He Has Faith in the Faithful

A conversation with Eugene O’Toole is a bit over my head. But that doesn’t mean it’s not enlightening. He’s a former Latin and history teacher with an interest in the classics and currently in charge of adult education at St. John Neumann Catholic Church in Irvine.

Not the first guy you’d think to call up to discuss the movies, unless it’s “The Da Vinci Code,” the surefire blockbuster that opens this weekend and which turns Christianity and Catholicism on their ear.

The movie spins off from Dan Brown’s bestselling novel of the same name that depicts Jesus as mortal and the husband of Mary Magdalene and the father of their child. The Roman Catholic Church conspired through the centuries to cover it up, the novel says. As for Da Vinci, he was one of the geniuses who knew about it and, as the story goes, revealed clues about it in his artworks.

Not exactly the story they told you in Sunday school.

Heresy? Blasphemy? An offense against Catholicism?

That’s what a lot of religious people are saying. To which O’Toole, a thinker and questioner and man of faith comfortably in his 70s, says, if I may paraphrase, “Not to worry.”

He tells me right off the bat he hasn’t read the book and won’t see the movie. He’s not boycotting them; he just doesn’t read much historical fiction and isn’t much of a moviegoer.

But he’s not telling other people not to go. To the contrary. “Is it possible that the church in the first three centuries pulled a fast one?” he asks, rhetorically.

Sounds like a great blurb for the movie, but O’Toole has a ready answer. No, the church didn’t, but that realization resulted from his own religious questioning and deliberation. It’s been a lifelong quest that he strongly recommends.

“It’s terrific,” he says of the controversy surrounding the movie, “because it brings up all the old questions that should be asked. Who is Christ? He himself asked that question -- Who do people say I am? “

Asking questions about one’s faith isn’t a sign of weakness but of potential discovery, O’Toole says. Two other good ones are which books made it into the Bible and who decided on them, he says. A fourth good question for more modern times, O’Toole says, is whether people should “pick and choose” what elements of the faith they accept.

“You can’t have faith without crisis and without doubt,” O’Toole says. “We have to ask questions like that.”

For people today who think ancient history belongs to old folks, O’Toole notes that the very theological questions asked today were asked 2,000 years ago. And they didn’t stop after Christianity was embraced by the Roman Empire in the 4th century.

And more than 500 years after that, he says, a significant part of the empire remained skeptical of Christ’s divinity. Had you been in a 4th century barbershop -- as the story goes, O’Toole says -- the subject was “the hottest issue of the day.”

All these centuries later, he says, it’s still good that adult Catholics ask questions about their faith in addition to heeding church authority. “Too often we don’t grow from a juvenile experience to a mature adult experience,” O’Toole says. “That can’t come without some kind of crisis. Faith needs doubt to increase the adult’s mature commitment not only to truth but to the love that Christ espouses.”

Besides, O’Toole suggests, self-discovery yields a better payoff. “I could take it on someone else’s authority, but the inner experience of awareness, it’s an awakening that each of us must have, especially for adults” in the modern age, he says.

In modern-day parlance, he thinks of “The Da Vince Code” as a riff on the Gospels and the early Christian church -- albeit an artistic interpretation that serious historians and theologians won’t buy.

But boycott the book or movie? No way.

“In a sense, the book and the movie, fiction as they may be,” “O’Toole says, “have asked us to do that kind of self-searching and self-awakening.”