Good Manners and Bad Habits

After the “drawing-room Christians,” now come the “gossiping Christians” — the new appeal of Pope Francis directed at those who have lost the sense of their belonging to the Church, to the people of God.

Thus this morning, Saturday 18 May, during the early celebration in the chapel of the Domus Sanctae Marthae, Pope Bergoglio highlighted the “bad habits” that are added to the “good manners” to which so many Christians bear witness.

And among the bad habits, precisely that of flaying one another with words, through disinformation and slander. “Gossip,” he concluded, “is destructive in the Church.” Jesus spoke a great deal with Peter and with all the others, just as the apostles spoke among themselves and with others, but it was “a dialogue of love.”

Jesus — the Pope recalled as he began his homily — had asked Peter several times “whether he loved him, whether he loved him more than the others. Peter had said yes, and the Lord gave him this mission: feed my sheep.” This was precisely “a dialogue of love,” but at a certain point, the Holy Father explained, Peter was tempted to meddle in the life of another, Judas, and having learned that he would betray Jesus, he asked the Lord why he still allowed Judas to follow him. “Jesus reproached him once again: ‘What is that to you?’ (cf. Jn 21:20–25). Do not meddle in the life of another. What is it to you if this is what I want?”

Peter, the Pope explained, is a man, and so he too is subject to the temptation to interfere in the lives of others, that is, “as people commonly say, to poke his nose in everywhere.” This happens to us too in our Christian life: “how many times — Pope Francis wondered — are we tempted to do this? The dialogue, this dialogue with Jesus, is diverted onto another path. And meddling in the lives of others takes many forms.” He highlighted two of them: always comparing oneself to others, and gossip.

Comparison, he explained, means always asking oneself: “why this for me and not for that person? God is not just!” To clarify the idea, he cited as an example the little Thérèse who, “when she was a child, was curious to understand why Jesus did not seem to be just: to one he gave much, and to another very little. She was a child, and she put the question to her older sister, and the latter — wise sister that she was! — took a thimble and a glass. She filled them both with water and then asked: tell me, Thérèse, which of the two is fuller? But they are both full! And Jesus is like that with us: it does not interest him whether you are great or small. What interests him is whether you are full of Jesus’ love and Jesus’ grace! That is how Jesus acts with us.” When one makes comparisons, “one ends up in bitterness and envy. Which is what the devil wants. One begins by praising Jesus, and then, on this path of comparison, one ends up in bitterness and envy.”

The second form the Holy Father referred to is gossip. It begins with much politeness: “But I don’t want to speak ill of anyone, yet it seems to me that...” and then it ends in “flaying one’s neighbor. That is exactly how it is!” “How much gossip there is in the Church! How much we Christians gossip,” and gossip “is precisely a flaying, hurting one another,” as if one wanted to bring the other down in order to raise oneself up. “This is not done! Gossip seems nice, I don’t know why, but it seems nice. Like honey sweets, isn’t it? You take one and say: this is good, then you take another, then another, and in the end you get a stomachache.” Gossip is like that: “it is sweet at the beginning, and then it destroys you, it destroys your soul! Gossip is destructive in the Church. It is a bit the spirit of Cain: to kill one’s brother, with the tongue.” And it is done “with good manners. But on this path we become Christians with good manners and bad habits! Well-mannered but wicked Christians.”

The Pope then set out three negative behaviors: disinformation, that is, “only the half that suits us and not the other half”; then comes defamation: “when a person really has a fault, has done something very foolish,” one must tell it, “play the journalist, no? And that person’s reputation is ruined”! The third is slander: “Saying things that are not true. That is truly to kill one’s brother!”

Source: News.va