From 2009 to 2012, I attended Boston College, a Jesuit Roman Catholic institution in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, on the western border of Boston proper. As a Protestant Evangelical, I didn’t know what to expect when Jess and I moved from South Florida and our familiar church jobs and community there and I entered into an unfamiliar theological and cultural world. During my first semester, Thomas Groome, a former priest and well-known Catholic educator, who would become a mentor of sorts for me, told me in his charming Irish brogue, “I tink you’ll find crossing over to be… terribly enriching.” It was.
For three years, I immersed myself in the theology, culture, and community of Boston College and their school of Theology and Ministry, staffed in large part by Jesuit priests. I studied religious education, sociology of religion, student formation, Christian philosophy, Latin, Greek, Biblical studies, moral theology, virtue ethics, and a host of other related subjects. On many Thursdays I went to mass, and I certainly didn’t miss the free lunch (“repast”) afterwards if I could help it. One professor of education referred to me as her “little evangelical.” It was new, it was challenging, and sometimes it was weird. It also helped form me more into the scholar and person I wanted to become. Ironically, it was during that time that I became convinced that the German Lutheran Protestant Dietrich Bonhoeffer would become the primary focus of my academic life’s work (it’s a long story).
At the end of my season at Boston College, when it came time to write my ThM (advanced theological master’s degree) thesis, I had already chosen Bonhoeffer as my subject. I knew I wanted to study his life and writings in a PhD program, whether at BC or at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California. I thought about the influence Boston College and Catholicism had had on my life during those three years, and I had noticed that in some significant aspects of his life story and writings, the same seemed to be true of Bonhoeffer. What follows is taken from my ThM thesis, “The Catholic Influence on Dietrich Bonhoeffer”, and I think it shows why this kind of “crossing over” in our lives can be so...enriching:
When in Catholic Rome: Bonhoeffer Discovers the Church
The first great influence of Roman Catholicism on Dietrich Bonhoeffer was actually the city of Rome itself. As Bethge observes in Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Rome was the city for which young, educated Germans had longed for some time. Paris and London were not the natural destinations for German youth wanting to broaden their horizons, experience ancient culture, and connect with new or different people; Rome was the symbol of the origins of German culture. It is not surprising, then, that the college-aged Bonhoeffer pushed for and received permission from his parents to travel to the great city to the south with his brother Klaus, in the spring of 1924. Up to this point, Bonhoeffer had had limited interactions with Catholicism:
Relations between Catholics and Protestants were still distant and reserved…it was not until he was in upper school…that it occurred to him to enter a Catholic church in Nordhausen. In a letter to his parents he wrote, almost with alarm, about its magnificence. Not until summer term in Tübingen did he learn something about Catholic practices, and he readily admitted that his overwhelming impression of the Corpus Christi procession in Rottenburg was one of genuine faith. Thus he traveled south willing to approach Catholicism with as few preconceptions as possible.
So although some of the major draws of Rome were the classical and Mediterranean (to which Dietrich’s brother Klaus was drawn), not specifically Catholic, aspects, Dietrich seemed to seek out the latter, enchanted by the ecclesiastical charm of the Eternal City.
Bethge makes a claim when addressing Bonhoeffer’s interest in Rome that is of some importance to our discussion: “The fascination exercised by Catholic Rome became a permanent influence on Bonhoeffer’s thought. It cannot be said that it diminished his critical awareness, but the Roman expression of the universality of the church and its liturgy had a tremendous impact on him.” Bethge goes on to explain how “provincial, nationalistic, and narrow-minded” Bonhoeffer’s own church seemed in comparison with the universal sense of church he encountered in Rome….
Specifically, Bonhoeffer asked questions of and learned much from a priest from Bologna, attended high mass on Palm Sunday in St. Peter’s cathedral (“surrounded by a throng of seminarians, monks, and priests of every skin color”), attended vespers in Trinità dei Monti, and started to feel as if he was gaining “real understanding of Catholicism…beginning to understand the concept of the church.”