The following column is the opinion and analysis of the writer:
It is abundantly clear that Americans are living in a country divided.
The recent election results, illustrated in many election maps used by the news media, mark our country in absolutes: blue and red with little or no nuance. President-elect Joseph Biden has many daunting tasks ahead of him, including reuniting a country torn by opinion and politics. Every one of us has responsibility to move beyond the polarization and fissures in our country now at the point of rupture, as if an earthquake has split our nation in half.
In his recent encyclical, Fratelli Tutti, Pope Francis offers some helpful guidance on how to move opposing forces to a new synthesis, a new level of understanding. In his document, Francis is calling the world to a new way of living. He cites the example of St. Francis of Assisi, who crossed over Crusader army lines at the siege of Damietta to meet Sultan Malik-el-Kamil in Egypt. His journey showed that overcoming barriers between peoples, cultures and religion was possible. That visit marked an effort to embrace everyone along the way, even people who thought, acted or felt differently than St. Francis did.
Pope Francis worries that leaders and the people of many areas of the world have lost the ability to sit down and listen to one another. Today we in the United States have become a deaf world uninterested or unable to hear what is in the heart of our own people, and in the hearts of other countries’ people. Clearly, there is a need for us to engage in dialogue in “relaxed conversation or in passionate debate.”
Much that is happening in the media and social networks involves parallel monologues that reinforce individual or group positions. Too often we all are dismissing those with another view as “deplorables” or “extremists,” and instead fail to see that the other views may have legitimate convictions and concerns that need to be heard and understood.
With Fratelli Tutti, published last month, the pope is calling us to a culture of dialogue and encounter to help us rise above our differences and divisions. He presents a principle that unity is greater than conflict — he addressed this in his presentation to the United States Congress during his Sept. 24, 2015, visit to the U.S. Francis knew of our political divisions at that time. In his encyclical, he writes of looking for unity, “This means not an absorption of one into the other but rather a resolution which takes place on a higher plane and preserves what is valid and useful on both sides.”
It is possible to build communion amid disagreement, but only “when great persons are willing to go beyond the surface of the conflict and see others in their deepest dignity.” (Evangelii Guadium, 227-228).
Today we are faced with real and deep political conflict, but through dialogue and encounter with one another we can arrive not at a compromise or syncretic solution, but an understanding that happens on a higher plane and that respects what is valid and useful on both sides.
In the months ahead we Americans need to listen and discuss with all that voted in the election to bring about conversion of hearts and reconciliation.
