Painful issues are new evangelisation’s beginning

10 Jun 2013

By Robert Hiini

CatholicVoices founders Jack Valero and Austen Ivereigh at The Great Conference on May 23 in Sydney. Photos: Coutesy of the Archdiocese of Sydney

Sexuality and life issues are where Church and society meet, and Catholics need to embrace associated media controversy – not run from it if the missionary impulse of the Second Vatican Council is to be fulfilled.

So said CatholicVoices founders Jack Valero and Austen Ivereigh when they presented their keynote address at The Great Grace: Receiving Vatican II today conference in Sydney on May 23.

A faith that was not interested in engaging with difficult issues and changing the world to be more like Christ, which the Council had called for, was “not a faith worth having”, Mr Ivereigh said.

Since successfully engaging the news media during Pope Benedict’s visit to the United Kingdom in 2010, both men have been much sought-after by bishops and associations around the world, asking for their particular brand of media training.

The most recent recipient of their “positive approach to the media”, as Mr Valero described it, was CatholicVoices Melbourne, with both men conducting training for lay men and women in that city, in the week preceding the conference.

“The media is a place where a function is carried out. They have a role to hold people to account,” Mr Valero told the conference.

“We want to know when [wrong-doing] has happened [in financial institutions and government]. We want them to ask questions on our behalf.

“Those questions that are asked of the Church are asked in the same spirit. When those people are asked of us we are happy because they are being asked on behalf of the people, of myself.”

There were hostile people in the media, Mr Valero said, but there were people hostile to the faith and the Church in all areas of life.

“I have yet to meet a journalist who is as hostile as my own sister,” Mr Valero said, to some amusement in the audience.

Both men said they believed the training they provided to Catholics around the world was an answer to the ‘new apologetics’ called for by last year’s synod in Rome on the New Evangelisation called for by Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI.

The synod bishops called for a “new apologetics of Christian thought and a theology of credibility adequate for a new evangelisation”, in the synod’s final list of propositions.

“The new apologetics understands that, on the whole, the people aren’t listening to the Church because, on the whole, they think that what the Church is understood to be offering is nothing new or interesting,” Mr Ivereigh said.

“But the big exception is the neuralgic [painful or contested] issues. On the neuralgic issues people really are listening. They are interested because the Church’s apparent perversity in these areas makes it an endless source of fascination.

“The issues we focus on are precisely those where the Church presents a scandalous obstacle to the icons of [an] ethic of autonomy; namely sexuality, abortion, and euthanasia.

“It’s the ‘why’ people say to you at a dinner party; “how can you as a Catholic believe that?” They’re interested. The neuralgic issues are where the communication does happen or doesn’t happen.

“The new apologetics is about learning to be in that space and to be comfortable there … to step out of the frame,” Mr Ivereigh said.

Credibility, said Austen Ivereigh, was when people of the Church spoke to people’s concerns, took into account what they believed, and understood their anxieties and the strong usually Christian values implicit in their criticism.

CatholicVoices training helped Catholics understand the dominant “framing” of controversial issues, to affirm the implicit Christian value in the criticism, and to give a response which showed how the criticism had confused its meaning.

Mr Ivereigh cited the work of philosopher Rene Girard in saying the “sympathy for the victim” narrative, so popular in news media, was a good example of a cultural development resulting from Judeo-Christian Revelation.

“Yet, the contemporary frame sees the Church and organised religion generally, and its institutions generally, as creating victims rather than standing with them.”

“The values of liberty and equality arose because of a shared belief about the good [but the Church is] now seen as antithetical to liberty and equality; that the task of liberty and equality is somehow to emancipate people from the ‘burden’ of faith,” Mr Ivereigh said.

“They are positive values but because they are tied to an ethic of autonomy which is hostile to faith and civil society in general, I would argue, [their advocacy] has become a deeply authoritarian and intimidatory movement.”

If Catholics reinforced negative frames about Christianity, and Catholicism more specifically, in the answers they gave news media, people would switch off.

“People are not persuaded, in fact, by argument unless those arguments speak in some way to their core moral intuition.

“The core moral intuition of contemporary individualistic society which has not grown-up with faith and community is the autonomy ethic, so no-one has the right to impose their view on others.

“If you don’t take that moral intuition into account, then you’re not going to be heard, and if you begin your sentence with “the Church believes this” or “the Church says this” then you are simply reinforce the frames and you don’t get very far.”

Catholics could achieve much with “a little courage”, “apostolic zeal” and “boldness”, in addition to knowing their own faith and the communication frames of media.

“It’s the willingness, the boldness to stand up and speak in situations, often when you know you’re not necessarily going to get a friendly reception … It’s the people in the office and the pub who turn to you and say “how can you be a Catholic?” and then go on to give you a very hard time about women, gay people, [the crisis], or whatever’s in the headlines.

“But they are not turning away from you; they’re turning to you and they’re asking you to explain. They’re inviting you to communicate. To speak across the growing chasm between contemporary culture, at least university educated, elite contemporary culture, and the Church,” Mr Ivereigh said.

Communication was not just about speaking to the secular world ‘out there’ but to all people who live in the world, including Catholics.

Recent research in the United Kingdom on practising Catholics’ approach to controversial teachings showed worrying, if not unexpected, results.

“Most people did not disagree with Church teaching [but] what they won’t be able to tell you is why the law should reflect this.

“So, in other words, their faith sits alongside beliefs which have been internalised from our culture which are that those views are private, relevant to them only, and that any attempt to persuade our culture otherwise is an unwarranted imposition.

“The bad news is that so long as Catholics believe that, then the missionary aim of the Council will be frustrated.

“The aim is to shape our culture to create a new civilisation of love, so it would be impossible to challenge the commodification of human beings; the culture of death; the dethroning of cultural marriage; or the appalling treatment of migrants, or any of the other ills that face our society.

“And, of course, that undermines faith itself, because a faith which cannot challenge these ills is not a faith worth having,” Mr Ivereigh said.

The Second Vatican Council was a “great breakthrough” in giving laity a clearer understanding of their own specific vocation “to be there in the secular world and to bring it to Christ”, Mr Valero said.

“Apostolicam Actuositatem [Decree on the Apostolate of the Laity] containded a very striking sentence, that the mission of the laity came to them through baptism, directly from Christ, not mediated through the hierarchy, but through baptism.”

Although the initial media framing might be intent on asking Catholics to defend themselves, Catholics could break free through reframing, and re-orientating the question to say something positive instead.

“We don’t need to defend anything if our message is really excellent, as we believe as Catholics,” Mr Valero said.

“We just need to explain it in a very compelling way; so compelling that people say at the end, “I want that”.

“That’s what we need to do. That’s communication.

“The Catholic Church appears [in the media] a lot because what the Catholic Church does is important,” Mr Valero said.

“So, rather than thinking they are attacking us, rather think “isn’t it wonderful that we are always there. Our message counts. They want to know what we think.”

“That’s why we give thanks to God.”

All keynote presentaions at The Great Grace conference, including the full and unedited presentation of CatholicVoices’ Jack Valero and Austen Ivereigh, can be viewed on the conference website – www.thegreatgrace.org.au. Audio of conference workshops can be also be downloaded.