A DIFFERENT KIND OF LISTENING

 

A Different Kind of Listening

Robert Royal

Monday, November 18, 2024

 

The post-election crowing and whinging are both already wearying. The race is decided. What matters now is not endless analyses of how or why the winners won (that’s best left to journalists, political consultants, and other practitioners of dark arts). What matters is what they will do. I expect a lot. But before the recent campaign passes into the merciful mists of time, it has uncovered some more interesting and longer-lasting matters, Catholic matters, about our democratic peoples just now and several recent developments in the Church.

Something we heard a lot about during the long years of the Synod on Synodality was the need to “listen,” especially to the poor. Indeed, Pope Francis says that when he was elected, his friend, Brazilian Cardinal Hummes embraced him and told him “Don’t forget about the poor.”

As if. . . .

But what secular politicians and, sorry to say, many Catholic prelates usually mean when they talk about “the poor” is not real people living in hard circumstances, but something already turned into an ideological concept.

What if, when they’re asked and listened to via the crude tabulation of the ballot box, growing numbers of “the poor” prefer an opportunity society rather than the “social assistance state” that Pope St. John Paul II warned us about in Centesimus Annus? Do we – and the Church – listen? And perhaps rethink our idea of who the poor are and what they need, other than more government programs?

Or are poor people who think that way – like the black Americans Joe Biden instructed “ain’t black” if they didn’t vote for him – not really “the poor”? Are they suffering from what the Marxists called “false consciousness”? Who decides whether to “listen” to them – or not?

Or why is it, if capitalism is as rapacious as many in the Church hierarchy seem to think, that the most capitalist society on earth – the United States of America – is the desired destination of hundreds of millions of “poor” people around the globe? Do they, too, just want to be rapacious and greedy, or are they mistakenly willing to subject themselves and their families to the running dogs of capitalism? In either case, does anyone listen to them?

All this is somehow connected in my mind with another phrase that we heard during the elections – and by a strange synchronicity – during the Synod, too: “We aren’t going back.”  This slogan expresses belief in a single-lane superhighway to progress, by people who are sure what the future should be and what is deplorable “backwardism.”

But as Chesterton says somewhere – and the dark wood at beginning of Dante’s Commedia also confirms – if you’ve gone off the right road, going back is the most progressive thing you can do. You, of course, don’t go back to following that road in the direction that got you into the ditch in the first place. You go back a sadder and a wiser person, with eyes open to where you really need to go.

 

The Road to Emmaus by Robert Zünd, 1877 [Kunst Museum St. Gallen, Switzerland]

 

It’s curious that it’s not only in America that the people have chosen a different path than what has been presented to us as the shining progressive pathway. In several European countries, peoples tired of being ignored – and denigrated – by their own elites have sought another way.

Italy, Hungary, and the Netherlands already have governments that reject the immigration schemes and woke policies of the European Union. In addition, Austria, Germany, and France have growing, strongly populist parties – “far-right” in the journalese, which means they are now far distant from the progressive rulers who have moved to the far-left.

The elite apologists have been trying to impose a kind of cordon sanitaire around the populist movements by claiming that they are “fascist.” Yet they only grow the more they are denounced. There’s plenty to criticize about any political or social movement, to be sure, but maybe they ought to be listened to, really listened to, first.

I’m sorry to have to say that almost no one in the Church pays any attention – “listens” – to these voices now emerging in the developed world. Pope Francis, I’m quite sure, means well in his concern for migrants. And I think he also sincerely believes that the populist revolts are, as he often says, “simplistic solutions” to complicated problems.

I’m also quite sure that he’s quite wrong. If anything, it’s quite simplistic to think that the only reason a people strongly opposes the wholesale remaking of its national life is merely a lack of charity. In the United States, for example, we have a history of welcoming immigrants. And we admit over a million, legally, a year – and still feel the strain of illegal migrants.

It would be useful, too, if the Church were listening to all of its people – not just those hand-picked for synodalization. Why were – and are – groups pushing LGBT+ meeting regularly now with the Holy Father? While Orthodox groups like Courage don’t get a hearing? Again, I think Pope Francis thinks he’s dining with the tax collectors and prostitutes, like Our Lord. But is it similar? The tax collectors and prostitutes repented and followed Him. Is that coming out of these meetings or Fr. James Martin’s Outreach?

A new preacher of the papal household was just appointed by Francis this week who may be good in some respects, but has a history of the usual LGBT doubletalk – “the Bible doesn’t say,” “it could be that,” “people at the time didn’t understand” – preparing the way for accepting what the Church cannot accept.

I’m quite convinced that the populist movement in the secular sphere is going to bleed over more and more into the Church as well. You can, for instance, suppress the Latin Mass, but you cannot suppress the desire, especially among young people and families, for a deeper, richer, more beautiful worship than the thin liturgy given us after Vatican II.

We are going back – to a road that will lead authentically forward. Only those who are not listening will be surprised by what they will soon hear.

Source: https://www.thecatholicthing.org/2024/11/18/a-different-kind-of-listening/