About those haters: Pray, don’t rebuke

We live in a world where people rage at others, and many rage at Christianity in general and the Catholic Church in particular. They rage at us when they take us to represent the Church. This will only get worse.

The anger and hatred so many journalists, activists, politicians, and pundits showed for Catholics and the Church after the Dobbs decision was leaked and then again when the Supreme Court released it gives a good example of how the world reacts when Catholic teaching conflicts with the world’s passions and institutions. People reacted with even more anger and hatred on social media.

Priests get it worse than the rest of us, of course. They get more abuse in person than we laymen do. Bullies target them because they know priests won’t fight back. As the sex abuse scandal went on, one friend in New York City told me he’d had to get used to comments like one he got from a cabbie: “So, off to diddle some little boys, are ya, Father?” He heard such insults from all sorts of people.

Saint Thomas More is supposed to have said: “We would all much better mend our ways if we were as ready to pray for one another as we are to offer one another reproach and rebuke.” If he didn’t say it, someone did, and that person was right.

The insight applies to the cabbie and people like him. They’d be better human beings if they cared about the people they abused. They’d learn kindness, generosity, patience. And it would be a win-win for them: They’d even be better critics. They’d hit more accurately because they’d see their target better.
 
It implies even more to us, who have been told to try to look at others the way the Lord who died for them looks at them. Especially when they attack us. Jesus tells us to turn the other cheek when someone hits us, and then He explains what that means: “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, pray for those who persecute and insult you.”

Why? So that “you may be true sons of your Father in heaven, who makes his sun rise on the evil and equally on the good, his rain fall on the just and equally on the unjust.” To do as Jesus tells us here is “to be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”

I think we can say that Jesus expects us to apply the Golden Rule to our speech: Speak to others the way we would want others to speak to us. That includes speaking to others who’ve just abused us. If we’d been rude or cruel or piggy, how would we like our victims to respond?
 
We need a verbal smack, but that rarely changes anyone. We’d want kindness and forgiveness.

But Jesus doesn’t just tell us to speak more kindly. He tells us to love the abuser with real actions. He tells us to do them some good we can do them, and the primary good we can do them is to pray for them. (And if you’re a priest with an abuser cabbie, tip them well.)

He tells us to do what Thomas More is said to have urged. Not to react or defend ourselves, not to reproach and rebuke, but to pray for them. An engaged Our Father and Hail Mary would do. It will do them some good, as God decides.
 
And I find it does me great good. I can’t feel either the hurt or the anger that I’d felt. Sometimes I even feel a liking for the person, and that can lead to a real conversation.

DAVID MILLS has edited Touchstone and First Things magazines and now writes columns for several Catholic publications.