Catholic tradition still has answers for the questions of the contemporary world, says the former Master-General of the Dominican order.

For someone who was almost expelled from school as a teenager for reading Lady Chatterly's Lover during benediction, Dominican Father Timothy Radcliffe certainly qualifies as a bad boy turned good. When asked what turned him around, he might give a simple answer: truth.

"When I left school I met people who told me that my faith was not true," he said recently at Dominican University near Chicago. "This became the big question for me. Is it true? It dawned on me that if it was true, then my faith must be the most important thing in my life."

Contemporary society has lost its taste for seeking truth, Radcliffe argues, which is why he has devoted two books to inviting an increasingly secular world back to church. "We are devouring our small planetary home because we are tempted to see everything in terms of its utility for us," he says. "Consumption is the dominant metaphor of our time."

As a remedy he argues that we must learn to know and love what is around us "not for what it gives us but just because it is. You can delight in a flower without having to pluck and own it."

For Radcliffe, however, the search for truth is not something done alone but in community, what he calls the "pleasure of pursuing the truth in good fellowship."
"We can only have the confidence to engage in such a courageous task if we are sustained by friendship."

Your most recent book is titled Why Go to Church? which followed an earlier one, What Is the Point of Being a Christian? Why are these questions that Christians should be answering now?

For one thing, it's what people are asking. I wrote the earlier book in response to a question from a friend of mine, a professor of sociology. He said to me that his son, who is very bright but not interested in religion, asked what he would get out of being Christian. He said if he became a Buddhist, he'd probably get some inner calm—that's the payback—or if he became a Hindu then maybe he'd get good fortune. But what does Christianity give?

Initially I was shocked by the question; it shows how utilitarian we can be about everything. But I came to see that the question needed to be answered. I think what our faith actually does is open us up beyond immediate paybacks to the God whose worship is our joy, which brings us to ask fundamental questions about who we are and where we're going.

In What Is the Point of Being a Christian? I wished to challenge any little utilitarian approach to being a human, which is that of a consumer: What do I get on the market?

My friend's son actually enjoyed the book, though he didn't know it was written in response to his question. He said: OK, it's not bad. I enjoyed reading all this, but I can do all this by just sitting at home. Why do I have to go to church?

At that moment the Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, contacted me to ask if I would write a book for him for Lent, so Why Go to Church? seemed to be the book I had to write.

It's a question that needs an answer because even when people do believe, they can turn it into a fake spirituality of me and my God, or a beautiful relationship with Jesus, which I can have all by myself. But what you see in the gospels is that Jesus is always drawing people into the company of his friends, disreputable friends sometimes, and that if you want to belong to him, you have to enter that broad, welcoming friendship, which is what we celebrate in the Eucharist.

What do you think has changed in contemporary culture that has people asking questions they never would have a generation or two ago?

I think the big temptation of our culture is trivialization. We have a fascinating, rich culture in many ways, which I love—I'm delighted I live in the beginning of the 21st century—but there is a temptation toward banality, the cult of celebrity. Everybody wants to get out of bed in the morning to read about what Tiger Woods has been up to.

I think earlier cultures, even very recent ones, partly because of the fragility of life and the imminent threat of death, retained a constant awareness of who they were and where they were going—questions about their destiny. Saul Bellow said we in contemporary culture are dying from an ignorance of death. Death is hidden away.

If you run away from death, then you eat and drink and be merry, because you don't know what the hell is going to happen tomorrow and you'd rather not know. I think that's why we now need to be woken up to the profound questions that traditional cultures confronted all the time.

Why go to church? I suppose if we went back 50 years, our ancestors would have belonged to communities and known their neighbors and shared a communal life. They would have known that it's the rituals of the community that sustain people, secular rituals and religious rituals.

We were once deeply communitarian people, and it's only recently that people have been able to become invisible to their neighbors and have lives that are detached from any local community. We need to rediscover why we need to belong.

Does the Catholic tradition have answers to these questions that make sense to contemporary people?

Very often people make a breakthrough when they're faced with death and birth. What I find in England—it's the most secular country in Europe—is people become parents and then realize that their lives don't make sense just in terms of their own span. Now they've got this little bundle of flesh, what Charles Dickens calls an "item of mortality," who will live beyond them and will have other children.

When faced with birth and death, people realize you've got to have a longer story, which is what Christianity offers, from the beginning to the end. I've always loved the Glory Be—" . . . as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be"—it's the big story, and people wake up to that.

I'm a trustee of Cafod, the British version of Catholic Relief Services, and I was talking to the director of international affairs. He talked about realizing his life was astray and that he had to wake up to some ultimate destination, some destiny. I think the church does offer that.

What are the obstacles on the church side to proclaiming the gospel in a way that contemporary people might respond to it?

One obstacle is that we're often too rich. I think the church is always renewed when we really find ourselves with the poor and the powerless. The seductions of power are considerable, perhaps particularly in the United States, where the church is so rich.

In England, they always used to say the difference between the Catholic and Anglican clergy is the Catholic priests went on bicycles and the Anglicans went in cars. If you're on a bicycle, you see people, you stop. You have to be in proximity to the poor, and I think that's a sort of verification of the authenticity of our preaching.

The other thing I'd say is that faced with the mystery of God, we often lack humility. We think we've got it all wrapped up. But any Christian who calls himself or herself traditional knows that faced with the infinite mystery of God, we know so little. Thomas Aquinas said in this world we cannot know who or what God is, and it's the temptation of any ideological group, on the left or right, to think they've got God wrapped up.

I think if we want to be authentic proclaimers of the gospel, we have to be fellow disciples. We have to be beside people as they search and they question and they doubt.

Of course this isn't incompatible with a confidence in preaching, but the best preacher not only boldly proclaims but humbly listens. If you haven't got that humility, then you're just somebody floating an ideology.