I was thinking this past week about the US astronomer and author, Carl Sagan (1934–1996). I remember his observations a year before he died: “When people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority, (with)…critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what is  true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.”

Are many people today now moving into a post-truth state of mind? Certainly, the Internet is a goldmine of information as well as a minefield of misinformation and distortion. Facebook and other social media are hardly the sources of always reliable truthful statements.

What are the criteria for making reliable judgments about truthfulness? I look for reliable reporters, trustworthy news sources, and well-documented reports. I do not trust undocumented reports. Primary sources are crucial. We need to discern and help people discern the difference between fabricated stories and reality. We need to avoid fake history and fake news, but it is not always easy.

My own truth-seeking journey has taken several turns. As a small child I was a curious research examiner. One of my first explorations, when I was about four years old, was taking a small screwdriver and prying the back off my dad’s pocket watch to see how it worked. As an adolescent I tore apart old telephones, radios, old clocks, etc. My dad thought that was fine if I did not touch his watch. I was good at taking things apart. Reassembly was more difficult. But I could see how things worked. Or used to work.

In high school and college, I spent eight years – 180 miles from my home in SW Michigan — at Sacred Heart Seminary in Detroit. The country boy became quickly urbanized, and his intellectual and socio-cultural world expanded tremendously. In high school I reached the point at which I could write a term paper in Latin. I then moved on to learn Greek and Spanish. I also learned how to play the seminary pipe organ, with hands AND feet. It felt great. If he could have seen me, Bach would have laughed.

Seminary for me was a new world of experiences. I got used to showering every day with a bunch of naked guys but never found it a turn on. I did wonder however about some of my fellow students who had strong “particular friendships.” Some of those guys were also among those seminarians who mysteriously disappeared, usually while the rest of us were at morning prayer and mass. After breakfast, when we went to the dormitory to make our beds, we would see their lockers open and empty. Even their beds had disappeared.

Philosophy intrigued me, especially existentialism. The search for the authentic. I had to study Thomas Aquinas (c.1225-1274) of course but read as much as I could about Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) and Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980). At the same time, I was very religious. My classmates called me “Pious Dick.” I resonated with William James (1842–1910) and his The Varieties of Religious Experience. In many ways I was – for a while — a Catholic fundamentalist. I had questions but my spiritual director stressed that I should never question and never doubt. Those questions would later bombard me. 

In the 1960s, when I was in college, the “generation gap” was also very real for me. I was strongly opposed to the then developing U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Many of my older relatives, however, supported the war.

Several former friends and classmates died in Vietnam. I saw them as victims not heroes. Their parents thought I had betrayed them because I never went to Vietnam. But, for the record, I was not a “draft dodger.” I had completed my Selective Service registration when I became 18 years old. I carried my “draft card” with me but had a bonafide legal deferment because, as a seminarian, I was a divinity student.

Deep wounds last a long time. U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War began in the 1950s but escalated in 1965 until U.S. withdrawal in 1973. The American military presence in Vietnam had peaked in April 1969, with 543,000 military personnel stationed in the country. By the end of the U.S. involvement, more than 3.1 million Americans had been stationed in Vietnam and 58,279 had been killed. The Vietnam War tore America apart much more than the nineteenth century Civil War.

When I graduated from college in 1965, my bishop, Alexander Zaleski (1906-1975), who had gone to the American College seminary in Belgium at the Catholic University of Louvain, sent me to Louvain, better known today as Leuven. For me it was a tremendous eye-opening and mind-expanding experience. My father would often comment, with a chuckle, in later years: “Jack was never the same after Louvain.”  

In Leuven I began to question everything. It began early in my first year when my dogma professor, Fr. Gustave Thils (1909-2000), asked our class: “If tomorrow archeologists in Jerusalem would find the bones of the historical Jesus, would that destroy your belief in the Resurrection?” I thought of course it would. But I asked Professor Thils how he would answer that question. He said: “Of course not! Resurrection is not resuscitation.” 

I thought Thils was wrong, and so my questions began. It was in December of my second year in Leuven that the British theologian and Catholic priest, Charles Davis (1923–1999), whom I read and respected, announced he was leaving the Catholic Church. I was terribly upset. Davis explained that the Catholic Church had become too powerful and too dehumanizing and called it “a vast, impersonal, unfree, and inhuman system.” I went back to Professor Thils, with whom, I had discovered, I could really discuss my questions. I told him how upset and how sad I was because I had always considered Father Charles Davis to be an excellent theologian. Thils smiled and said: “Yes and Charles Davis still is an excellent theologian.”

Gradually I also came to a better understanding of “faith” as it appears in the Bible. It means first and foremost a relationship of trust and confidence in God. That understanding of faith still sustains me.

After three years in major seminary, and just one year away from priesthood ordination, I decided I wanted to become a non-ordained theologian and did not want to spend my life as a celibate priest. I informed my bishop. Bishop Zaleski was not happy and asked a couple of his priest friends to send me advice-letters to help me “think more clearly” about my vocation.

The priests back in Michigan stressed that many married men were quite unhappy and that, even as a celibate priest, there would always be ways for me to “have sex” with a woman or even a boy when I “needed it.” I was disappointed and angry. I was amazed that they could advocate immoral sexual behavior and be so blind to marital love and intimacy. I wrote back to the chief letter writer that love and marriage were much more than just having sex “when one needed it.” He never replied.

With the friendly help and support of professors Gustave Thils, in Leuven, and Edward Schillebeeckx (1914–2009) at the, then, Catholic University of Nijmegen, I began my journey toward becoming an historical theologian. I have never had any regrets.

In Leuven my classes were mostly in French, but classes in Nijmegen were in Dutch. Preparing for a year in Nijmegen, I spent a summer learning Dutch. My favorite teacher became my wife in 1970, and she is still my favorite teacher.

Well, enough personal history. Next week some thoughts about the historical Jesus — my theme for the remaining weeks of Lent 2026.

• Jack