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To Whom Are We Speaking?

Posted by Rebecca Teti in Faith on Wednesday, April 13, 2011 1:00 PM

“She makes me a better liberal,” the woman wrote of her conservative friend in a post last week.

She meant that the act of having to defend her ideas honed them, forcing her not to be lazy.

In the opening conference of the Vatican’s new “Court of the Gentiles” initiative, Pope Benedict XVI says much the same about the role atheists play in the lives of Christians today:

Those of you who are non-believers challenge believers in a particular way to live in a way consistent with the faith they profess and by your rejection of any distortion of religion which would make it unworthy of man.

He says in turn that Christians have something to offer to unbelievers:

Those of you who are believers long to tell your friends that the treasure dwelling within you is meant to be shared, it raises questions, it calls for reflection.The question of God is not a menace to society, it does not threaten a truly human life! The question of God must not be absent from the other great questions of our time.

The quality I most admire in Benedict is his absolute intellectual fearlessness.

No ideas threaten him because he is a man in search for the Truth, and he wants to invite all persons to take up that quest—from whatever starting point.

Here’s how he describes the Court of the Gentiles:

This image refers to the vast open space near the Temple of Jerusalem where all those who did not share the faith of Israel could approach the Temple and ask questions about religion. There they could meet the scribes, speak of faith and even pray to the unknown God.

He envisions the Church as a place where genuine seekers can come and pose their questions—even the most difficult ones—and find answers, or at least be set on the path towards Truth.

Dear friends, you are challenged to build bridges between one another. Take advantage of this opportunity to discover, deep within your hearts and with serious arguments, the ways which lead to profound dialogue. You have so much to say to one another! Do not turn away from the challenges and issues before you!

I believe deeply that the encounter of faith and reason enables us to find ourselves. But all too often reason falters in the face of self-interest and the lure of profit, and is forced to regard the latter as the ultimate criterion. Striving for truth is not easy. But each of us is called to make a courageous decision to seek the truth, precisely because there can be no shortcut to the happiness and beauty of a life of genuine fulfillment. Jesus says as much in the Gospel: “The truth will make you free.”

I wonder sometimes how well we Christians do at encouraging people along the path of truth rather than simply hammering them—and whether we aren’t sometimes more motivated by fear of having our ideas challenged than loving accompaniment of our unbelieving brothers and sisters.

I will give an example I expect may get me in trouble!

When Peter Seewald’s latest book-length interview with the Holy Father was released a few months ago, you may recall there was a minor controversy involving the Pope’s comments about a hypothetical HIV-infected male prostitute.

The secular media, eager to jump to sensational conclusions, played the story as if the Pope had reversed Church teaching and was now in favor of condom use as a means to prevent the spread of HIV.

Anyone who read the entire passage would have seen that he said explicitly that the Church “of course doesn’t consider condoms a real or moral solution,” but that was apparently too much to ask.

Many Catholic apologists and theologians took to the airwaves and internet to set the record straight.

I suppose this was necessary. If the comments that appeared in my Facebook feed are any indication, people were led astray by those headlines.

I was a bit troubled, though, by the number of Catholic commentators I respect who found fault with the Holy Father, treating the incident as a case of papal naivete or another embarrassing failure on the part of the Vatican press office. “May there never be another,” one popular blogger wrote, indicating his view that for the Pope to give a non-magisterial interview just to tell us how he thinks about things was a terrible mistake that could only lead to confusion.

Was it?

I think Janet Smith got it right when she wrote:

[Benedict XVI]was speaking only to the question of what the intention of the agent might indicate about the possibility of moral maturation; he was saying nothing about the morality of the use of condoms by anyone for any purpose.

In other words, Joseph Ratzinger made his remarks in the “Court of the Gentiles.”

As he always does, he engaged “the world,” rather than hectoring it, trusting people to be able to be honest with themselves and think though these questions.  He was inviting the world which insists that an AIDS-infected male prostitute use a condom ask itself why it so insists.

That thought process might go like this: I am going to use a condom. Why? To prevent my customer from dying. What’s it to me whether he lives or dies? Well…he is a person with inherent value who doesn’t deserve to die. If he doesn’t deserve to die, how does he deserve to be treated? Should he be used for a cheap sexual encounter?

...And so forth, until he came to see that no one needs a condom who has understood what a person is.

The pope made a wise and humane observation, no doubt trying to spark for those who had ears to hear a re-thinking of progressive morality by appealing to what is obvious and true in the depths of people’s consciences and their own experiences.

And almost the whole Catholic world fell into the secular press’ trap by immediately leaping on the topic to “correct” the “naive” pope and be sure the take-home message was, “Don’t use condoms, you sinners!”

See what I mean?  Doesn’t that seem a little tin-eared and flat-souled?

I acknowledge that the matter is tricky, because we do have an obligation to correct errors and confusion. Clear teaching is a mercy, and obscuring the truth is unkind, a kind of soft bigotry.

But sometimes it seems to me we (at least in the Catholic blogosphere) are so busy laying down the law, we leave no space for unbelievers or even believers who are experiencing doubts to ask questions and find genuine intellectual engagement rather than a lot of loud pronouncements.

In this respect, as the Holy Father said to bishops at Fatima last year, the Church has in a certain manner over-emphasized Catechesis, or at least not balanced it with humane witness and “accompaniment” of our fellows. Yes, we need courage in witnessing to Faith:

the times in which we live demand a new missionary vigour on the part of Christians, who are called to form a mature laity, identified with the Church and sensitive to the complex transformations taking place in our world. Authentic witnesses to Jesus Christ are needed, above all in those human situations where the silence of the faith is most widely and deeply felt: among politicians, intellectuals, communications professionals who profess and who promote a monocultural ideal, with disdain for the religious and contemplative dimension of life. In such circles are found some believers who are ashamed of their beliefs and who even give a helping hand to this type of secularism, which builds barriers before Christian inspiration.

But this courage is not primarily a matter of pronouncing anathemas and telling people what to do:

The courageous and integral appeal to principles is essential and indispensable; yet simply proclaiming the message does not penetrate to the depths of people’s hearts, it does not touch their freedom, it does not change their lives. What attracts is, above all, the encounter with believing persons who, through their faith, draw others to the grace of Christ by bearing witness to him.

The Pope is asking us to make the Church a place of welcome. Not in the wrong-headed sense of obscuring Church teaching as if Truth didn’t matter, but in the deeper sense of keeping our egos and anger and insults out of it so that “those who have ears to hear,” can.  Perhaps we have to learn to be a lot less fearful to have real conversations about faith and its implications.

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Sacramental Gifts that Keep On Giving

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