The Catholic Difference: Meditation on a Roman pizza

ROME – Pizza in the Eternal City tends to exemplify a proposition I have long defended: what crossed the Atlantic going west was usually improved in the process. I like Roman pizza, as I like Rome, but I like New York pizza, Chicago pizza, Detroit pizza and just about every other variant of American pizza – Hawaiian excepted – more.

Still, when in Rome, do as the Romans. So in recent years, I have formed the happy habit of dining with a cadre of young friends I have dubbed the “Pizza Group” on each of my Roman excursions.

We meet in the early evening at the apartment in which I stay, and for an hour we share wine, snacks, recent personal histories and observations – sometimes sardonic – on matters ecclesiastical, cultural and political. Then we decamp across the Borgo Pio to a local trattoria, where most of us order pizza, with one spaghetti carbonara addict among us, and continue the conversation.

The group is largely European, flavored by fellow Americans. Several of them are my former students in the Cracow-based Tertio Millennio Seminar on the Free Society. Others have taken my course on the life and thought of St. John Paul II at the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas, the Angelicum. Still others are friends of friends. 

Despite the differences in their national backgrounds, educational attainments and professional experiences, these young Catholic adults display several common characteristics. 

They are all thoroughly converted Christian disciples who love the Lord Jesus and Our Lady. They have a deep but not cloying piety. They embody dynamic orthodoxy, meaning that they firmly believe what the Gospel and the Church proclaim to be true, even as they seek ways to make those truths come alive in the 21st century world. They worry about the toxic waste dump of contemporary culture, not least because they’ve seen the damage it’s done to their friends and relatives, but I don’t sense in them any desire to retreat into the bunkers of sectarianism.

They intend, in their various vocations, to try to change the world for the better.

They have robust senses of humor and can laugh at the absurdities of the moment without becoming cynics. Each of them would be a candidate for any sane parent’s dream son-in-law or daughter-in-law. 
And none of them seems to have the slightest interest in the “hot-button issues” that obsess Catholic progressives. 

They believe that the Catholic ethic of human love is life-giving, not cramped, puritanical or oppressive. Their example invites their struggling or confused peers to conversion, not to membership in the cohorts of the perpetually aggrieved who insist that the Church must conform itself to the libertine spirit of the age to be “credible.”

They know there is a virtual infinity of ways to serve Christ and the Church without receiving Holy Orders. They seem to have internalized John Paul II’s vision of a Church of missionary disciples who evangelize culture, society, economics, and politics as Christ’s faithful laity.     

They might be deplored in some quarters as “culture warriors,” but my young friends understand that there are wars that must be fought and that the Lord calls the Church in every age to be a culture-reforming counterculture. Those of them pursuing advanced studies in theology and philosophy are equipping themselves to be the intellectual leaders of just that kind of revolution.

And here’s a point to underscore: these are all happy people. They undoubtedly have their trials and tribulations, and they understand that they’re facing stiff cultural headwinds personally, professionally and in their lives as citizens. Still, they are happy people, and their enthusiasm is infectious.

Across from the Pizza Group, in this particular trattoria on a recent night, were two very senior American churchmen, both fully identified with the progressive Catholic agenda. They were in conversation with two middle-aged men, whom I assumed to be priests in mufti. It was easy to imagine that they were slicing and dicing the Synod on Synodality, which was in its second week, especially in terms of those “hot-button issues.” 

And a thought occurred, as I pondered my friends and my pizza diavola: who’s got the future? Aging proponents of a march back to the Catholic ’70s under the rubric of “paradigm shifts?” Or these young friends of mine, who are inspired by the teaching and example of John Paul II and Benedict XVI and who think we can still learn a lot from Augustine and Aquinas?
 
Time will tell. But if the goal is evangelizing a broken world with the healing, saving message of the Gospel, my bet is on the Pizza Group.

George Weigel’s column ‘The Catholic Difference’ is syndicated by the Denver Catholic, the official publication of the Archdiocese of Denver.