Francis and the hope and humility of dialogue

Dialogue used to be much more widely practiced - we just didn’t call it that.

Following my last column regarding our pernicious partisan divide, I took up the topic at various venues, with Catholic and secular audiences. One word kept coming up over and over again in these discussions – dialogue.

Without dialogue, the only way to solve a disagreement is to completely separate from one another or go to war.

After the news of the passing of Pope Francis, my thoughts immediately turned to his ubiquitous emphasis on the need for dialogue – interreligious dialogue, dialogue between warring parties, dialogue in families, etc. – and what this often-misused word means.

In his encyclical Fratelli Tutti, Francis described dialogue as “approaching, speaking, listening, looking at, coming to know and understand one another…to find common ground.” True engagement. He pointedly explained that dialogue is not “the feverish exchange of opinions on social networks” because these are “merely parallel monologues” which “engage no one.”

A phony “kumbya” approach, in which participants feign agreement while burying differences, is also not dialogue. Surface-level talk produces no fruit; peace can only be temporary, as everyone embraces a different darkness, relativism. As Francis said, “the solution is not relativism” which “under the guise of tolerance…ultimately leaves the interpretation of moral values to those in power.”

While some readers understandably questioned the assertion in my last column that partisanship and the practice of politics has changed over the years, I’ll stick my neck out again by claiming that dialogue used to be much more widely practiced. We just didn’t call it that.