Robert Royal is president of the Faith and Reason Institute in Washington, D.C., and regularly makes trips to Chicago to work with the Lumen Christi Institute, a local group founded by Catholic scholars at the University of Chicago.

He is a scholar, prolific author and is editor of the opinion and news analysis Web site TheCatholicThing.org. Some of his books include “The God That Did Not Fail: How Religion Built and Sustains the West” and “The Catholic Martyrs of the Twentieth Century: A Comprehensive World History.” During a recent visit to Chicago, Royal sat down with Editor Joyce Duriga.

Catholic New World: You are deeply involved in the realm of Catholic intellectual thought. Our present pope is a big thinker. John Paul II was as well. Both talk about the need for forming Catholic intellectual thought. Why is it needed? How does it trickle down to the average Catholic in the pew?

Robert Royal: Do you need to read Thomas Aquinas to be a good Catholic? No. But somebody in the church has got to keep up that tradition of metaphysics, of moral reflection, to explain why it is that these things are not simply superstition.

When you tell people that reason itself points to the necessity for faith, or for the necessity of revelation — which is an interesting concept from St. Thomas — people think that they never heard this. So even Catholics tend to degenerate into ethnic Catholics.

One of the things lots of Catholics at secular campuses say is that they don’t want their local tradition to become like Jewish studies, that it’s just ethnic. They want thought. Why does Catholicism have something to say — which Cardinal George understands — to a secular society like ours?

Well, you look at the 20th century. It was this false anthropology — it was an atheistic humanism — that gave rise to Nazism, to Communism, and to even some of the currents, unfortunately, that we see in our own country and in Europe. But to begin with [this intellectual tradition] is important for Catholics themselves so that they have something.

It’s like going to the doctor. You don’t have to necessarily know the chemistry or the biology yourself, but you do know that somebody knows about this stuff and there are reasons — and there are good reasons — for this stuff.

CNW: Your Web site TheCatholicThing.org is an example of engaging the public through faith. Why is this engagement necessary?

Royal: At the deepest level, if there is not a Christian anthropology — that’s John Paul’s phrase — inevitably you’re going to get wrong views of the human person. Pope Benedict talks about how people think you have to be skeptical — that only skepticism protects democracy or otherwise somebody’s going to impose some kind of tyranny.

Well, if you do believe, for example, that human beings are free, that they can know the truth, that truth matters, that there are values beyond materialism, how can a democracy survive? Those are all things that used to be understood. Our democracy was really founded in religiosity unlike Europe, which, unfortunately, has this history of separating off from the monarchic tradition.

We’ve always had throughout our history this certain view of the human person, which comes out of the biblical view that underlies the notion of responsible freedom. It’s not just any freedom, it’s responsible freedom. Once you lose that I think democracy is in big trouble.

CNW: You mentioned truth. Sometimes when we speak of truth as Catholics people say, “That’s your version of truth. That’s your opinion.” How do we respond to people?

Royal: You say, “You tell me what your version of the truth is.”

We’re not just living in a debating society. There can be a wider or a narrower view of how much fits in. Why do we respect human beings? Just because we decided we were going to do it and it’s practical?

It’s precisely because we have lost that democratic faith, if you put it that way, that you see at the margins that there is a disrespect for life. We’ve done pretty well actually. The percentage of people who now describe themselves as pro-life has been inching up year after year and it’s now an absolute majority within the country of people who describe themselves as pro-life. So we’ve made progress.

We haven’t made progress in the legal system, the political process, but we have to keep at this because it is not the case that all views are equal. And even that all views have to be equally respected within the public square.

I think all these things are tied together when the Catholic Church is not present with a public voice. There have to be Catholics — and this is what I do in my job, and Lumen Christi helps — out in the public square who can make these arguments.

We [members of the Catholic Church] are not fundamentalists. We’re not a group that considers itself pure and wants to stay away from the world. We believe we have an obligation to evangelize the world. You do that with prudence. You don’t do that in a type of crude way, but we have to be out there.

Evangelization is not simply getting people to ascent to certain ideas. It’s to have the world live in a certain way as well. Ultimately, that’s really the most important thing of all, at least in this world, to form what the view of human life is.

CNW: You helped with some of the editing, through your connection with Lumen Christi, of Cardinal George’s book “The Difference God Makes.” What are your thoughts about the book?

Royal: I think it’s a very important contribution. He’s got a very rich mind and the book addresses a number of different issues about the United States and tries to present them in a different way by presenting them from the standpoint of communion. Not collectivist, not individualistic the way sometimes Americans think of themselves, but from a very deep, considered, practical and philosophical point of view that we simply are part of one another — that the idea of freestanding individuals is just foolish.

I have a granddaughter now and she’s studying all of us very carefully because babies don’t learn how to talk all on their own. They have to listen to you teach them the first syllable and the next one. We tend to neglect that here in the United States, that all persons are interpersonal. Even God himself is interpersonal. I think the cardinal is able to present that basic vision in addressing a number of questions about the church and the difference it makes in the world. I don’t know if there is a book as good as this at a general level.