When compassion is superior to apologetics.

won’t get into the specifics of the lat­est internecine war­fare on the Patheos Catholic chan­nel, which began inno­cent­ly enough with some harm­less sex­u­al har­rass­ment from one blog­ger to anoth­er. You can read the details in my friend Mary Pez­zu­lo’s post, enti­tled “Abuse, Apolo­get­ics, and the Heart of Christ.” That’s not all Mary’s post is; it’s real­ly about the scan­dal of Catholics wound­ing oth­er Catholics and, in con­se­quence, wound­ing the heart of Christ. Mary knows how to focus your atten­tion on the real spir­i­tu­al issues lurk­ing behind what might oth­er­wise seem to be no more than online shit­ti­ness.

But I want to take my cue from a sto­ry Mary tells about a third of the way through the post:

I don’t know the Quigley fam­i­ly per­son­al­ly. Appar­ent­ly they are the cre­ators of the Mater Ama­bilis home­school­ing cur­ricu­lum. The Catholic home­school­ers I know were express­ing shock about them on Twit­ter, and they made an announce­ment that’s been shared all over. That’s why I’m talk­ing about this pub­licly, because they announced it pub­licly and everyone’s already talk­ing, oth­er­wise I wouldn’t think it was appro­pri­ate to com­ment. Mr. Quigley explained that his wife and he are fed up with all the cru­el­ty, cold­ness, hatred of the poor and tol­er­ance of abuse they’ve wit­nessed in their Latin Mass Catholic com­mu­ni­ty. It’s made them doubt the effi­ca­cy of the sacra­ments to see so many peo­ple who receive the sacra­ments reg­u­lar­ly behave so hor­ri­bly. For that rea­son, they’re step­ping back from prac­tic­ing Catholi­cism, and they don’t know what their new reli­gion will be.

There are over 500 com­ments on that announce­ment, and a lot of them are cru­el and tone-deaf in the extreme. They are just what you’d think they were: angry peo­ple try­ing to tri­umph in an argu­ment. Peo­ple try­ing to throw syl­lo­gisms at a cou­ple who sound heart­bro­ken and prob­a­bly need some com­pas­sion and lis­ten­ing right now. Peo­ple rant­i­ng about Our Lady of Fati­ma. Every­one want­ed to look right. Every­one want­ed to win. Every­one want­ed to have that per­fect answer that would shame and manip­u­late a fam­i­ly back into the Catholic Church. They weren’t kind. They didn’t lis­ten. They didn’t seem to be think­ing at all; they were just spit­ting tri­umphant answers at peo­ple who were obvi­ous­ly feel­ing vul­ner­a­ble and hurt.

In a case like this, a per­son who makes his liv­ing as an apol­o­gist might be tempted—by reflex—to go into a long the­o­log­i­cal argu­ment about ex opere oper­a­to and the fact that the sacra­ments aren’t mag­ic bul­lets that auto­mat­i­cal­ly make every­one vir­tu­ous; you must coop­er­ate with grace. But while all that is, tech­ni­cal­ly speak­ing, true, it’s not what this wound­ed cou­ple needs to hear right now. They need some­one to treat them, not as though they only lack knowl­edge of the right argu­ments, and then every­thing will be bet­ter, but as though it’s right to be feel­ing what they are feel­ing. They don’t need to be treat­ed as though their faith has some­how failed.

What they need first is to know that not all Catholics are like the ones who hurt them. What they need first is to know that there are Catholics who love them and treat them as though their feel­ings are okay and mat­ter. It’s not the time to try to win an argu­ment; by doing that, you sim­ply deep­en the hurt they already feel.

What Job need­ed first was friends who would sit down and cry with him, not friends who only want­ed to explain to him why he deserved this. When God shows up at the end of the book, the great­est object of his wrath is the apol­o­gists.

Oth­er Catholics are among the most hor­ri­ble peo­ple I’ve known in my life. Back in 2016, when I refused to sup­port Trump and start­ed to say that social jus­tice actu­al­ly is Catholic teach­ing, I began to have Catholics accuse me of being pro-abor­tion. They would say that I was los­ing my faith, or that I was a “cafe­te­ria Catholic.” They told lies about me. I could under­stand that from a stranger, per­haps, but Catholics I knew in real life—including Catholics who helped me when I was join­ing the Church, and who ate with me, and had me over to their house—never once con­tact­ed me to help them under­stand my think­ing, nev­er once came to my defense. Instead I was ostracized—by peo­ple I thought of as real-life friends. You learn to live with those wounds but you nev­er lose them any more than Christ los­es his.

I’m only still in the Church because of the grace of God. I’m not still here because of the apolo­get­ics or the wit­ness of oth­er Catholics.

I don’t say any of that because I want peo­ple to feel sor­ry for me. My only point is what hap­pens when com­pas­sion fails, what hap­pens when your goal is to win a debate, score a point, and be right, rather than to love some­one. If I pos­sess all apolo­getic answers but have not love I. Am. Noth­ing.

C.S. Lewis once com­posed this prayer for apol­o­gists:

From all my lame defeats and oh! much more

From all the vic­to­ries that I seemed to score;

From clev­er­ness shot forth on Thy behalf

At which, while angels weep, the audi­ence laugh;

From all my proofs of Thy divin­i­ty,

Thou, who wouldst give no sign, deliv­er me.

 

Thoughts are but coins. Let me not trust, instead

Of Thee, their thin-worn image of Thy head.

From all my thoughts, even from my thoughts of Thee,

O thou fair Silence, fall, and set me free.

Lord of the nar­row gate and the needle’s eye,

Take from me all my trumpery lest die. [Pun not intend­ed.]

When some­one is wounded—whether it’s a par­ent who lost a child and blames God, or some­one who’s been sex­u­al­ly abused and is strug­gling to fig­ure out who they are, or some­one who’s been false­ly accused by peo­ple he knew—the last thing they are look­ing for is the Right Answers. And cer­tain­ly they’re not look­ing to be inter­ro­gat­ed by some­one who wants to know if they’re still fol­low­ing all the moral laws or believe all the right doc­trines. There are times when this kind of response only makes their hurt worse. They want love.

Apolo­get­ics has an impor­tant place, but this is what God revealed to Julian of Nor­wich:

I saw that God is to us every­thing which is good and com­fort­ing for our help. God is our cloth­ing, who wraps and enfolds us for love, embraces us and shel­ters us, sur­rounds us for love, which is so ten­der that God may nev­er desert us. And so in this sight I saw that God is every­thing which is good, as I under­stand.

And in this God showed me some­thing small, no big­ger than a hazel­nut, lying in the palm of my hand. It seemed to me as round as a ball. I gazed at it and thought, ‘What can this be?’ The answer came thus, ‘It is every­thing that is made.’ I mar­veled how this could be, for it was so small it seemed it might fall sud­den­ly into noth­ing­ness. Then I heard the answer, ‘It lasts, and ever shall last, because God loves it. All things have their being in this way by the grace of God.’

In this lit­tle thing I saw three prop­er­ties. The first is that God made it, the sec­ond is that God loves it, the third is that God pre­serves it. But what did I see in it? It is that God is the cre­ator and pro­tec­tor and the lover. For until I am sub­stan­tial­ly unit­ed to God, I can nev­er have per­fect rest or true hap­pi­ness, until, that is, I am so attached to God that there can be no cre­at­ed thing between my God and me.

Answers have an impor­tant place, but God is not going to ask us on the last day whether we gave our broth­er and our sis­ter a good answer, or how many apolo­get­ics “papers” we wrote. He’s going to ask whether we loved them with the love of Christ.