Gotcha Listening
Posted by Rebecca Teti in News on Tuesday, April 13, 2010 6:38 PM
“Gotcha” arguments are a pet peeve of mine.
Every couple of columns or so I seem to circle back to the premise that charity, whatever else it may be, is an intellectual virtue.
What do I mean by that?
That in order to advance genuine understanding, we have to extend to our debate partners a certain degree of trust in their good will so that we can understand what they are trying to convey to us.
Leaping onto mistakes and imprecisions only causes hurt feelings and anger, it doesn’t help us reach the truth.
I was reflecting on this during the Sacred Triduum, when I had an odd experience related to the Good Friday service at the Vatican.
I read the homily given by Fr. Cantalmessa with delight. It was a lovely reflection, made the more lovely for me because my father’s side of the family is Jewish. The closing portion of his remarks, which expressed kinship with the Jewish people and delight in our living our high holy days simultaneously this year, was a part of my prayer and reflection that morning. I was so pleased, given how contentious Good Friday can sometimes be between Jews and Catholics, at such genuine kinship being expressed “Wow!” I thought; this has to be a high point for Jewish-Catholic relations.
Apart from checking in on homilies coming from the Vatican, however, I stayed away from the news all weekend.
So I was genuinely shocked when my husband told me later in the day that the homily had created an uproar.
Uproar? About what, I wondered.
It turns out many people were horrified by the homilist’s comparison of the anti-Catholicism swirling around us these days and anti-Semitism. Being held to account by the press for actual crimes is not the same thing as having your people annihilated, they said.
Well…that’s not the actual comparison he made, but fair enough. Given how sensitive many Jewish groups are about the Good Friday prayers for the Jews, and given the efforts of some people to smear the Pope with charges of anti-semitism, it would probably have been wiser to leave the subject alone when speaking on behalf of the Vatican on that particular day. Fr. Cantalamessa obviously took the point, because he immediately apologized.
But I can’t help feel frustrated, because I can’t believe anyone who actually read the homily with even the least bit of good will instead of the determination to find fault would have felt the least bit offended.
Here’s a Jewish columnist in the Jerusalem Post who agrees. He doesn’t exactly speak for me, but the main point he makes I agree with completely.
His column, entitled, “We are bad listeners,” observes that often “headline news” obscures rather than illuminates what’s really going on:
REVISITING THESE events provides some important lessons on how the public perception of Jewish-Christian relations has fallen into the pattern of moving from scandal to scandal, while failing to recognize the real changes that are quietly taking place before our eyes. As we watch the news, we remain blind to the real news. Sensationalist news headlines make us lose sight of what is truly worthy of note, novel and inspiring.
Like me, the author assumes no one who had a bad reaction actually read Fr. Cantalamessa’s remarks in context.
I assume none of the Jewish speakers who reacted to the preacher’s statement even read his homily. They were probably reacting to a journalist who asked for a comment on some statement, and offered an appropriate response. Journalists, lifting a quote from a longer piece, set the agenda, Jewish spokespersons respond, a story is told, a scandal is created and thus our “relationships” are built. A look at what the Franciscan preacher actually said tells another story
And what is that story? Noting that in uglier times, Jews had to fear reprisals after Good Friday masses, he writes:
With this background, it is striking to note what Father Cantalamessa makes of the opportunity. He uses the moment at St. Peter’s Basilica, in the presence of the Pope, to wish Jews a “Good Passover.”
Reading this, I asked myself, when before was a Good Friday sermon used for such purposes? Probably never. Why do we take this gesture of goodwill for granted? Why do we gloss over it in silence? To think of the Jews as brothers in faith during a Papal Good Friday service is the fruit of decades of labor in the field of Jewish-Christian relations. That this could be said so casually and naturally is the real news.
But he does not stop here. He greets us, Jews, with words from the Mishna, quoted in the Hagadda, the most popular of Jewish texts, and echoed in Christian liturgy, a sign of bonding and unity between our communities. How often have we complained that Judaism is not simply the Biblical root, of which Christianity is the branch? How often have we emphasized the need to refer to latter day Judaism in its own right, respecting it as a self-standing religion, and not simply as the Old Testament?
Does not greeting us on Good Friday in words taken from the Mishna-Haggada deliver a powerful message that something here is right and that we have made progress?
But the “gotcha” mentality keeps us from seeing the good.
READING THE homily in its entirety, I am convinced that Fr. Cantalamessa’s intention was misconstrued. It is becoming harder and harder for religious people to deliver a thoughtful message, with some complexity, nuance, and historical and theological depth, without worrying about how one motif will be taken out of context and create headlines, the wrong headlines. Clearly, Cantalamessa didn’t think through the possible consequences of his statement, relying naively on the fact that they were authored by a Jewish person as a guarantee of their acceptability to Jewish ears.
Or, I might say, relying naively on the idea that people would listen to him with a modicum of good will and try to understand what he was trying to say, rather than listening only for something to pounce on.
This is not just a Jewish-Christian thing or a Liberal-Conservative thing or a secularist-Catholic thing.
We do it too.
I expect to be pounced on for this, but you know what claims I can’t bear against President Obama? The widely repeated accusations that he said he’d abort his grandchild or promised that the first thing he’d do as president would be to sign FOCA.
I bow to no one in affirming that he is the most radically pro-abortion President in our history (he just made every single one of us complicit in abortion by signing legislation that will use our taxes to pay for it). Nonetheless, he didn’t say those things if you listen in context.
Listen to his “punished with a baby” remark, and it’s clear that he is talking about contraception. He says he’s going to teach his girls “values and morals,” but if they make a mistake—meaning, if they have sex before marriage—he doesn’t want them punished with a baby. It was an inelegant remark and maybe some of us would say a telling one, but what he meant—as is clear from context and inflection—was that if his girls are sexually active, he wants them to know about contraception. He had been talking about sex-ed in schools. He was not encouraging or condoning the abortion of his grandchildren.
The remark is morally and prudentially problematic on its own; we don’t have to worsen it.
Similarly, the statement he once made that the “first thing he’d do” is sign FOCA was made in response to a question about how he’d safeguard the “right to choose.” Again, the remark is bad enough on its own; I can’t support a President who wants to safeguard the “right to choose.” But he meant that signing FOCA was the first thing he’d do to safeguard abortion rights, not his number one priority. Our side—the pro-life side—leapt on those spontaneous remarks because we can sometimes be as bad as anyone in forgoing listening to demonize the opposition.
Public life is rough and tumble and tough questions, even slightly rude questions are fair game. But if we are to advance our understanding of the truth, we have to become better listeners. Listeners who actually listen with the intent to understand, and not simply indulge our feelings of rage, superiority or frustration.
Bad listening is everywhere, and good listeners, too, can be found in may places on the religious and political spectrum.
In addition to this Jerusalem Post columnist and Fr. Cantalmessa’s Jewish friend whom he was quoting with the remark that set off the press, former New York mayor Ed Koch and noted civil liberties attorney Alan Dershowitz are among the people who have risen in defense of the Pope and of the Catholic Church in this hour of need.
Neither of those two men holds much truck with the Church on most issues. But they are fair-minded enough to look at facts instead of flying off the handle based on inflammatory headlines.
As Alon Goshen-Gottstein concludes in his column,
The theme of the preacher’s homily was going beyond violence. The last few couple of days show us yet again that bad listening is itself a source of violence
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