The Catholic Church is no stranger to controversy and scandal, whether it be the Crusades or the Inquisition or the role of Catholics in the colonization of the New World, or more recent scandals like the sexual abuse scandal. And non-Catholics might hear about all of these things and wonder, “how can you remain Catholic despite these things?” Here are some straightforward tips about what to say in response to that question… and what NOT to say.

Transcript:

Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer. I want to discuss the issue of responding to scandal today. I’m going to talk about this from a Catholic perspective, but if you’re not a Catholic Christian and you’re some other kind of Christian, I think 99.5% of this you’re going to relate to, even if the examples I use are specifically Catholic ones. But the basic problem is this. If you’ve been Catholic, if you’ve been Christian for more than a few minutes, you’ve probably had the experience of friends and family coming to you and demanding you explain some bad thing. One of your co-religionist did, some bad thing your church seems to have done, and wondering why are you still a member of that church? Why do you still practice that faith in light of XYZ kind of scandal? Sometimes it’s something historic, the Crusades, the Inquisition.

Other times it’s something much more recent. It could be the abuse scandal involving children. It could be whatever the latest comment is, Pope Francis said, or what the media says he said, or any number of things. The details don’t really matter for our purposes. The question is how should we respond? And I’m going to suggest there are three really common ways of responding that are not particularly effective and three better ways that happen to be rooted in the New Testament that are better ways of responding. The first ways not to respond to the scandal. Let’s begin with number one. Don’t respond with anger and defensiveness to the extent you can avoid it because look, this is the most important relationship of your life and understandably, if someone attacks that, you’re going to feel a strong desire to fight back and to attack back.

There’s something even healthy about that. But from the perspective of evangelization and apologetics, you need to curb that appetite. You need to curb that desire because the fight or flight thing that can kick in is not really helping you in this situation. There’s been a lot of interesting data on defensiveness. One of the common things is that defensiveness is often tied to when we feel a relationship is threatened in some way. And in this case, it’s pretty obvious what relationship that is. Someone’s insulting your mother, someone’s insulting the church, someone’s insulting Jesus. Defensiveness is likely going to kick in those situations because these are really important relationships. So, what’s the problem with defensiveness there? Well, one of the classic works on defensiveness is by Jack R. Gibbs from 1965 is just called Defensive Communications, and what Gibbs explains is that defense arousal, that is that fight or flight response kicking in prevents the listener from concentrating on the message.

When you’re calm, when you’re subdued, when you’re tuned in, you’re able to receive a lot of what the other person is communicating, both what their words are, but also their affect, their emotions, their underlying reasons. They might be presenting a certain piece of information to you or might be saying a certain thing. You’re receiving a lot more than just the text. When you are defensive, when that defensiveness kicks in, you’re trying to do that really nuanced, really complicated listening activity while also feeling fight-or-flight response kicking in, maybe also getting your anger up where it’s got this narrowing effect. Maybe also planning how you’re going to respond and maybe also lashing out because you’re thrown a little off kilter that’s not effective listening to say the least. Not only, Gibbs says, do you defensive communicate, so if I’m defensive and I’m speaking, not only do we send off multiple value, motive and affect cues, I seem defensive.

But also, defensive recipients distort what they receive. I’m sure you’ve been on the receiving end of this. Maybe you just caught somebody in a bad time, they’re already thrown off or they’re feeling defensive. Maybe someone just got done criticizing them and then you come in and you have an innocent comment, and they immediately misinterpret it. They assume the worst. Why? Because they’re in that defensive crouch. So, even though you had nothing but the purest motives, you find yourself feeling very attacked in return. So, effective communication is broken down in that situation. So, Gibbs says, “As a person becomes more and more defensive, he becomes less and less able to perceive accurately the motives, the values, and the emotions of the sender.” That’s a disaster for communication in any context. That is particularly a disaster for communication if you’re trying to explain who Jesus Christ is, why his church matters, trying to witness to that to somebody else.

That is already a hard job, and it becomes all the harder if you give in to defensiveness and find yourself trying to balance regulating your own emotions with listening to what the other person is saying and reading between the lines for the emotional subtext and everything, all of those things that go into good communication. So, watch out for defensiveness, again, some of it is natural, but push against it. Don’t give in to it to the extent that you can. Number two, data dumping. Now, I’m telling you at the outset the things that I’m telling you not to do are all things I’ve done. It may be that somebody is troubled by something that you know a lot about and maybe their emotionally upset about an event. Maybe it’s again, something like the Crusades. Maybe you’re an expert on the Crusades, something about the sexual abuse scandal and you’ve done a lot of research on it. The temptation is to just throw a tome of information at them.

This is not usually a good idea because people are not robots and that is not usually how we receive information best to begin with, but particularly if something is maybe emotionally throwing the other person off, if this is a scandal that maybe they’re a little thrown off about, then you responding in a way that seems completely detached by just dumping a lot of information is not only not persuasive, it can actually make you seem cold and indifferent. So, the first way not to go is getting really defensive and getting overly emotional in that kind of way. The second way to go is being really underemotional in a certain way, being coldly distant and detached and just being entirely like, well actually here’s 10 studies. There may be a time and place for that, don’t get me wrong, but it’s something that as a general rule of thumb, you’re going to want to watch out for because it’s as often as not going to send a different impression than what you’re trying to convey and may suggest that you’re not understanding the emotional impact or the real gravity of whatever the scandal actually is.

Third, missing the forest for the trees. The classic example of this, somebody posts a five paragraph argument on Facebook. It’s a really good argument, but they use the wrong form of two. They put T-O-O, and they meant T-O. So, you respond but just point out, hey, you made a grammatical mistake. Now you might come across feeling like you’ve scored a rhetorical point, but you’ve not done anything to answer their actual argument. No one comes away from that encounter saying, wow, I was initially persuaded by person A. Then person B pointed out that A had made a grammatical mistake, and so now I’m forced to reevaluate the argument. Usually, we’re not quite that obvious about it. Usually, when we’re missing the forest for the trees, maybe we’re finding a faulty argument. The other person used, oh, you made these 10 points, but that one point you made is actually false and I could prove it’s false. Don’t get me wrong, if someone makes 10 points and one of them is false, it might be really important and relevant to bring that up and show them that.

But if all you do is do that, you’re missing the forest for the trees. You don’t want to do that either. You might be saying, okay, well what is left then? I’m glad you asked. Here are three ways we should respond to scandal. I would say these are three Christian responses to Christian scandal. Number one, respond to the person, not the objection. Let me explain what I mean. I’m going to give an actual example from the Bible. It involves three friends of Jesus. So, Jesus, as you may remember, is friends with Mary and Martha. You remember the famous story of Mary sitting at Jesus’s feet while Martha tries to clean the house while he is there and their brother Lazarus. We’re not focusing on that first story. We’re focusing on the second story we know about their lives. Well, third story really, which is that at some point Lazarus dies.

John tells us about this in John 11. He reminds us of the second story that I just glossed over that it was Mary who anointed the Lord with ointment and wiped his feet with her hair whose brother Lazarus was ill. The sisters sent to him saying, “Lord, he whom you love is ill.” Okay, that’s a good frame. Jesus has healed a lot of sick people and now he has the chance to heal a sick person he loves. He knows personally that in his humanity they’ve spent untold hours probably together. Bethany seemed to have been something of a little bit of a getaway for Jesus when he wanted to just be away, to be alone, to relax. There he is, Mary, Martha and Lazarus.

How do you think Jesus is going to respond? He responds in a bizarre way on the surface. In verse four we’re told that when Jesus heard, he says, “This illness is not unto death. It is for the glory of God, so the Son of God may be glorified by means of it. Okay, so you’re going to really have two scandals here. One, why does Jesus let his friend Lazarus die? And two, why does he make what looks like a false prophecy that this isn’t going to end in death because once Lazarus dies it’s like, well, Jesus, you got that one wrong. But then there’s going to be a third part of this scandal as well, and I love the way John puts it. He says, “Now, Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus, so when he heard that he was ill, he stayed two days longer in the place where he was.” John loves paradoxical expressions, the lamb standing as though slain, that sort of thing.

He loves to throw you for a little bit of a loop as a reader. So, here he says, yeah, Jesus loved them so much that he didn’t come when they called, he waited two more days. You should be saying, what? How is that loving? Because you’re invited into that confusion. You’re invited into that place of being a little troubled by this. In Matthew 8, the centurion comes to Jesus, and he’s got a sick servant and Jesus offers to come to the house and heal him. And this centurion responds by saying, “Lord, not worthy to have you come under my roof, but only say the word, my servant shall be healed.” So, Jesus could have with a word healed Lazarus from afar. He didn’t have to be there, but he might’ve at least gotten up and hurried to go be with him, catch him right before he died. But he doesn’t. He waits two more days and it’s baffling on the surface why he does this.

We know the end of the story. We know Jesus is going to raise Lazarus from the dead, and so him waiting actually makes sense. You’ll notice in verse 17 that when Jesus does arrive, Lazarus has already been in the tomb for four days. So, even if Jesus had come immediately, it still would’ve been two days too late. Him being dead for four days is better for showing the glory of God because it reduces the likelihood that Lazarus had been accidentally buried while not really dead. You’re not going to last that long entombed wrapped up for four days. So, him waiting two days makes sense with either a God’s eye view or at least the benefit of hindsight we have as readers. But at the time, this looks like a threefold scandal. Jesus doesn’t come when he’s called and even waits two extra days and claims that this illness isn’t going to end in death, and it does. He doesn’t heal him remotely, he doesn’t do any of these things. This is going to be the scandal that needs addressing.

Now, I want to say a word at the outset as a Catholic apologist, people sometimes want from me, from us, some kind of easy Q&A manual. If they do this, I do that. Just show me the course, show me the ropes and the response I always try to give is it’s not that easy. It’s not just they’re going to pull out this verse, you’re going to pull out that one. Sure, that happens sometimes there’s a place for that. But effective communication, and that includes effective evangelization and effective apologetics is rarely, if ever, that simple. You have to read the person, not just the objections. Now we’re ready for what those objections are. The first one’s from Martha in John 11: 20, when Martha heard that Jesus was coming, she went and met him while Mary sat in the house. That’s an important detail. Martha said to Jesus, “Lord, if you’d been here, my brother would not have died.” Okay. That’s the objection we’re dealing with. Lord, if you’d been here, my brother would not have died.

But Jesus doesn’t answer it right away. He lets her give him more context. In the next verse she says, and even now I know that whatever you ask from God, God will give you. Why is that context important? Because it frames how Mary is working through this scandal, how Mary is working through this problem that in the midst of it, she’s gotten to a point where she can say, okay, Jesus didn’t come and that was a problem, but even now, he’s able to do something. Jesus confirms this in verse 23, he says, “Your brother will rise again.” Martha doesn’t seem to be quite ready to go to an immediate rising from the dead. So, she says, “I know that he’ll rise again in the resurrection on the last day.” And Jesus then takes that opportunity to say, “I am the resurrection in the life. He who believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live. And whoever lives and believes in me shall never die.”

Then he invites her to faith. He says, “Do you believe this?” She says, “Yes, Lord. I believe that you are the Christ, the son of God, he who is coming into the world.” There it is. That is, I think, how many of us like apologetics and evangelization to go. She has a theological problem. Lord, if you’d been here, my brother would not have died. And then he walks her gently through this back and forth that leads to a theology of the resurrection, an identity of who Jesus is, beautiful and profound. Compare that with what happens next. In verse 28, Martha goes back and calls her sister Mary saying quietly, “The teacher is here and is calling for you.” And when she heard it, she rose quickly and went to him.

Then in verse 32, we find that Mary, when she came where Jesus was and saw him fell at his feet saying to him, “Lord, if you’d been here, my brother would not have died.” Does that sound familiar? It’s literally verbatim the same objection. Lord, if you’d been here, my brother would not have died. Martha and Mary to the word say the exact same thing to Jesus, and he’s going to respond to them very differently. Why? Because he picks up more context. The next verse it says that when Jesus saw her weeping and the Jews who came with her also weeping, he was deeply moved in spirit and troubled.

That word for troubled is like the word for when you trouble the water, you make ripples on the water, and that word for deeply moved is a really tricky word to translate into English. I know people say that about Greek words a lot, but this one is a confusing one. It’s used in other contexts outside the Bible to mean the sound horses make when they do that [inaudible 00:17:35] sound. That’s just that deeply moved in spirit. It often means like an agitation or anger, it means something is coming up. Jesus is not just a placid lake in response to this. He’s not stoic. He’s not Data from Star Trek. We sometimes imagine that’s what we’re supposed to be like. If I’m not going to be defensive, I better be cold and cut off. Jesus is not. Instead, he says, “Where have you laid him?” Notice his first concern, Lazarus. They said to him, “Lord, come and see.” And then famously, sometimes depending on the language and translation, the shortest verse of the Bible. John 11:35, “Jesus wept.”

The exact same objection. Lord, if you’d been here, my brother would not have died. Jesus responds in a totally different way. She doesn’t need a theological lesson. She needs someone to cry with her. So, Jesus responds with compassion and then he responds by weeping with her because that’s what she needs. If someone comes to you and says, there’s this problem with the abuse of children, now it could be this is someone who wants to say, well, are the abuse rates really higher in the church than they are in public schools? And you can give them all the facts and figures then, or they could say, my kid just underwent the worst experience of their life at the hands of a man of God. If you jump in with some stats right there, you don’t understand what you’re doing.

Martha and Mary present the same objection, but Jesus doesn’t just answer the objection. He answers the women. Martha is asking a theology problem. Mary’s raising a problem of the heart. So, effective evangelization requires doing that, being able to go there with people, and that’s a lot harder than read these 10 books and you’ll have the ready responses to every possible question. Those ready responses can be really good for the kind of Martha questions, but don’t imagine that every conversation is going to be like that. That’s the first effective way Jesus shows us that. The second one, I call leaning into the scandal because I don’t really know a better term for it. Our temptation is to lean out from the scandal, to get defensive, to downplay, to deny, to dismiss, to gaslight even to say, oh no, you just misunderstood. It’s not really a scandal. It’s not really a problem. And that’s not really the biblical way that scandal is handled.

You saw in John 11 how John seems to heighten the sense of scandal. He heightens the fact that they’re legitimately confused and hurt and thrown off by Jesus’s apparently indifferent response to them. Jesus isn’t actually indifferent to them, and that’s true and that’s good to know, but it’s also good to know that they quite sanely felt like he was being indifferent. Jesus’s response seemed cold at first, and if we can’t acknowledge that, we can’t understand the text and we can’t do what Jesus does. Don’t avoid the scandal, lean into the scandal. This is a weird example to give or a weird place to go, but why don’t I actually talk about Patrick O’Hare of the White Motor Company because this is a passage from Dale Carnegie’s book, How to Win Friends and Influence People, that I found really insightful. He sets it up by saying that Patrick O’Hare was one of the star salesmen for the White Motor Company in New York.

Now, it’s important you know it’s called White Motor Company because otherwise when he mentions White trucks, you’re going to be like, why does he only sell white trucks? Well, it’s capital W White, it’s somebody’s last name. O’Hare says, “If I walk into a buyer’s office now and he, the buyer, says, ‘What, a White truck? They’re no good. I wouldn’t take it if you gave it to me. I’m going to buy the Who’s It truck.” Okay, let’s pause for a second. That’s the objection. A White truck is no good, wouldn’t take it if you gave it to me. I’m going to go to the Who’s It truck. It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to apply that to what, the Catholic Church? That’s no good. I’m going to go with Santeria or Methodism or something in between, whatever it is. How do we respond in that situation? Listen to how Patrick O’Hare responds.

He says, I say, “Who’s It is a good truck? If you buy the who it, you’ll never make a mistake. The Who’s Its are made by a fine company and sold by good people.” It sounds like they’re sold by Dr. Seuss because he chose Who’s it, but fair enough. That is a weird response. Imagine like jujitsu. I obviously don’t do jujitsu, but just imagine. The whole point of the martial art is that you use your opponent’s strength against them that rather than pushing against their pushing, you go in the same direction as them and suddenly they’re pushing doesn’t have any effect. That’s what it is when you lean into a scandal that this charge that they thought was going to be some major point against the church stops really being a major point against the church once you agree with it. Here’s how O’Hare explains it When he agrees, “Oh yeah, the Who’s It has got some great qualities.” He says, “He is speechless then. There is no room for argument.”

If he says, “The Who’s It is best. And I say, ‘Sure, it is.’ He has to stop. He can’t keep on all afternoon saying it’s the best when I’m agreeing with him. We then get off the subject of the Who’s It and I begin to talk about the good points of a White truck.” He says, “There was a time when a remark like his first one wouldn’t have made me see scarlet and red and orange, defensiveness. I would start arguing against the Who’s It, and the more I argued against it, the more my prospect argued in favor of it. And the more he argued, the more he sold himself on my competitor’s product.” That’s the idea. When you deny or downplay scandal, one of the things you’re doing is that you’re requiring another person to put more and more time and effort into proving to you there is a scandal which is going to have the effect of convincing them more and more that there is a scandal, more often than not. You’re making another person research arguments against the church.

You’re making them research reasons why there’s a scandal, and so you’re sending them two messages. Number one, there’s a scandal because you’re making them do all that research and number two, Catholics because you’re like the embodiment of the Catholic Church for them don’t care about the scandal. That is a disaster. That’s what not to do combined with what to do. When you downplay, when you minimize, when you do all that stuff, you often have the perverse effect of driving people away because people who are actually troubled by it aren’t going to treat your cavalier dismissal of scandal seriously. And you’re going to, if anything, make them double down on trying to prove the scandal exists and they’re going to become more and more convinced and more and more troubled by it, and you’ve done the equivalent of convincing them of the Who’s It truck. Only it’s something much worse like you should leave the church.

That’s not how Jesus approaches it. Jesus approaches it with the Christian version of Patrick O’Hara’s point. He’s not going to say, oh, the Who’s ... Read more on Catholic.com