Austen Ivereigh - How to Defend the Faith without Raising your Voice

Civil Responses to Catholic Hot-Button Issues

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Copyright 2012 by Austen Ivereigh. Published 2012

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ISBN: 978-1-61278-538-7 (Inventory No.T1222)

eISBN: 978-1-61278-224-9

LCCN: 2012932796

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We know how it feels, finding yourself suddenly appointed the spokesman for the Catholic Church while youre standing at a photocopier, swigging a drink at the bar, or when a group of folks suddenly freezes, and all eyes fix on you.

Youre a Catholic, arent you? someone says.

Urn, yes, you confess, looking up nervously at what now seems to resemble a lynch mob.

The pope has been reported as saying something totally outrageous. Or the issue of AIDS and condoms has come up. Or the discussion has turned to gay marriage. And here you are, called on to defend the Catholic Church by virtue of your baptism, feeling as equipped for that task as Daniel in the den of lions.

Go on, they seem to say, but dont actually put it that way.Justify what the Church teaches!

Scrabbling together a few thoughts, you put up a valiant defense, and people nod sympathetically. You contextualize, point out x and y, make a few observations they hadnt thought of, bring a little perspective into the question. The mob dissolves; people smile. Theyre not persuaded, but they dont want you to feel uncomfortable.

Or it didnt happen that way at all? Perhaps what happened was you got a little flustered and said a whole load of things which sounded pretty unpersuasive even to you.You got irritated at the Church being constantly made to answer to a self-appointed inquisition of secular humanists and accused of bizarre conspiracies by people who had read too much Dan Brown. In fact, you became very flustered and flew off the handle; the feeling of persecution got to you. By the time you had spluttered out your angry defense, the gulf between you and everyone else had widened impossibly and someone else had quickly, nervously, introduced a new topic.

Either way, heres what didnt happen. You didnt manage to reframe the issue. People still had the same view of the Church dogmatic, authoritarian, anti-democratic, hypocritical, inhuman as before you started speaking. You didnt turn the tables, recast the issue, open minds and hearts.You were stuck inside your opponents frame.

As we were saying, we sympathize. Its not easy making the Churchs case.The issues can be complex, and the headlines grotesquely simplistic. And its hard to know, sometimes, what the Churchs view actually is. Maybe you heard a bishop or theologian on the radio answering precisely that point. Maybe youve read up on it. But most likely, you just dont have the time to conduct major research on issues that keep coming up in conversations. Youre bright and a committed Catholic. But youre also busy.

What you wish you had was an adviser, someone you could summon for a quick briefing, who could offer you (a) a bit of background, (b) a survey of the key issues, (c) some suggestions of how you might reframe the issue, and (d) some key points you could draw upon next time the question arises.

Well, here we are: not quite an adviser, but the next best thing a book full of precisely such advice. Practical advice.

What youll read in these pages is the result of a group of Catholics getting together to prepare themselves for precisely these high-pressure, get-to-the-heart-of-it-quick kind of contexts: not just around the water cooler, but in three-minute interviews on live television. Their experience, distilled here, will help you to reframe the hot-button issues which keep coming up in the news and provoke heated discussion.

We call these issues neuralgic because they touch on nerve endings, those places in the body which, when pressed, cause people to squeal. In our public conversation, they are the points which he on the borders where mainstream social thinking inhabits (at least apparently) a different universe from that of Catholics. Touch on them, and people get very annoyed. How on earth can you believe that? they ask you.

Now, this book doesnt tell you what to say in answer to any given question. Every conversation is different. And it cant help you to know whats coming up in the news on a given day; not even the people who make the news can predict that. But chances are youll be in a discussion sometime soon because of something involving the Church in the news, and most news stories involve one of those neuralgic issues. In fact, thats often what makes it a news story. Because of the perception in newsrooms that the Churchs position on the question of condoms and AIDS is totally outrageous, when Pope Benedict XVI made a few off-the-cuff remarks about the issue in September 2009, it was a huge lead story across the globe. It wasnt the remarks so much as the neuralgic issue that made it news.

So while we cant predict the news story, we can be pretty sure about the neuralgic issues. This book will help you to think through ten of the most common (and the toughest) for yourself; to understand where the criticism is coming from; and to consider how to communicate the Churchs position in ways that do not accept the presuppositions of the criticism. At the end of each of the nine briefing chapters, there are some key messages which summarize these positions and will, we hope, help you next time youre challenged.

But theres a bit more to it than that. Wed better explain the method and approach used here, where it comes from, and what were hoping to achieve.

This book is the fruit of a project called Catholic Voices, which was created for Pope Benedict XVIs visit to the United Kingdom in September 2010, and which has inspired similar groups in Spain, Ireland, Mexico, and other countries. A team of amateur speakers was formed, consisting of ordinary Catholics in other words, Catholics who had jobs and children and mortgages who were happy to put across Church positions and teaching on radio and television in the run-up to and during the papal visit. We are advertised to the media as media-friendly, studio-ready and ego-free, by which we meant: happy to be questioned, and sympathetic to the medias objectives and reason for existing; familiar with the demands of three-minute live interviews, and the constraints and possibilities of radio and TV; and uncomplaining if the news has moved on and you no longer need us. We were described as authoritative but not official: we set out to be well briefed and articulate, knowledgeable, and able to communicate the settled teachings of the Church. But while we had the blessing of the bishops, we did not speak for them. If you wanted to know how the bishops responded to such and such a story in todays news, you would need to call their spokespeople. But if you wanted to know what the Church believed and taught, you could call us.