I’ve seen role reversals before, but this was extreme.

Though maybe not as extreme as it might seem at first glance.

Bishop Thomas Tobin, whom I have interviewed several times, including a long session in his office, came over to The Journal the other day to interview me.

Yes, we see things through different prisms.

For example, when people visit The Journal, they are invariably surprised. Their notion of a newsroom usually has been shaped by the hubbub of noise and frantic activity conveyed by old movies. In reality, the modern-day newsroom is as calm as an insurance office. I often say it’s as quiet as a library.

Bishop Tobin said, “It’s like a church.”

He came here for some shop talk. I write columns. He writes columns. His is called “Without a Doubt,” a staple of the Rhode Island Catholic, the weekly diocesan paper that has succeeded The Providence Visitor.

A recent piece he did, assailing presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani’s posture on abortion, made national headlines.

The bishop aggressively articulates Catholic doctrine. I part company with the church, certainly on abortion, physician-assisted suicide, stem-cell research and gay marriage.

Of course, I’m not Catholic. I’m Jewish, and Bishop Tobin wanted to talk about the role faith plays in my writing.

It was an honor to receive him — and quite the challenge. A more typical interview for me would be a college student calling up and asking for help on a class assignment.

Offhand, Bishop Tobin is as personable as any politician I know. He greets people easily. He’s a big sports fan. He grew up near Pittsburgh and is famous for his devotion to the Steelers football team. He winced at a photo on the wall here of former Steelers quarterback Kordell Stewart on the ground in a game against the Patriots. I introduced him to Bob McGarry from our sports department, a Green Bay fan and an extraordinary football authority, and the bishop told McGarry things he never knew about the Packers.

As for baseball, the bishop, who is 59, brought along marvelous 1960 and 1961 Pittsburgh Pirates yearbooks for me to peruse. Look at the smiling buccaneer on the 1961 cover celebrating the team’s 1960 World Series title. Each yearbook sold for 50 cents. Tickets to the games at old Forbes Field ranged from $1 to $3.

He’s personable — and he’s tough. With his communications aide Mike Guilfoyle on hand, we sat in a conference room for over an hour, and the bishop peppered me with questions that drew on my background and my writing and made me think about things I hadn’t always thought much about, and sometimes, when answers seemed flabby, or, I guess, from his standpoint, wrong, he sought to shake me into reexamining the implications of my views.Things went well enough early on, as I sought to explain how my understanding of Jewish values — such as helping people, speaking up, repairing the world — often influences what I write about or how. It prompts me to tackle issues such as Darfur or state budget cuts or even medical marijuana, and to try to focus attention on the importance of saving those who need rescue, or treating with fairness and dignity Rhode Islanders who struggle. (Indeed, in a strain of thinking I didn’t even touch on with Bishop Tobin, I actually sense that much of the outrage I voice about corruption is informed by Jewish culture. It’s not just the constant drumbeat one hears from early on about righteousness. It’s also the scandal of embarrassing one’s family and community.)

But now I faltered. There was some talk about the inscriptions at the graves of my father — a believer in justice — and mother — a believer in charity — and the bishop asked what I’d like on my tombstone. A terrific question to which I could only fumble for an answer.

I offered some general ideas but felt bad that I couldn’t come up with something clever, concise or poignant, and I actually felt bad for him — because I know what it’s like to pose a great question, only to have the interviewee come up with just a so-so answer. Which is why you need to come equipped with a lot of questions. And he did.

He asked what role I thought religion should play in society. I spoke about standing up on a matter, whether from a religious perspective or not. I said that when columnists do take a stand, as opposed to saying on the one hand this/on the other hand that, it makes for a better column and contributes to society.

Now the bishop pounced. “So the need to stand up for something when you see it’s wrong — would that apply to someone like Rudy Giuliani, who says, ‘I think abortion is wrong but I’m going to let people choose’?”

“You’re good,” I said. “I think he needs to stand up for his beliefs.” But, of course, Giuliani’s views on this topic are ambivalent. You run into the same thing with several other Catholic politicians, such as Sen. Jack Reed, who also personally opposes abortion but says he’s obligated as a public servant to uphold the Constitution.

Bishop Tobin wanted to know if I’d call myself a liberal, if I considered myself a secularist, if I believe in objective moral truth.

At one point, when the dialogue turned to my support of physician-assisted suicide, the bishop — he acknowledged he was being provocative — accused me of envisioning a society that would “dispose of old, sick people.”

Which, of course, is not the way I would put it. The people I have in mind — say, the people that state law in Oregon has in mind — are terminally ill folks who want to dispose of themselves, need help to end their suffering, and are allowed to do so under carefully prescribed circumstances.

Indeed, physician-assisted suicide is one of the things that best illustrates where Bishop Tobin and I find ourselves in opposite places.

In an interview last year, he summarized Catholic law: “We don’t believe that we are the lords of our own life. That originates from God…. God decides when life begins and when life ends.”

When I asked about the idea that a just God would not require people to endure and grovel, coping with psychic pain even if physical pain could be eased, the bishop said, “God required his own son to grovel and to suffer….”

At The Journal, I reminded the bishop of this conversation and said, “I can assure you, with all respect, when I sit down to write a column about physician-assisted suicide, I don’t think: ‘Well, what would Christ have done? How does this fit with — ’ I don’t even ask how does it fit with Jewish theology.… I don’t use theology as a framework.”

The bishop asked, “Do you use faith as a framework?”

I said, “I think I do, but I don’t think you would think so.”

And so it went.

He was probing, but good natured and respectful, and I made clear to him that I admire the church’s stands on such social fronts as the need to end homelessness.

And, as I say, there was a definite professional collegiality. When he finished asking me questions, I asked him some.

I was curious about the casual but caustic tone he chose for the Giuliani column. You remember, the bishop called the former New York mayor’s abortion views “pathetic,” “confusing” and “hypocritical.”

At times, he wrote as if Giuliani were sitting there: “Hey, Rudy…”

The bishop told me that that was exactly the way he imagined it, as if he were sitting across a table from the candidate, and he addressed him as “Rudy” because, he said, that’s the way the candidate projects himself.

Does the writing come easily? If the subject is important and interesting and he can find the right tone, it does, he said. (To which I’d add: Amen, and would that all columns be that way!)

When Bishop Tobin sees a Catholic politician straying from the church on a major issue like abortion, does it make him more angry than sad or more sad than angry?

It can be some of each, he said. “It’s just very discouraging.”

But he asserted he doesn’t take it personally. “You know, I would like to have lunch with Rudy.”

By the way, the bishop’s questions for me included some on sports.

Most especially, the Steelers fan asked this Patriots enthusiast for a prediction on the game between the two teams scheduled for Dec. 9 in Foxboro. I don’t want to steal the thunder from the bishop’s Rhode Island Catholic column, which is scheduled for June 28 publication. But I look forward to it, and I want to see if he’ll be man enough to report my answer.

And no fair seeking divine intervention to affect the outcome!

M. Charles Bakst is The Journal’s political columnist.

mbakst@projo.com