| U.S. News

Father Phan, 61, is a rare bird on multiple levels. Born in Vietnam, he’s studied in both London and Rome and lived for the last 32 years in the United States. He’s an internationally acclaimed intellectual who once worked as a garbage collector in Texas for minimum wage, and a devotee of Asian spirituality who can drop names such as Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, high priests of postmodern Western chic, almost as easily as he can Lao Tzu or the Buddha.

Currently a professor at Georgetown University, Father Phan in 2001 became the first non-Caucasian to serve as president of the Catholic Theological Society of America, and he’s also a key adviser to the Federation of Asian Bishops’ Conferences. Almost literally, East and West intersect in his work.

As National Catholic Reporter reported Sept. 13, both the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and the Committee on Doctrine of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops are looking into Father Phan’s 2004 book, Being Religious Interreligiously. He joins a growing number of theologians working in the area of religious diversity to face similar reviews, including the late Belgian Jesuit Father Jacques Dupuis, American Jesuit Father Roger Haight and Jesuit Father Jon Sobrino of El Salvador.

To critics, Father Phan and his colleagues offer a classic example of good intentions run amuck. In the name of promoting interreligious tolerance, they say, Father Phan fudges core doctrines such as Jesus Christ as the unique savior of the world, and the Catholic church as a singular channel of grace. To his admirers, Father Phan is a prophet. They believe he’s pointing the way to a Catholicism more universal than Roman, one that is faithful to the gospel yet responsive to a new historical moment.

Whichever view one takes, Father Phan’s story captures in microcosm perhaps the deepest transition reshaping Catholicism at the dawn of the 21st century – the emergence of a truly global church, one in which pressures for new ways of approaching old questions is destined to swell.

The stuff of Hollywood

Father Phan’s life story is the stuff of a Hollywood screenplay. His entire family, 14 people in all, fled Vietnam for the United States just three days prior to the fall of Saigon in 1975. By that stage, Father Phan was already a promising young Salesian who had studied in Hong Kong, London and Rome. Yet in Plano, Texas, where Father Phan and his family were settled after a brief stretch at Camp Pendleton in California, he was just another refugee. To help make ends meet, Father Phan took a job as a garbage collector for $2.10 an hour, minimum wage at the time. “When we moved to Dallas, we didn’t even know where Texas was,” Father Phan recalled in a 2004 interview. “So we asked someone what the weather was like there, if it would be cold. He said no, so we said, ‘OK.’”

After his family settled down, Father Phan put his theological career back on track. He won positions at the University of Dallas and then The Catholic University of America, becoming dean of the theology department at both institutions. He eventually moved to Georgetown, where he holds the Ellacuría Chair of Catholic Social Thought, named for Jesuit Father Ignacio Ellacuría who was murdered in El Salvador. Father Phan has written more than 300 essays and 20 books, including a trilogy published by Orbis Books: In Our Own Tongues (2003), Christianity with an Asian Face (2003) and Being Religious Interreligiously (2004). Along the way, he left the Salesians and became a priest of the Dallas Diocese.

“He’s the most respected Asian-American theologian in the country,” said Christina Astorga, a Filipina moral theologian at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, Pa.

Father Phan’s core theological concern is the transition from what he sees as a largely Western, Euro-centric mode of Christianity to a faith more thoroughly shaped by different global cultures, languages and values. He has developed an Asian Christology, for example, based upon understanding Christ as both an ancestor and an elder son.

He brings the same passion for diversity to his work in non-Christian religions.

While the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) recognized “elements of truth and grace” in non-Christian religions, the church officially regards those elements as a preparation for the Christian gospel, reaching fulfillment only in Christianity. Father Phan argues that non-Christian religions can complement Christianity, rather than merely setting the stage for it.

In a nutshell, Father Phan’s thesis is that God doesn’t necessarily want everybody to be Christian. He quotes Father Dupuis to the effect that different religions are “gifts of God to the peoples of the world.”

On that basis, Father Phan defends the idea of multiple religious belonging, meaning that it’s possible ...