves and our brothers and sisters. And he will rely on us as he should. The way he handled the Senate was the Senate of Bishops in the last year, late last year, was a perfect model of that. The Senate met. It debated. There was a leak of a document that seemed to be broader on acceptance of gays and divorced. And the conservative minority combined and watered down the final statement, which was taken as a loss for the pope. The pope congratulated them on their openness and debate and published the whole proceedings. And whose side do you think the world was lined up on? But before that, the synods which had been introduced by the Second Vatican Council, the pope, John Paul, clamped down and said, oh, we'll have a synod, but it'll be secret. And he'll report only to me, and I will only do with it what I want to do. So that was the way the synod was operating up until this last one. And when the pope opens it all up, that's exactly the right thing to do. He didn't tell them what to do. He's just letting us in on what they're doing. And that kind of accountability, that kind of openness, calls for us to respond, to demand from our priests that they be more consistent and honest. I have very good friends who are part of SNAP, the victims group for the abused minors. And they're very disappointed in the pope that he hasn't instantly changed the whole of the proceedings. They thought he'll say, who's a victim? What's the procedure? How can we compensate? Do all that in his first year or two? He's not doing that. He's appointing commissions. He's appointing studies, organizing groups. He's not doing it by fiat. That would be imitating his predecessors. It would be acting as if the pope were a monarch. He's not, and he knows that. How he changes, how he encourages a change. He's not enlisting on our side, the liberal side, not enlisting on the conservative side. He knows the weakness of both. The conservatives, he's not draining them because they're mean. They love to punish. They love dogma. The perfect example of that is they love to exclude people from communion. Divorced politician, abortion advocate, they can't have Jesus. Only we can have Jesus. The pope has said the Eucharist is not a punishment, not to be used as a punishment. It should be used as a medicine. His other favorite image is that the church is like a field hospital after a battle. When you go to the wounded, you don't say, do you have the right ideas on nutrition and heart attack and all of that kind of thing before you address the wounds? You go out and address the wounds. The conservative position has been to go out on the battlefield and shoot the wounded. You know, everything I'm hearing here could apply to our country, too. Exactly. Exactly. Especially what you said about we depend on too much, we hope for too much from our leaders and not enough from ourselves. Anyway, I said he's not joining the conservative side as a us against them. He's not joining the liberal side either because he knows that we have our weaknesses. We liberals are the smarty fans of the party. We know too much. And the pope doesn't like that. This pope like John the 23rd loves the things that the people love, including popular piety, what's called folk religion. Both he and John the 23rd were great believers in Marian devotions, the rosary, things like that. I love that in his very sparse, sparely furnished room in the Casa Santa Marta, he has a statue of Our Lady of Lujan, the Argentine protectress. And not too many liberals that I know have statues of Our Lady in their room. Yes. Does Pope Francis have a kitchen cabinet or are there any identifiable individuals or groups that influence his thinking? Yeah, he has, well, I don't know about kitchen cabinet, but he has certainly has his advocates who have been with him for a while. Remember, he came in second in the conclave that chose Benedict. And the people who pushed for him then were pushing for him this time too. The book by Ivory mentioned some of them. In fact, the conservative said, oh, see, he engineered his own election, which is not at all true. But yeah, he has standbys from the liberals like the ones who have been aged out of the voting cardinal late, but are still on his side. And of course, he has his friends from Argentina. He's not naive, although he says he is. But he's not a schemer in the sense that he wants to rely just on one group of people. He says that was his mistake as a provincial. So he has an inclusiveness. He tries to include all kinds of people. You had already partially answered my question about what is being done about the pedophiles and the priests who are being hidden and passed on to another city or town. And this is all continuing. And what you had said the Pope himself isn't making pronouncements or being dogmatic that they're having commissions and inquiries. As you see it, is there anything being done to actually punish the perpetrators and to prevent this from continuing to happen? Well, there are changes, gradual ones. For instance, the Vatican for the first time appeared before the Human Rights Commission of the United Nations and revealed what it had previously hidden, the fact that 800 priests were dismissed, were defraught that people didn't know about before. Again, the church loves to do things in secret. So when they do something good, they keep it in secret because they don't have to admit how many things they've had to face up to. He is certainly more open to victims. He's more open to everybody. He's washed the feet of Muslim woman. He's embraced all kinds of people. So I think he's trying to get the resources. It's a very difficult thing to get a punishment for responsible bishops because the whole church machinery is geared to prevent having to do that. And he can't change that machinery overnight. You know, it's always a very complicated matter to say who is a real victim? When does the statute of limitations, the natural one, not just the legal one, run out? We can't go back and rewrite history. So there are punishments pending for two bishops. If you read John Allen in Crooks or the people in Commonwealth or in the National Catholic Reporter, there are procedures going on against at least two bishops. But that's a very difficult thing. What is proper compensation? What is protection of the rights of the accused? These are not things that you can make one sweeping judgment on, it seems to me. I think this will be the last question. Yes? Mr. Wills? If we are the church, the people are the church and the Holy Spirit moves among us, do you think in our lifetime that we will see married priests and we will see women as priests? Well, to tell you the truth, I don't care. Because I think there shouldn't be priests. There are no priests in the New Testament until the late letter to Hebrews. There are no priests in Paul. There are no priests in the Four Gospels. Paul never calls himself a priest. He never addresses anyone as a priest. Peter calls himself one of the presbyters. One of the company of presbyters in the letter that's ascribed to him. So the priesthood is a later growth and later on it became a malignant one. As if only the priest can do sacraments, which are all later developments, too. So now, if Catholics get together for a Sunday meeting and a priest doesn't show up, they say, well, let's go home. Without a priest, we're nothing. St. Augustine said, you are the body of Christ. Not the thing on the altar. He said, well, when we put bread and wine on the altar, that's you on the altar. And when I give you communion, I say, receive what you are, the body of Christ. Henri Delouac showed that the body of Christ meant always the people of God in the first four or five centuries. But then the idea that only the priest can speak for God led to a kind of imperialism that only the priest can marry, only the priest can do last rites, only the priest can confirm or bishop. All of those things are later growths of this monopolization of grace and saying spirit has only this one conduit down to us. Now, we are more and more acting as if that's not true, that we can have community leaders, deacons, and others. In my church, the Northwestern Student Church, we've had for the last 25 years, 20 years, two women who are more important to us than the priests who were set in. You know, we have no say now over what priest comes to us. The bishop just sends one and takes one away at any time. But we've had two women who have led the community in all kinds of ways. When the first one retired, people who had been students at Northwestern came back to testify to her and said, you're the one who helped me through my studies. You're the one who helped us prepare for marriage. You're the one who catacysed our children. And she also preached the homily until Francis George stopped that. But she is much more the leader of our community than any of the priests who were dropped in for a while. She stayed longer and she was closer to everybody, knew everybody. That's the way the leaders of the community, even when the priesthood did arise, they belonged to the people. Augustine didn't want to become a priest. Ambrose didn't want to become a priest. They were forced to. People said, we want you. You have to do it because God speaks through us. I understand all that. I guess in my lifetime, I have known so many men who have left the priesthood to marry. And I think it really diminishes the church. It just doesn't seem fair. On the other hand, they should continue to be leaders in their community. I think they are. But I think that they're looked upon. And we shouldn't let say, unless they're priests, they can't be leaders, teachers. Again, only priests took theology at one point. And they did it only in Latin. And so the rest of the people had to learn the Bible only as the priest explained it from a Latin translation. Again, this is the concentration of power in the hierarchy and in the priesthood. It's a very unhealthy, long development. And so that's my question to you. Do you think it will change in our lifetime? I think it slowly is changing. As I say, women are becoming far more important. They have to be because the men are disappearing. And on things like confession, the Pope, when he was asked about contraception, said, oh, Paul the Six was a prophet. He was against Malthusianism. He was against colonialism. And he says, but of course, for the woman, she's got to work that out with her confessor, which is what's happening. So he doesn't have an open break or assault on authority. He just says, the spirit is working in various channels and the woman will work it out with her confessor. That's what he has to do in order to hold the church together. As I say, he's not going to line up with us against them or them against us. I wouldn't want him to. And we're never going to get an ideal church. I'm never going to get a priestless church in my lifetime, short lifetime left. The church never was perfect. It was flawed and damaged from the beginning. The disciples never understood Jesus. There were fights from the very outset. Peter and Paul argued practically viciously over kosher food. So what we have to do is live with our damaged church and try to heal its wounds the best we can in whatever way we can. Thank you. Thank you, Professor Wills.