Building Bridges in Today’s Divided Church
Ann Garrido
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Many Voices, One Spirit was produced with a grant from the Catholic Communication Campaign of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.
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SESSION ONE: What are we witnessing?
FOCUS
There are many issues that divide our Catholic community. The way we talk about these issues matters—to us and to the world.
INTRODUCTION
One at a time, introduce yourselves to the group, sharing your names and, briefly, what led you to join these sessions. What have you witnessed in the Church and wider world that inclines you to believe the healing of polarization is an important topic, worthy of your time and energy?
Take some time to read together the “Group Commitments” in the Introduction of this book.
OPENING PRAYER
Leader: Each of us has been led by a different road—a different set of experiences—to this place. The Holy Spirit has nudged each of us in a unique way to enter into prayer, reflection, and conversation with this particular group. Having introduced ourselves to each other, let us take a moment of silence to pray in our hearts for all who have gathered here.
To give thanks for their presence. (pause)
To give thanks for their courage to take part in these sessions. (pause)
To give thanks for their willingness to respond to the Spirit’s promptings.
(Moment for silent prayer)
Leader: Gathering our individual prayers into one, let us now ask God’s blessing on our group as a whole and on our time together.
All: Lord, you promised that wherever two or three were gathered in your name, you would be present in their midst. We ask now for the Spirit who gathered us here to infuse this space and fashion us into a holy community marked by patience and forbearance, charity, and a concern for justice.
Side 1: Open our eyes so that we might see your face in each other.
Side 2: Open our ears so that we might hear your voice speaking through each other.
Side 1: Open our lips to speak only what is loving and true.
Side 2: Open our hearts to grow in understanding of each other.
(Moment for silent prayer)
Leader: With eyes ready to see, ears ready to hear, lips poised to proclaim, hearts open to the continued movement of the Spirit among us, let us attend together to God’s Word.
LISTENING TO SCRIPTURE
A reading from the book of Genesis (11:1-9)
Now the whole earth had one language and the same words. And as they migrated from the east, they came upon a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there. And they said to one another, “Come, let us make bricks, and burn them thoroughly.” And they had brick for stone, and bitumen for mortar. Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves; otherwise we shall be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.” The Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which mortals had built. And the Lord said, “Look, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down, and confuse their language there, so they will not understand one another’s speech. So the Lord scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city. Therefore, it was called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of all the earth; and from there the Lord scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth.
Reader: The Word of the Lord.
All: Thanks be to God.
SHARE
• Describe a time in the past couple years when you felt like one of the citizens of Babel—a time when your family or friend, social group, or faith community had a hard time communicating and felt “scattered” or separated from one another.
• In the story of Babel, it is God who scatters the people to halt an ill-conceived plan. To what do you attribute the “scattering” you’ve described? What do you see as having led to this “scattering”?
REFLECTION ON THEME
We start our series of conversations on the topic of polarization with a question: What are we witnessing? The question can be understood in two ways.
First, what are we witnessing in the world around us? In our parishes? In our own families? The political and ecclesial polarization of the United States is frequently a topic of discussion. The
general sentiment seems to be that divisions are growing rather than healing. But what are you seeing personally? How are you being impacted? Are there relationships among people in your network that have frayed, perhaps even ended?
There is another way, however, to understand the question, “What are we witnessing?” When polarization is our reality as a Church, we need to ask, “What are we witnessing to the world?” We’ve asked what we see when we look at the world, but what does the world see when it looks at us? Does the way we, as Catholics, treat one another incline others to listen to what we have to say, or does it make them want to run in the opposite direction? Does the witness of our common life lead people to fall more deeply in love with Jesus or turn them off the gospel entirely?
The Church is a community bound together as the Body of Christ and united in the deposit of faith— the teaching handed down by Jesus to the apostles and, through them, to the college of bishops. Some expect the Church to also be a place where the practice of patience and forbearance, charity, and a concern for justice result in perfect harmony among its members. People with that expectation will be disappointed in the present age. In part, they will be disappointed because their expectations are unrealistic. Even the saints had moments of impatience; even the saints struggled to figure out what was just and what was charitable in various situations.
But the real reason these people will be disappointed is because the practice of patience and forbearance, charity and justice do not always result in perfect harmony and certainly not if we do not strive to achieve it. These are wonderful virtues to put into action, especially amid tension, but tension itself is woven into the fabric of life. Our goal in this program is to learn to neutralize that tension where it exists in our relationships by extending our love to those with whom we have even serious differences.
God created a diverse world with not only many different environments and species but many kinds of people. It is only through entering into new and different environments and meeting new and different people who think, live, speak, and process differently than we do that our minds and hearts stretch to love more broadly while we adhere to what has been revealed and taught by Christ and his Church.
The witness the world needs the Church to offer is not the witness of perfect harmony among its members but rather the witness of a community constantly striving to live its diversity in holy ways— engaging tension as an opportunity to enrich its communal life rather than allowing it to tear the community apart.
The prayer, reflection, skill building, and faith sharing during these six-sessions are intended to help us grow our capacity to offer the kind of witness we want to offer as Christians in this world. Perhaps we’ll discover along the way that—as in the story of Babel—the scattering we’ve experienced in recent years has deeper roots than natural differences of perspective. This is due to diversity of generations, culture, gender, or life experiences. In the story of Babel, the people are scattered for their arrogance. What may we need to acknowledge in our own behavior that keeps us from talking to each other? How can we witness to the faith in ways that will ultimately confirm us as one body in Christ?
In our sessions, we’ll focus on developing the mind frame and communications skills that can help us better manage tensions in our families, parishes, social circles, and communities in healthy and holy ways. As we do, let us be open to acknowledging the roles we may have played in creating division. As always, let us remember that God is not only patient, forbearing, charitable, and just but also
overflowing with mercy. We should readily turn to the sacraments of reconciliation and the Eucharist as we strive to heal divisions.
SHARE
• What are your own beliefs about conflict? Is it always bad—or sometimes good? Is it useful? Destructive? Where do you think these beliefs came from?
• St. Thomas Aquinas recommended that we read from those we consider our nemeses: “We must love them both, those whose opinions we share and those whose opinions we reject. For both have labored in the search for truth and both have helped us in the finding of it.”1 Describe a time when you’ve listened to or read a perspective different from your own and learned something, even though you believe the other person is wrong.
• Can you think of a time when being in conflict with another person has been good for you— perhaps when it has led to deeper insight for you and a richer relationship with that person? Has it ever made you become aware of something of which you needed to be made aware? What allowed this situation to reach a productive outcome, perhaps in comparison to others in which this was not the case?
• If our society were to do some deep soul-searching, what sins do you suspect we might find beneath our current experience of being “scattered” or divided?
• What witness would you like the Church to offer in a polarized world? What should the Church be able to do well that it now does not?
ACTION
• Read the USCCB’s “Civilize It” pledge in Appendix 1 or at https://www.usccb.org/civilizeit . The practices that we will be looking at during upcoming sessions are intended to help us live out this pledge. If you feel ready to take the pledge now, go ahead and sign your name online. If this is something that you need more time to consider before making your commitment public, know that you will again be invited to consider this pledge at the end of our last session.
• This week, pay close attention to news stories in which a tense situation was managed productively or people behaved in ways aligned with what you think we should be witnessing as Christians in the world. Make a list of the positive practices and behaviors you see in these stories. What distinguishes them from those you see in the many less hopeful stories you run across?
• When participating in the Eucharistic liturgy this week, ask God to help you identify one person with whom you strongly disagree on an important issue and with whom you might try to build a bridge over the course of these sessions. It might be a family member, co-worker, fellow parishioner, neighbor, or a friend. It should be someone that you at least have the capacity to interact with on a regular basis. At the start of the next session, you’ll be asked to share with the group the person God has prompted you to select as your “practice partner,” using a pseudonym. (If this action step feels overwhelming or you are having trouble choosing someone, please see Appendix 2 for suggestions.)
1 Thomas Aquinas, Met. XII, 9; n. 2566
CLOSING PRAYER
Leader: During World Communications Day in 2018, Pope Francis shared a prayer based on the popular prayer attributed to St. Francis of Assisi, rewritten for our own time. In future sessions, this will be our opening prayer, but for the close of our session today, let us pray it together, knowing that each time we meet we will be trying to make the spirit behind these words our own.
All:
Lord, make us instruments of your peace.
Help us to recognize the evil latent in a communication that does not build communion. Help us to remove the venom from our judgments.
Help us to speak about others as our brothers and sisters. You are faithful and trustworthy; may our words be seeds of goodness for the world: where there is shouting, let us practice listening; where there is confusion, let us inspire harmony; where there is ambiguity, let us bring clarity; where there is exclusion, let us offer solidarity; where there is sensationalism, let us use sobriety; where there is superficiality, let us raise real questions; where there is prejudice, let us awaken trust; where there is hostility, let us bring respect; where there is falsehood, let us bring truth. Amen.