The other day I started reading the correspondence between French authors Paul Claudel and Andre Gide. Claudel was a poet and playwright; Gide was a novelist, essayist and winner of the 1947 Nobel Prize for Literature.

Claudel strove might and main to convert his friend to Catholicism, but Gide, an ex-Protestant, wanted none of it. Much to his credit.

In one of his letters, Claudel asserted that religious truth “resides uniquely and exclusively in the teaching of the Catholic Church, and nowhere else.” Without doubt, that had always been an untouchable, bedrock tenet of church teaching. In recent decades, however, it’s been discarded by the church as a triumphalistic fiction.

When I read Claudel’s statement, I recalled an article in the this paper about the church’s rush to canonize the late Pope John Paul II. (April 2) I laughed when I read that his writings were being examined by theologians for evidence of heresy – as if they hadn’t already decided there isn’t any and can’t be any.

Notice how far removed Claudel’s traditional, exclusivist Catholicism was from the pope’s own transmogrified version of it: In his Message to the Peoples of Asia (1981), the pope declared that everyone without exception is supernaturally united to God (i.e., in the state of grace) and hence a child of God and heir of heaven. He reiterated this teaching on a number of occasions during the course of his pontificate.

Let me tell you, heresy doesn’t come any balder.

William LaRochelle, Lewiston

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