The Winning Ticket

I love the news. I anxiously await the times each week when new episodes of my favorite news and political podcasts are posted, and I’m motivated to get out of bed by the promise of precisely three things: prayer, news, and coffee. 

However, I don’t need to tell you that, in both tone and content, the news in our political moment is not exactly a barrel of laughs. Every word from the White House is presented in a new wave of hysteria, while political parties struggle with deep internal divisions that are beginning to look like identity crises. 

It can be quite tempting to identify ourselves with our political affiliations and beliefs.  Partisanship is obviously harmful, but in the wake of each new conflict, it can feel like a safe harbor. “Oh good,” we think to ourselves, seeking relief from the turmoil in news outlets whose views align with our own. “At least these people get it.  I think I’ll stay right here and enjoy the sweet smell of sanity.” 

We’re seeing the same partisanship seep into our religious opinions and conversations. It’s all too tempting, amid clerical conflict and liturgical debates, to choose sides whose tenets become our own almost without our noticing. 

There is, of course, nothing wrong with personal preferences; and it’s certainly true that there are times when choosing a side is a moral matter. (In Dante’s “Inferno,” the author places those who never chose sides or made up their minds outside of both Heaven and Hell – because they were on the fence their whole lives, so they are in death.) Yet, are there not other times when we choose sides to avoid the long and demanding work of challenging our viewpoints, listening to other opinions, building bridges? 

I once heard a priest describe sin as a sickness of the soul that oozes from an internal division. When we say one thing and mean another, know one thing is right but choose another, we allow for divisions inside us, and we know that satan loves divisions. Divisions create cracks through which he can climb into our hearts.

Let’s extend the picture beyond the individual.  Just as evil feeds on divisions within individual souls, so it feeds on divisions among people and groups. 

Now, I’m not some starry-eyed idealist who thinks that the world would be the land of hand-holding and rainbows if we would all just cooperate. Rather, I have faith that the Church is truly a home for all (our name does mean universal, after all). I pray that the Church’s children – including myself – have the humility to recognize that they are not creators but sharers of the truth, and that truth is big enough to encompass all of us.    

In an article published last year on the website Aleteia, Tom Hoopes wrote, “Today we too often look at the Church as a struggle between left and right, and we invest a lot of energy into trying to determine which side is winning. If we judge the Church . . . in political terms, we not only risk doing harm to the unity of the Church; we risk missing the point of the Church altogether.”

A priest once asked me, “If Catholicism is not big enough to transcend political beliefs, then what are we doing here?” It’s a great question. How often do I appreciate the truth behind it? We’ve all heard that cheesy quotation to the extent of, “There’s so much more that unites us than divides us.” If this is true of all people – as it surely is – how much more does it apply among members of the Church? 

Let us pray for the prudence to understand what is at stake in each conflict – truth and goodness, or our personal preferences. Let us fight for and defend the truth when it is under attack while allowing for the diversity of opinions that are encompassed by the truth. Let us not fetishize our tastes, but be grateful for disagreement that creates the opportunity for unifying conversations.

Most of all, let us pray that Christ will lead us every day to be possessed by truth – the truth that is bigger than all of us, inviting us all into deeper community with the Trinity and with one another.