Respect for Legitimate Differences: The Catholic Agenda
UCU – Ecumenical Social Week – Lviv, Ukraine
–
Opening
Ceremony –
Tuesday, 1 October 2013
One of the truly positive
characteristics of UCU and its family, including the Institute of Ecumenical
Studies, is their ability to make work seem enjoyable.
I am sure old Aesop has a fable to illustrate this skill, but given my own
background, what comes to mind is Mark Twain’s account in his classic novel of
Tom Sawyer tricking the boys of a Saturday morning into whitewashing the fence
in his place.
My special greetings to those who have succumbed to the invitation of
the Institute of Ecumenical Studies to come and work this week and my best
wishes to all for a fruitful sixth edition of the Ecumenical Social Week here
in Lviv!
This Opening ceremony bears the title:
Otherness as a Gift: Challenges of
Modernity in Europe and Ukraine.
Truth to be told, I find this title questionable, as it reminds me of my years
in Berlin at the beginning of this 21st century and the application
of the expression “multikulti”
(multicultural) to almost everything from pickup football games in the park of
a Sunday, to block parties with potluck supper, to summer street carnivals. Reveling
in differences in and of themselves hardly seems to be of value: once you have
discovered that no two snowflakes are alike, it is pretty well safe to get on
with life. With people, the simple fact of being different, tall/short,
fat/skinny, smart/not so smart, hardly seems important; being different is a
given, the gift of which must perforce lie elsewhere.
In
point of fact, and rightly so I believe, basic Catholic teaching accents what
by God’s Will from all eternity we share in common. The Church teaches as
fundamental the truth that I share a God-given dignity, equality, with the
other, which draws us together in a human project which is not transitory but
ordered on eternity. Basic catechism motivates my option or obligation to see
the other as gift not on the basis of our “otherness”, but because we are more
the same than we are different. The Catechism of the Catholic Church states it
in summary fashion as follows:
1934 Created in the image of the one
God and equally endowed with rational souls, all men have the same nature and
the same origin. Redeemed by the sacrifice of Christ, all
are called to participate in the same divine beatitude: all therefore enjoy an
equal dignity.
1944 Respect for the human person
considers the other “another self.” It presupposes respect for the fundamental
rights that flow from the dignity intrinsic of the person.
1945 The equality of men concerns
their dignity as persons and the rights that flow from it.
1946 The differences among persons
belong to God’s plan, who wills that we should need one another. These
differences should encourage charity.
Concerning our theme, then, it is no small question for me as to whether
or not the accent has been misplaced. How is it that “otherness” can be shared
and appreciated in interpersonal and social relationships? How do I or can I come to respect the diversity of persons if not through
sacrifice, motivated and justified rather by what we have in common? It seems
wrong-headed to say that the diversity from me or among us as persons,
communities, societies or cultural traditions is to be seen as a package come
in the mail unexpectedly to be simply opened and enjoyed. With that said, I
wish to get back to our theme which deserves ample and straightforward
treatment.
Let it be said that I find the English translation of the title for
today’s proceedings, Otherness as a Gift:
Challenges of Modernity in Europe and Ukraine, to be perhaps simply somewhat
of an understatement. The problem is that word “challenges” in the plural; the
“gift” of otherness is not just another challenge, as if it were no more than
keeping your salad dressing mixed by stirring or shaking a bit. Too often if
not just about always, differences among us must be laid at the door of our
first parents and their fall from grace through disobedience to God’s Will. To my way of thinking, we could better entitle
today’s encounter: Otherness as a Gift:
Perhaps the Challenge in Europe and Ukraine Today.
Most places in Europe, future spouses
choose their husband or wife on the basis of their commonality and/or
attraction to each other (this in part at least, though not solely, was also
the case in olden days with arranged marriages). Having common ground and
sympathies doesn’t make the lives of a couple together later in marriage all
that much easier; ongoing effort to keep their marriage bond going and growing
is required. Analogously, projects like Europe or Ukraine would be tough enough if
all participants in the adventure had chosen one another. That is not the case.
From a Christian perspective, the gift lies in the sacrifice, the heroic
sacrifice which renders the adventure life-giving and bent on eternity, in
communion with our Creator, Redeemer and Friend/Bridegroom, Jesus Christ.
Too often we neglect to take our
brokenness into sufficient consideration. We may even deny the extent to which
accidental differences become the pretext for painful divisions or
“irreconcilable differences”, as the divorce decree sometimes reads. As a young
man in Vienna in the late 1980’s, being a monsignor already, on a couple
occasions I was admitted to the salon of some of the old Habsburger hangers-on,
not immediate family but rather people very different from Otto von Habsburg, nice
people who would have had you believe that World War I and what followed had
changed little of their societal environment and that they had grown up at
court like their parents or grandparents, having lived in all the capitals and speaking
all the languages of the Empire. On one occasion as I listened to them bounce
back and forth in clever repartee from German, to Hungarian, to Czech, to
Italian, I got the impression that they actually were fluent in all those
languages and more, and undoubtedly felt at home most any place in Central or
Eastern Europe. For all the good intended or pretended, I still couldn’t bring
myself to believe that paradise was lost with the breakup of that empire.
I have been told that St. Stephen of Hungary long ago touted the
overriding value of kingdoms/empires made up of various peoples, languages and
customs. True or false? And why? Granted, such a mix did gift peoples with a
lot of common words for everyday things, Riebieseln,
Kukurutz… but was “otherness” really a gift in and for the empire? Was this
type of familiarity the real equivalent of knowing and esteeming the other? How
did otherness play out to the advantage of the once great kingdoms and empires
spanning Europe from east to west, from north
to south? How does otherness work today in Switzerland,
in Italy, in France or Spain
or Belgium?
Have you ever tried in Louvain
to ask in French for street directions?
“Diversity and Respect: the European Challenge
today”? or “Ukraine,
quo vadis”? I honestly fear that much militates against, yes, even yet today in
our enlightened world, I fear that much militates against real and adequate respect
for diversity. You just can’t call otherness a gift and proceed from there. Permit
me to qualify that word “diversity” and namely as not just any difference or
distinction but rather as “legitimate differences”. A reasonable social project
demands on all sides a willingness to seek out the other, draw near to the
other and establish something in common with the other.
I can remember getting to know a fine,
old Belgian Salesian Father in Rwanda,
who explained the origins of his habit of asking his salary from the Nunciature
in small bills such that he could easily distribute the money to the poor
waiting outside the gate on payday. He said he lived from his mother’s example,
who, before his father had returned from the front at the end of World War II,
she alone with a raft of small children would simply place on the bench at the
kitchen table with her children any man who wandered in at mealtime in days
when so many men (former soldiers, slave laborers and other victims of war) were
displaced and struggling to find their way home. Otherness was not the accent
but rather commonality. The priest’s mother could have been thinking that
perhaps her husband, the children’s father, found himself somewhere on the road
in similar straights, perhaps a neighbor’s son or a brother somewhere half
across Europe, alone, exhausted, hungry and
maybe confused or fearful. The gift seems to reside in being able to overcome
or bridge legitimate differences and fears of the unknown for the sake of
mutual understanding and esteem.
Any kind of dealings, in the best
sense of that term, dealings with the other, demand proximity. Either we seek
each other out mutually and establish common ground or I reach out to you in
some way, unconditionally, heroically really, to reduce the distance between
us, to eliminate, if possible, the barriers between us. Otherness is more
likely a barrier than it is a gift; it must be overcome, in the sense that
bridges must be built between us. I must learn another language; I must come to
appreciate someone else’s customs and culture. Hurdles have to be cleared;
there has to be an exchange between us. I may be different but I cannot insist
on playing strange; I must find a place to stand together with the other.
Otherness’ gift seems to come in meeting the challenge of overcoming it and
establishing common ground.
The rest of the title of my words
today refers to the “Catholic Agenda”, well, presumably for gaining respect for
legitimate differences. Not long ago, I was asked in an interview how a change
of popes changes Church policy. And I responded that to my way of thinking
popes do not make the difference in basic Church policy; we as Church seek to
proclaim the Gospel; that is our policy. All else is basically a matter of
emphasis or accent.
Many of us have pictures in our mind
of Pope John Paul II during the Holy Year 2000, very much crippled though still
walking, confessing faults and asking forgiveness in an effort to overcome
barriers. What he sought to teach by word and example, Pope Benedict XVI
further elaborated in his magisterium and Pope Francis seeks to attain through
availability and proximity to ordinary folk. It’s like the Christmas slogan, “the
gift is in the giving”. Otherness, even legitimate differences deserve our
respect, but they become gift to the extent we can overcome them.
That said: it would be ingenuous of me
to claim that our Catholic Agenda is self-evident. I cannot but think of
Blessed Pope John Paul II and the amount of effort he expended in trying to
teach people, especially in a Europe divided, the
path to reconciliation through what he called “the healing of memories”, that
is, memories treated as divisive burdens still conserved and still carried from
the past. Many of us can remember not understanding what he was trying to
accomplish; otherness induced by bad memories is not an easy concept to grasp
once you get past yesterday or last year. Collective memory of the distant past
is totally beyond a boy like me who grew up on the slogan “Go west, young man!”
In today’s genealogy craze, it doesn’t even seem to trouble people much to
discover that their grandfather left behind, in Ireland
or even elsewhere in the United
States, a wife and children, lying to their
grandmother about practically everything in his past, when he proposed marriage
to her. I know people like that and I know people who discover that their
antecedents were brothers who hated each other so much that the younger brother
changed the spelling of his family name to increase difference or distance: my
friends could only shake their heads and smile at a discovery which had no
memory to be healed for them. Healing memories is not about the past or about
our DNA; healing memories is a polite way of challenging people to let go of
their, perhaps, one-sided recollection of the past, used solely as a pretext
for being “other” and in a hostile way. While not disclaiming the past, I
refuse to let it hold me hostage; I let go, with “sacrifice” and confessing my
own fault, if needs be, for the sake of common cause as our overarching
strategy to move ahead, freed from shackles and chains so as to choose the
other and allow myself to be chosen, for the sake of a common agenda. Call it
Europe or call it Ukraine;
I have the luxury to call it Catholic/universal and allow my stance, my choice,
yes, my sacrifice to inform my social or interpersonal project.
In seeking reconciliation (where present offence exists), in seeking to
bridge the gap of historical or cultural differences (whether or not they have
been aggravated through some offense), it is not pronouncing judgment, in the
here and now in the name of truth or integrity concerning the objective and
personal culpability from the past which is at stake, but rather it is and must
be the clearing of present barriers of hurt, indifference, ignorance, wrong… It
must be the overcoming of otherness in the present moment which is the key,
regardless of whether the pretext for that alienation is historical or actual. I
really don’t think the Pope’s thoughts about healing memories were all that
esoteric, but in choosing a neutral expression like healing memories he was
reaching out and fighting against a mountain of resistance mostly sinful,
characterized by animosity toward the other. “Otherness”, defined as a certain
propensity on the part of people to make strange, to distrust, as protagonism
over and against the other, is not a value. The gift part comes in surmounting
difference as obstacle and most likely doing so through great, yes, great
personal sacrifice.
“Respect
for Legitimate Differences: The Catholic Agenda”: as tempted as I am to
limit appropriate quotes to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, I wish to make
my point and close, referring you to an ecumenical document, on Christian
witness in a multi-religious world. It is a very short document (just a seven
page paper from 2011), stemming from a shared awareness of the tensions between
people and communities of different religious convictions and the varied interpretations
of Christian witness. The Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue
(PCID), the World Council of Churches (WCC) and, at the invitation of the WCC,
the World Evangelical Alliance (WEA), met during a period of 5 years to reflect
and produce this document to serve as a set of recommendations for conduct on
Christian witness around the world.
I do not find
it a document of compromise, watering down in any way the Catholic position,
but rather a consensus document which is firm on Christian identity vis-à-vis
others with whom we live and work and to whom we wish to witness, to whom we
are bound to witness about the truth, about Jesus Christ, true God and true
Man, the Savior of the world. The paper concludes with six recommendations to
Christians as to how they should proceed in giving witness to the Gospel in a
multi-religious world. Three of these stand out as particularly important:
“2. build
relationships of respect and trust with people of all religions…
3. encourage
Christians to strengthen their own religious identity and faith while deepening
their knowledge and understanding of different religions…
4. cooperate
with other religious communities engaging in interreligious advocacy towards
justice and the common good…”
As a Catholic, an ineluctable part of my raison d’être has to be proclaiming the
truth about Jesus Christ and His Church. In our world, that may make me
different (Oh, how pertinent the insight of Benedict XVI concerning the
tyranny/dictatorship of relativism!), but I am and must be different, and legitimately
so; my “otherness” is not assumed or overlaid, but it is a part of me, if you
will.
Others more
expert than me need to lay out their thoughts on Union-building: read “Europe”
and on Nation-building: read “Ukraine”.
My plea would be that you do so with an eye to the truth which comes to us from
God. Neither agnosticism nor relativism is worthy of the human project.
Personally, I am in favor of approaching the challenge from a Catholic
perspective and with a Catholic agenda, one which seems to enjoy a certain ecumenical
consensus.
From my
difference, I reach out to others in boundless joy, knowing that I possess the
“pearl above price”, which out of sheer respect for others, who do not share
this gift in common with me, I wish to share with them. Their “otherness” is a
gift and a challenge to me to the extent that I engage them, respecting them
most assuredly, but engage them nonetheless and “for the sake of the Name which
is above every other Name”.
Thank
you for your attention!
Catechism of the Catholic Church:
Second Edition (pp. 522;525). U.S.
Catholic Church (2012-11-28). The Doubleday Religious Publishing Group. Kindle
Edition.
www.vatican.va_roman_curia_pontifical_councils_interelg_documents_christian_witness_in_multi-
religious_world_english
