Biography
Francis Cardinal George is the Archbishop of the Diocese of Chicago and one of America's great religious leaders. This Chicago native entered the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate in 1957 and was ordained a priest in 1963. Renowned as a Scholar, he earned advanced degrees in Theology and Philosophy and is the former Chair of the Department of Philosophy at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska. In 1973 he was elected Provincial of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate for the Central United States Province and then served as that order's Vicar General in Rome from 1974 to 1986. In 1986 he was appointed Coordinator of the Cambridge Center for the Study of Faith and Culture, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and was serving in that post when he was named Bishop of Yakima, Washington, in 1990. He was subsequently appointed Archbishop of Portland, Oregon in 1996 and the Archbishop of Chicago in 1997. In 1998, Pope John Paul II elevated him to the office of Cardinal. [Biographical information is correct as of the broadcast date noted above.]

"Is a Millennium Just a Thousand Years?" 
As we come closer to the year 2000, anticipation of beginning a new millennium grows. Some anticipate an upheaval of some sort, whether historical or natural; others see it as just one more turn of the calendar; still others at least hope, in the tradition of a New Year, that the next thousand years will be better than the last. There is a kind of mystique about a thousand years, from its use in the Book of Revelation to speak of Christ's reign to its use by Adolph Hitler to describe his Reich.

St. Augustine long ago wrote that he knew what time is if no one asked him, but that he became confused when he tried to explain it, even to himself. The movement of the earth around the sun, which is the basis of our year, is just a physical motion until we devise a way to measure it. But with measure comes meaning. And measure is given deeper meaning when associated with events in a framework we call history. As individuals and as peoples, our sense of history provides a framework which arranges and selects events within the measured sequence of physical movements that are the basis of time.

The anniversaries of treasured or feared events give us calendars—personal calendars when we celebrate the anniversary of our birth or of a marriage; a national calendar when we celebrate the anniversaries of independence and of national heroes; a religious calendar when we celebrate Hanukkah, Easter, Ramadan. In all these celebrations, the passage of time becomes self-conscious, and we search for its meaning.

Is the passage of time friendly to us? Those who read human history as a story of inevitable progress would say so. Is the passage of time a threat to us? Those who accept myths of decline, personal, national, global, believe so. Cosmology, the study of the history of the entire universe, has become a subject of serious study in recent years as we push further and further into space to discover the secrets of a universe more grand and mysterious than we had imagined. Can nature tell us the meaning of history? Or must we look to history itself to give us answers?

Religious faith, by connecting time and eternity, discloses meanings beyond both nature and history. Much of the interest in the year two thousand and the beginning of the new millennium is rooted in this anniversary's religious significance. Two thousand years after the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, the celebration of the beginning of a new millennium can be an occasion for a new encounter with him, not just as a remembered figure but as someone who creates the time in which we live, someone who defines the meaning of history. The anticipation of a new millennium, an anniversary only one generation in thirty will ever celebrate, can help us see and appreciate time as a gift, not from nature or history but from God.

The tradition of a major anniversary as a time of jubilee comes to us from the book of Leviticus, chapter 25. The chosen people of God celebrated a year of jubilee as a sign that everything, even time itself, is gift. The jubilee year was a time when slaves were set free, debts were canceled and forgiveness allowed to transform human relations. It was a time when property was returned and right relationships were restored, even to the land itself, which was allowed to lie fallow. It was an anniversary celebration that helped prevent the creation of a permanent underclass among the Hebrews. It was a year that called men and women out of their timely preoccupations into a sense that God was with them, that God accompanied them, that eternity mixed with time.

We can pick up the themes of the book of Leviticus at the end of this millennium and look in our time to do away with all forms of slavery, of racism, bigotry, exploitation and violence in our communities. We can look at property and work toward tax and welfare reform that might create right relationships among us and between economic classes. Resting the land today has us look at our role as stewards of creation and develop of a more informed ecological consciousness.

The beginning of the new millennium will see the development of a new global consciousness supported by the emerging global economic order, by a world-wide communications network, by universal popular culture. Will these new historical developments be friendly or threatening to us? Much depends upon whether or not this coming millennium celebration can be a time of jubilee, a moment when time itself seems to open up and we can see it in the light of eternity. If the millennium is a jubilee which brings us a renewed sense of time as gift and a new sense of urgency about attending to the problems of our age, then it will be a moment of hope, and more than this cannot be asked for. A hopeful people can trust one another; a hopeful and believing people can trust as well in God's providence.

Is a millennium just a thousand years? Not if it is a moment of profound hopefulness, for then its celebration opens us to eternity. Pope John Paul II speaks of the new millennium as a springtime. Let this be our conviction and our prayer.

God bless you.

Interview with Francis Cardinal George
Interviewed by Lydia Talbot

Lydia Talbot: Thank you for that compelling message, Cardinal George. I must first congratulate you on receiving the prestigious Chicago Bible Society's Gutenberg Award. It's a wonderful recognition for your time in Chicago.

Francis Cardinal George: Thank you.

Talbot: In your message on the millennium, you build on the religious significance of this new era. How would you envision the image of Christ for this time in our history given the market culture we are up against?

George: The image of Christ? When you think of the Christ of history, our dominant image of Christ as Redeemer is Christ crucified. But then there is also that image, especially in the book of Revelation, of the Pantocrator, the Christ who dominates the whole cosmos, the Christ that connects us with the wisdom literature of the Old Testament. It is this wisdom of God incarnate, and, therefore, the wisdom that understands the ages and in whom the ages finally find their meaning. The meaning of time is a person. The meaning of our lives is not things, it is persons and a person, if we are Christian, who is called Jesus. It's perhaps that Cosmic Christ, in a sense, that comes into focus in the millennium. And yet that's a challenge to us to not make a private religion out of Christianity. It is that, of course, but it is that only if it is truly Christianity and Christianity is cosmic in its significance. It has a story of history and of the cosmos.

Talbot: In reference to the biblical justice tract you described in your message, you would say that in seeking that Utopia—if we could envision the planet with no racism, no bigotry, no violence, no poverty—how can we begin to make a difference in terms of the voice of the church in the secular culture in which we live?

George: The church forms people who are citizens, so the first imperative is to see that people are formed, that their consciences are just and upright, that they live with the Lord in such a way that they are concerned about others. Then beyond that, there are larger social issues that the church collectively can speak to and each church has its own way of doing that. But I think in American Christianity and, indeed, in other faiths that are here—the Jewish faith, Islam which is finding its voice more and more, as are Hindus and Buddhists—depending upon their organization and their own self identity find different ways to speak to the public order.

Talbot: Can a materialistic society understand the image of Christ as a suffering servant, the wounded healer?

George: That's a good question because that's an important image only to the extent that we understand suffering that is somehow redemptive. If suffering makes no sense at all, if it has no value, if it is just a waste, then a suffering Christ, of course, is someone to be avoided not someone to be welcomed as a savior. We have to look at that and see whether or not our own economic messages to one another—the advertising and all the rest—has so obliterated our sense that suffering is part of the human journey and can be transformed into something of great value.

I am somewhat disabled and being disabled means that you look at your own identity in a different way. But it also means that you provide an occasion for others to be generous. The recognition of suffering is a call to generosity on the part of the whole community. It shapes us as human beings.

Talbot: Cardinal George, as a child you were stricken with polio. Can you talk about that sense of suffering as a child and how that might have impacted your own personal spiritual journey?

George: I could, but I'm not sure if I want to talk about myself a lot! The experience of having polio means that your self identity shifts and you have to come to terms with limits. I think that sense of having to come to terms with limits very early, just at a moment when most of us are beginning to feel our limits expand in adolescence, certainly has impacted my own sense of gratitude. You have to fight not to be resentful and so in the effort to overcome resentment, I think your personality is shaped. I am grateful for that. What is interesting, particularly as I talk with people that are far more disabled than I am and as I try to be part of the disabled community as my people, is that they do draw out the best in other people. They prevent us from thinking that we can be islands; that we don't need to help one another.

Talbot: On Christmas Day you visited the children at Children's Memorial Hospital. What were the faces? What were the stories there?

George: With the children that are in a hospital at Christmas—because the personnel do try to get them home—you can be sure that they are very sick. So the faces were of children who were sick with cancer, children who have various chronic illnesses, and some who have had accidents and even strokes. One small child had had a stroke. We don't think of strokes as something that visits small children but that can happen.

Talbot: You resonate with children with disabilities. Take us back again as an altar boy at St. Pascal Church on Chicago's north side. Could you ever imagine then at that point in your young life that you would become Cardinal of the city of Chicago?

George: No! I couldn't live with that over my head!

Talbot: But you had a very special first grade teacher, Sister McCabe, I believe, who was a profound influence on you.

George: Sister Rita McCabe.

Talbot: What was the beginning of your decision for the priesthood?

George: When a child is eight or nine, the religious psychologists tell us that is a very important moment religiously and that's the moment when you receive your first communion and go to confession for the first time in the Catholic church. That had a big impact on me. But then as you grow up you forget it. It came back to me then in high school when I thought seriously about becoming a priest and that's what I pursued.

Talbot: You are a distinguished scholar with a background in philosophy. You were the head of the philosophy department at Creighton University. How did that background in philosophy impact your understanding of the difference between the God of philosophy and the God of religion, which requires a leap of faith?

George: The early fathers, Greek and Latin, spoke about the relation between Athens and Jerusalem, between reason and faith. The present Bishop of Rome, Pope John Paul II, just wrote a letter on faith and reason. In the Catholic tradition, faith and reason are not at odds at all. They speak to one another. Faith opens up possibilities to reason and it also needs reason to criticize what faith gives us. It's a dialogue. Neither one can exist in healthy form without the other. If in fact reason seems to be the enemy of faith—that's a notion of reason that has developed in the last three or four hundred years which I think has come to its end—I hope in a new millennium we will have a better sense of that dialogue. My having studied philosophy and taught it and then studied theology has made that dialogue personal for me and I have always enjoyed it. The idea is that you can find truth where ever it is and not just in the Bible.

Talbot: How do you read the barometer of that dialogue between faith and reason in the context of the papacy and the future of the papacy in the new millennium?

George: You do ask big millennial questions! The tradition is there that faith and reason are sisters and they speak to one another, so any pope is going to support that. This pope, having himself been a philosophy professor, embodies that dialogue in a very particular way. The future popes will continue with that. But our understanding of reason is built up with our self identity and that keeps evolving because the sciences show us different facets. We think of ourselves differently now because of psychology, which is a modern discipline, and because of cultural anthropology. So as we become more self-conscious in the disciplines, and in cosmology and astronomy, etcetera, and about ourselves and the universe, that dialogue with faith expands. So the faith comes to a different self-understanding, too.

Talbot: We are so grateful for our dialogue with you, Francis Cardinal George. You are a gift to our city and to the wider community.

George: As is this program.

Talbot: I am so honored to have you with us.

George: Thank you very much.