Bill Miller is an employee of the Catholic Diocese of Cleveland; he has been assigned to Oberlin for three and a half years. He received a Bachelor’s degree in psychology from Wheeling Jesuit University and a Master’s in education with a concentration in theology from Duquesne University in Pittsburgh. He has been a lay minister in the Catholic Church for 25 years.

On March 31, Terri Schiavo passed away. Obviously, the controversy surrounding her death was partially stimulated by the Catholic faith of her family and their alliance with religious advocates. What do you and Church doctrine have to say about Schiavo’s case?
The Terri Schiavo situation is a very difficult one. The Church teaches that, while you are not expected to take heroic measures to keep a person alive, you must provide basic nutrition. Her husband claimed that she would not have wanted to live like a “vegetable,” but her parents did not want to deny her nutrition. The legal system and the media got all hung up on who should decide her fate; however, I’m not even sure that who makes the decision is the main issue. The issue is, under what circumstances does any person have the right to end his or her own life or the life of someone else. I am not an ethicist, but it appears to me that in this circumstance, those criteria were not met. One of the things that the church allows for is the possibility of miraculous things happening. To allow a person to continue to exist, even in what the secular world would call a vegetative state, is not to say that the final chapter has been written.

Two days after Ms. Schiavo died, Pope John Paul II passed away. Could you reflect a little on his legacy as both a spiritual and a temporal leader?
This particular pontiff was one of the most prolific writers in the history of the papacy. He issued at least 13 encyclicals and over 40 apostolic letters. He also visited over 100 countries during his time as pope, far more than any other pope in history. He felt that it was part of his mission to put the issue of the importance of faith before the people. He did this very personally and with great vigor.

He is often seen in the media as a man with a very conservative social agenda. That is grossly over-simplistic. I think that perception comes from his attitudes toward birth control and abortion — two topics on which he is very conservative. What people don’t understand is that, while the pope could be spiritually quite orthodox, he had a very liberal social agenda — he spoke out repeatedly over the course of his life for compassion and justice for the poor and the oppressed, was against capital punishment and opposed the war with Iraq.

Part of his legacy was helping to topple communism in Eastern Europe. I think that has been played up in our media as making him a special supporter of the United States and, at times, to further assign him a conservative agenda. Neither of those perceptions is necessarily accurate.

But the Pope did firmly oppose communism, didn’t he?
The Pope has said in his writings that he did not reject, in principle, communism or capitalism, but the specific ways they are sometimes implemented. When abuses in communism led to totalitarianism or when abuses in capitalism led to greed and materialism, he was opposed to those circumstances. He was very, very concerned over the growing gap between the rich and the poor. He saw that as totally contradicting the teachings of the Gospel and he was very opposed to it.

Is it difficult sometimes to negotiate Oberlin’s student population, given its strong propensity toward secularism?
Despite its reputation for being more secular and for people on campus being less interested in religion or spirituality than on other campuses, Oberlin really has a strong tradition of intellectual and spiritual debate. I have found, in my conversations, that there is a good deal of openness to discussion. That’s a good thing. However, as a campus community, we can and must do better. There are pockets, even here, of intolerance and bigotry.

The Pope, incidentally, believed that the dialogue between faith and reason had been disregarded in the last century. He believed that faith was not a crutch that took the place of reason, but a compass for navigation, a valuable part of any person’s life. He believed that individuals have to make their own choices about faith and that denying the role of the faith in any human endeavor ultimately enabled many of the 20th century’s most crushing authoritarian regimes.

It seems that the concept of faith was very important to the Pope.
Karol Wojtyla was not merely a man with faith. His identity was faith. Faith for him was a lifestyle, a stand that you take with respect to everything else. He believed that without faith, humanity will cease to exist.