Authentic Communion and the Way Out of Polarization

In response to polarization, many have noted the importance of civil discourse. While necessary, however, civility alone is not sufficient. The fuller remedy for polarization is the practice of communion. We need to learn and relearn that we are bound together in the life of the Church at a level deeper than our own agreement. This unity, which arises from our common baptism, makes it possible to sustain the experience of being cross-pressured without succumbing to polarization and making enemies of one another.

Ironically, both the tendency for hypervigilance against heterodoxy and the tendency to treat doctrine as easily revisable suffer from reducing communion to a kind of social contract. For the latter, doctrine has only as much binding force as we are willing to grant it and can be revised again if our willingness to consent to it changes. For the former, any specter of change in teaching is tantamount to a crisis, the social contract demands full and unquestioning assent, and those who do not offer it must be aggressively quarantined lest the contagion spread.

But ecclesial communion is neither malleable according to our opinions nor so fragile as to collapse when the tradition is examined critically and the possibility of doctrinal development is recognized as a part of God’s ongoing preservation and guidance of the Church in history. More importantly, communion is not a product of our consensus, but a cooperation in God’s grace as members of the body of Christ.

The reality of being in communion, in other words, does not cease when Catholics disagree with one another, nor do our obligations to one another as members of that communion. We are still members of the same body of Christ, called to the one table of the Mass—even when, as is often tragically the case, our approaches to the Mass itself are points of division
and rancor.

When the dynamics of polarization take over, we start to treat other Catholics as enemies or even as traitors who are dangerous to the life of the Church. Disagreement leads to suspicion that our interlocutor does not really believe in the same faith as we do. This is poisonous to charity, and because it destroys trust, it also works against any hope of helping brothers and sisters in Christ to grow in faith. Worse yet, these internal divisions in the Church are ripe for exploitation by other forms of polarization, especially by partisan political divisions.

What is necessary for us to begin to find our way out of polarization is a deliberate practice of cultivating and valuing communion, especially in the midst of disagreement. Rather than demonstrating how another Catholic has betrayed or undermined the faith, we ought first to look for evidence, even in what we disagree with, of the faith we hold in common, and celebrate that evidence when we find it.

This idea is not my invention. It is simply an application of the “Presupposition” from the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola to the situation of polarization. 

In order that a retreatant and retreat director may be “of greater help and benefit to each other,” Ignatius counseled:

“It should be presupposed that every good Christian ought to be more eager to put a good interpretation on a neighbor’s statement than to condemn it. Further, if one cannot interpret it favorably, one should ask how the other means it. If that meaning is wrong, one should correct the person with love; and if this is not enough, one should search out every appropriate means through which, by understanding the statement in a good way, it may be saved.”

It is striking how much effort and desire Ignatius calls for. We are to be “more eager” to find a good interpretation than a bad one and to ask how to interpret what we cannot readily accept. If that does not succeed, we should correct “with love” and “if this is not enough”—having already made the previous three attempts to reach agreement—we are to “search out every appropriate means” to save the statement we are tempted to condemn. Disagreement and condemnation among Christians are envisioned more as a failure of love than as a principled defense of the truth against a subversive enemy.

Ignatius’s advice might be rejected as idealistic, or perhaps criticized for having as much potential to be exhausting as does the very polarization that it might help us avoid. But this is precisely the effort that is necessary to sustain communion in a cross-pressured and polarized world. And it is also the kind of effort necessary for a new evangelization in the context of pluralism and secularity where all claims to ultimate meaning are contestable and even devout believers need help and community to keep opting in to the possibility of faith.

At its best, the way of seeing recommended by the “Presupposition” involves an enlargement of our own imagination of another’s motives. We are asked to see how they might be trying to say something we can agree with, even when we cannot agree with what they have actually said. To put it somewhat more theologically, we are asked to see—and to want to see—how something we are inclined to reject might proceed from a desire for the good, and a desire for God, in which we already share.

This is a deeply hopeful vision, and it is one all Catholics are called to put into practice.

The gift of communion—of being bound together in a common life by something deeper than our own agreement—is a gift not only for the Church but also for a divided and polarized world. Communion reveals that polarization is not an automatic consequence of difference and exposes it as a lie that deceives us into fearing each other instead of recognizing what we hold in common. Catholics ought to aspire to show our neighbors who are exhausted by polarization and division that there is a way out of this trap, and that it starts by choosing to love those we are tempted to view as enemies. 

Sam Sawyer, S.J., ’00, M.Div. ’14, is the editor-in-chief of America Media.

This article excerpt was originally published online March 16, 2023, became the cover story “The Call to Communion: How the Church Can Combat Polarization” of the April 2023 print issue, and is printed with permission. To read the full article and discover more resources from America Media, visit: americamagazine.org

Article Image: Artist John Nava was commissioned by the Archdiocese of Los Angeles to create a series of 25 fresco-like tapestries, The Communion of Saints, depicting 135 saints and blesseds from around the world, for the nave of its Cathedral of Our Lady of Angels. This image portrays three of the panels. Photo credit: Communion of Saints Tapestry. Used with Permission. © 2003 John Nava/Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels.