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Suppose there is a person...
Nov. 27th, 2004 11:03 pmSuppose you are a member of the Catholic Church.
And suppose there is a person in your life whom you would like to keep as a friend. Suppose that you respect and admire that person very much... except for one thing. That that person is bestially, even diseasedly prejudiced against the Church; that that person is not - you wish! - just ignorant, but driven by hate to the extent that everything you can possibly say or do is either distorted or answered with a false statement of fact (often in a situation where the person concerned ought, if we admit any sanity, to know that what is being said is a flat lie); that however much you try to answer and explain and make sense, those things that cannot be distorted or lied about are simply ignored and "forgotten"; that this same person essentially comes to the conclusion that you, as a Catholic, ought to be excluded from the political process - and is not ashamed of it either.
Suppose, too, that you have a fierce temper that you have been suppressing in order to try and argue rationally on this ground; while the other person makes no effort whatever to show the least respect to your tradition (which is the tradition of Dante, Beethoven and Shakespeare) and to your beliefs.
What do you do? Do you try again; or just resign yourself to the fact that this person, however admirable in other ways, has a diseased spot in the soul - and that, by the height of misfortune, this disease spot is exactly to do with the thing you value most in the world, and makes any prospect of any rational friendship quite impossible?
And suppose there is a person in your life whom you would like to keep as a friend. Suppose that you respect and admire that person very much... except for one thing. That that person is bestially, even diseasedly prejudiced against the Church; that that person is not - you wish! - just ignorant, but driven by hate to the extent that everything you can possibly say or do is either distorted or answered with a false statement of fact (often in a situation where the person concerned ought, if we admit any sanity, to know that what is being said is a flat lie); that however much you try to answer and explain and make sense, those things that cannot be distorted or lied about are simply ignored and "forgotten"; that this same person essentially comes to the conclusion that you, as a Catholic, ought to be excluded from the political process - and is not ashamed of it either.
Suppose, too, that you have a fierce temper that you have been suppressing in order to try and argue rationally on this ground; while the other person makes no effort whatever to show the least respect to your tradition (which is the tradition of Dante, Beethoven and Shakespeare) and to your beliefs.
What do you do? Do you try again; or just resign yourself to the fact that this person, however admirable in other ways, has a diseased spot in the soul - and that, by the height of misfortune, this disease spot is exactly to do with the thing you value most in the world, and makes any prospect of any rational friendship quite impossible?
