I Call You Friends (review)

I Call You Friends. By Timothy Radcliffe, O.P. New York: Continuum, 2002. 225 pp. $24.95.

In the preface to an earlier volume of his collected writings, Timothy Radcliffe, who served as Master General of the Dominican Order from 1992-2001, noted that "religious life" (a phrase he admittedly doesn't like) has meaning only if it says something about the meaning of human life. That explains the reason why many beyond the boundaries of the Dominican Order and religious life will find the present volume a rich source for spiritual reading and reflection, and why the original version of the text, Je Vous Appelle Amis, was awarded the French religious book prize for 2001. The genre of the book—an extended interview and a collection of homilies, addresses, lectures, and articles from New Blackfriars—precludes the development of any single theme, but Radcliffe is a preacher, teacher, and religious leader who has genuine insight into the human condition and the quest for God that lies at its core.

The book is divided into four parts. The first third of the text consists of a series of interviews with Radcliffe conducted by the French journalist Guillaume Goubert. The subsequent chapters are organized under three headings: Christian Commitment, Mission, and Living the Gospel. In his brief introduction to the volume, Radcliffe identifies two themes as central throughout—the question of truth and the discovery of the centrality of "the friendship that is the life of God and which we are called to share with one another" (v). The leitmotif of the interrelationship of truth and love is reflected in particular in the chapter on Catherine of Siena, originally a letter to the Dominican Order on the occasion of her being named as a patron of Europe in 2000. There Radcliffe stresses that Catherine's relationship with God, like her relationship with her friends, was marked by a combination of love and bold speech (the gift of parrhesia: see Acts 4:31; 2 Cor 7:4). He exhorts her followers in the Dominican family (and beyond) to develop a similar courage not only to "dive in" and address the serious issues facing the church and world today, but also to face honestly the "wounds of which we hardly dare speak" which compromise the Order's (and the Church's) preaching of the Gospel.

Radcliffe's unflinching commitment to truth and his ability to name the wounds and limitations of the Church deserve particular attention in the context of the present crisis of credibility that haunts religious leaders in general and the leadership of the Roman Catholic Church in particular. In contrast to the silence and denial fostered by many members of the hierarchy in the name of loyalty to the church, Radcliffe maintains that vigorous dialogue, disagreement, and debate are necessary for the kind of shared search for truth that will foster the common good and build up the one body of Christ. Speaking from his Dominican heritage of democracy (which, he notes, is far different from simply operating by majority vote) Radcliffe describes good government as one in which leaders "create the conditions in which we really can talk to each other, and together arrive at a decision about the common good" (24). Beneath this model of leadership lies a distinct spirituality. Leaders are called to nourish the kind of mutual trust that empowers those who differ to listen to one another in hope of discovering a fuller truth, and expresses confidence that God can and will speak through the other (38). In pieces that range from an address to Catholic schoolteachers to his speech at the Second Synod of European Bishops, Radcliffe extends these reflections on leadership to the broader role of all teachers in the church. Teaching, he avows, is not a matter of requiring submission to authority, but rather of initiating people into how to look for truth together.

This view of governance rests in turn on...