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Children, Love One Another: On Charitable Speech and Slander (Part 1)
Associate Pastor's Column
St. John ceaselessly told his faithful, “children, love one another.” This is the same St. John who wrote the Gospel and three which bears his name, and the book of Revelation; yet, like always, you can easily find that theologian blinded by pride who claims he did not author these books. It was St. Jerome who tells us, in his commentary on Galatians (vi, 10), that St. John ceaselessly repeated, towards the end of his life, “Little children, love one another.” This is the theme and title with which I crown this next series of bulletin articles, all about being charitable with one another in our speech; that means good and kind and loving in our speech about others, for God’s sake and not just for human prudence. I will comment many sentences from St. Francis de Sales (Introduction to the Devout Life, III, 29), which I quote once and for all for the upcoming articles. Here he has a chapter entitled, “slander.” The eighth commandment expresses the natural and divine law about speaking the truth. Human experience tells us that more often than not, the temptation to sin against this commandment comes when we’re upset with our neighbor for whatever reason, and we wish to speak ill of him. The Catechism obliges us to respect the reputation of other people, whether we think they may be good or evil persons. We therefore are forbidden to judge others rashly and to speak ill of others without objectively valid reasons (CCC 2475-2487). Sometimes we are tempted to speak of the real moral faults of another person; this is called detraction. Other times we are tempted to lie or misrepresent the truth regarding the moral faults of others; this is called slander or calumny. In this series, when I discuss slander, I use it in a more global sense, encompassing slander properly speaking, but detraction and calumny, too. It is grave matter against the eighth commandment to speak ill of another, meaning matter of mortal sin if it is done with knowledge and consent. So talking in your sleep doesn’t count. It is so common, so prevalent, so all-pervasive, so typical, so standard in families, workplaces, groups, schools, etc., that it may surprise us that such sins are mortal, but indeed they are, and they need to be confessed. St. Francis writes, “Slander is a form of murder. We have three kinds of life: spiritual, which consists in God’s grace, corporeal, which depends on the body and soul, and social, which consists in our good name. Sin deprives us of the first kind of life, death takes away the second, and slander the third.” He later quotes St. Bernard as having said, “The one who slanders and the one who listens to a slanderer have the devil in their company – one man has Satan on the tongue and the other in his ear..” (On the Canticle of Canticles, 24, 3). Of all the things that most ruin parish life is slander. It makes people bitter and suspicious of one another, it outrages the victims, it fills the perpetrator with mortal sin, it causes scandal, it makes the speaker a hypocrite for he too is a sinner, and it plants seeds of “turf” and “politics” which only serve as a means for devils to employ one of their favorite tools: division and isolation, like wolves when they raid a flock of sheep. In our happy cluster, we love one another, and let’s be those in the Archdiocese who are most renown for loving one another. Let us begin with our speech, admittedly the hardest place to start since it is the easiest place where to sin. Trusting in God’s grace, God who is our Father and has mercy on us his sinful children, let us imitate God, little children, and love one another.
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