Can You Dialogue Like a Pro?
I enjoy reading papal encyclicals because not only do they reveal information about the Church’s history and doctrinal development, they also contain wisdom for everyday life. Pope Paul VI’s encyclical Ecclesiam Suam from 1964, inviting all Christians to unity, has a short section about the method of dialogue (78-82), and while it is excellent advice for evangelizing in a pluralistic society, it benefits anyone trying to communicate with co-workers, friends, or family.
Pope Paul VI wrote that a willingness to dialogue is proof to others that you hold them in esteem and offer them kindness, that you are not bigoted, malicious, hostile, or arrogant. Being willing to listen and respond, rather than dictate and demand, shows the other person you respect his freedom and dignity. Dialogue, he said, is a way to make spiritual contact. He named the following four guidelines.
First, strive for clarity. Rather than babble away carelessly, be thoughtful with the words you choose and consider the audience. Human language, in its adaptability, is a great manifestation of mental powers. Are you making your message easy to understand? Can ordinary people grasp it? Is it intelligible?
Second, be meek. Be humble rather than arrogant. If your words are bitter, people won’t listen. If you are speaking what you know is true, then share the message with charity, making no demands and avoiding peremptory language that only shuts down the conversation. Under conflict, humility shows generosity and patience.
Third, be confident. Don’t waste words. If you aren’t sure of something you are saying, admit it for the sake of furthering the discussion. If you aren’t ready to discuss the issue further, then either refrain from discussion or be open to attentive listening. Having confidence in the good will of the hearer will also promote friendship, a mutual adherence to what is good overall rather than what is merely good for one’s self.
Fourth, be prudent. Your communication will serve the purpose of teaching if you consider the psychological and moral circumstances of the other person. If your audience is suspicious or hostile, be sensitive to that condition. Adapt the manner of presenting your ideas to the degree of intelligence of the hearer.
Pope Paul VI concludes that dialogue conducted with this much care weds truth to charity and understanding to love, which means that even if the Gospel message isn’t the direct object of our communication, we are still evangelizing because we dispose others to a fuller sharing of ideas and convictions, and thus, lead them to Christ.
Category: Catholic Free Press, Ecumenism
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This is worth printing off and reading over and over. So many places, especially online, you can see good Catholics losing their effectiveness over a bad, argumentative or sanctimonious approach. Making truth unattractive by bad presentation is to sell it far short and I think in some ways unjust to the person who is thirsting for it, even if they are unaware of that fact. Thanks Stacey, I get so much out of your blog even if I don’t always have time to comment, I always read your posts. Jennifer x
Is it possible, fifty years on, that anyone actually believes that one can make two plus two equal five, just so long as we are clear, meek, confident, and prudent?
Jesus Christ is Lord.
The Jew, the Muslim, the atheist, reject this.
There is no squaring the circle.
The truth must be told, that is our charge and our duty and our obligation.
The only question left is how long will we prefer ecumenism, to missionary outreach?
I give it another ten to twenty years.
By then things ought to be bad enough.
Knock yourselves out.
Why would honest dialogue involve dishonesty? Of course Jesus Christ is Lord, no ecumenical document I’ve read remotely suggests saying otherwise.
Rick, what you do – going around the internet proclaiming the Gospel and Truth of the Church – THAT is ecumenism, that is dialogue. That is your way of missionary outreach.
Where do people get the idea that ecumenism means denying Christ?
I really would like to know the cited sources where people get this idea. I’ve been afraid to use that word – ecumenism – because people claim what you just said, but now that I’m reading the works of Pope Leo XIII, Pope Pius XII, Pope Paul VI, and Pope Benedict XVI, I see that they never claim we should deny that Jesus Christ is Lord. Where do people get that?
“God’s grace, which is the grace of Jesus Christ according to our faith, is available to all. Therefore, the Church believes that Judaism, i.e. the faithful response of the Jewish people to God’s irrevocable covenant, is salvific for them, because God is faithful to his promises.”——— 2001 address by Cardinal Walter Kasper, then-President of the Pontifical Commission for the Religious Relations with the Jews
“Therefore, the covenant God made with the Jews through Moses remains eternally valid for them”—-USCCB Adult Catechism, 2006
“Jews and Christians are precisely in their difference the one people of God who can enrich one another in mutual friendship. I do not have the right to judge what Judaism may gain from this dialogue for its own purposes.”—–Cardinal Kurt Koch, then president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity and of the Commission for Religious Relations With the Jews, speech May 2012
Now.
One can either try and wax nose these incredible perversions of the Gospel, or one can fight them.
But if one tries to say that these incredible perversions of the Gospel are in fact the Gospel, then one has determined that two plus two equal five.
These are statements of bishops and cardinals, and it seems other bishops and cardinals disagreed. I haven’t read the full context, or the reactions and clarifications. Perhaps this is something not fully understood, like limbo for unbaptized infants.
I’m referring to what the councils and Popes have said. None of them, that I’ve read so far, even remotely suggest denying that Jesus Christ is Lord. They also emphasize that conversion cannot be forced or coerced, but they never advise watering down the truth.
Wax nose it is then.
S: “These are statements of bishops and cardinals”
>> These are official statements of Heads of Congregations of the Vatican, acting in their official capacity as Princes of the Catholic Church.
“and it seems other bishops and cardinals disagreed”
>> It was primarily the action of one determined lay Catholic which got the heresy removed from the 2006 USCCB Catechism.
I know him very well.
His reward was a demand from his bishop that he remove the name “Catholic” from his website.
But let us stipulate to every word you say above.
You have completely established my initial point.
S earlier: “Why would honest dialogue involve dishonesty? Of course Jesus Christ is Lord, no ecumenical document I’ve read remotely suggests saying otherwise.
In other words, your words above are directly contradicted by the three cited, official teachings.
If you had never heard of one before, you have heard of three now.
Examples could be multiplied, but the point is established:
“One can either try and wax nose these incredible perversions of the Gospel, or one can fight them.
But if one tries to say that these incredible perversions of the Gospel are in fact the Gospel, then one has determined that two plus two equal five.”
Rick, it feels like you are constantly trying to get me, and others, to deny allegiance to the Magisterium and give such allegiance to you and your friends instead. Maybe that’s not what you intend…but it sure feels that way.
For some of us, it already is morning, each and every day. We trust the Holy Spirit is guiding the Church, as Christ said He would. To deny that is heresy.
“From this it follows that those who arbitrarily conjure up and picture to themselves a hidden and invisible Church are in grievous and pernicious error: as also are those who regard the Church as a human institution which claims a certain obedience in discipline and external duties, but which is without the perennial communication of the gifts of divine grace, and without all that which testifies by constant and undoubted signs to the existence of that life which is drawn from God. It is assuredly as impossible that the Church of Jesus Christ can be the one or the other, as that man should be a body alone or a soul alone. The connection and union of both elements is as absolutely necessary to the true Church as the intimate union of the soul and body is to human nature. The Church is not something dead: it is the body of Christ endowed with supernatural life.” – Pope Leo XII, SATIS COGNITUM
I don’t agree with you. I intend to keep studying this issue, and I will never arrive at the conclusion that the Church is wrong.
The problem which lies ahead for you, Stacy, is that the magisterium today is teaching things never taught by the magisterium before, and what is much worse, insisting that loyalty involves denying that any such difference exists.
You will, eventually, come to that point where this can no longer be fudged, and at that moment you will have a choice to make.
Discomfort is a necessary part of establishing truthful knowledge.
But it is deeply unjust to accuse me of opposing the magisterium.
The magisterium, at its highest levels of authority, has *for millennia* anathematized the heresy:
“the covenant God made with the Jews through Moses remains eternally valid for them.”
Loyalty to the magisterium does not involve accepting heresy.
Loyalty to the magisterium involves fighting it.
All the best to you, may God be with you as you continue your development as a loyal and faithful theologian.
And thanks for your willingness to allow discomforting things to be examined and addressed from time to time.
@Stacy Trasancos
“I’m referring to what the councils and Popes have said. None of them, that I’ve read so far, even remotely suggest denying that Jesus Christ is Lord. They also emphasize that conversion cannot be forced or coerced, but they never advise watering down the truth.”
Yes you are right. You rely on the Popes and Councils and these fellows rely on speeches of individual bishops and a local catechism and start yelling that the sky is falling. Its serious enough what they are seeing and they are not wrong to oppose it but I think they exaggerate so that they can try to make big men out of themselves.
@Anonymous
“His reward was a demand from his bishop that he remove the name “Catholic” from his website.”
Oh yeah sure. It just couldn’t have been anything else he did could it? Wink wink. Like the fact that he was Jew baiting for years on his site. That when his Bishop told him to knock it off he outright defied the Bishop.
This whole thing got brought out over on Dave Armstrong’s blog. I found out that Sungenis didn’t take down all the Jewish material when his Bishop told him to. In fact I found out that Sungenis had not only NOT taken down the anti-Jewish material but he put up even more things like a cartoon of a Jew pointing a machine gun at a child and making his Bishop out to be a heretic and even a book review where Sungenis said things like “There was such unbridled destruction of people and property that, like Jacob saw in his day, we have all the signs that the nation of Israel has made itself “stink” among the nations” and “The Jews are godless and getting more ungodly with each passing day”. Remember that Sungenis was doing all this during the same time that his Bishop had told him “immediately to desist from commenting on the Jewish people and Judaism both online and in all other publications.” I’m sorry, but thats just outright defiance and disrepect. No Catholic should act like that.
After he got called into the Diocese he suddenly “saw the light” and he thought the Bishop was the best thing since sliced bread and that it was an honor to obey him. All of this changed when they told him not to call his web site Catholic anymore and then suddenly he said that he knew all along that his Bishop was really trying to spread heresy to unsuspecting Catholics. Wow. Without even running it by the Bishop he had posted yet another piece on Jews that even a friend and ally of his had to admit was “unnecessarily combative and polemical in tone, and/or open to misinterpretation.” And that’s when the Bishop told him to take the name “Catholic” off his web site.
But Rick Delano said that Sungenis did “everything he possibly could to accommodate his bishop” I’m sorry, but that’s ridiculous from everything I’ve seen. And when Rick Delano invited me on his blog to “Well bring it on” (those were his very words) I put up the evidence like he asked and all of a sudden he went ballistic and censored all my comments. He won’t allow that information to go up. And when all of this came out over at Dave Armstrong’s blog he basically came up with some lame excuse and just ran away. It’s a long discussion but you can see it here http://socrates58.blogspot.com/2012/01/2012-sungenis-odd-yssey-robert-sungenis.html
I found a lot of good background information here http://sungenisandthejews.blogspot.com/ and there’s even someting specifically about Rick there that’s pretty interesting https://sites.google.com/site/sungenisandthejews/rick-delano-creates-a-conspiracy
As far as I can see this whole thing is a smear of a good and orthodox Bishop by some Internet “heroes” who are trying to make a name for themselves. I think that there are lots of serious things going on in the Church and sometimes the laity need to speak up but these guys do more harm than good IMO. They seem to think that God has appointed them as the orthodoxy police over Bishops and Popes.