Mercy!

It will be the word of the year from Pope Francis, starting next month, when he opens a year — a jubilee — of mercy. It’s also just about the unlikeliest of words to hear during a presidential-election season here in the United States. Perhaps that’s why we need it now more than ever.

A news story in the run-up to the most recent Republican debate walked through some of the suffering candidates have experienced in the course of their lives. Losing children, suffering with children. These are candidates for office, but they’re also human beings, was the enduring and perhaps unexpected theme of the story. During a season when we only think winners and losers, it’s a baby step toward the humanization of politics. It’s a reminder that no politics is worth anything if it does not seek first and foremost the flourishing of the human person in freedom.

This is a thought to keep in mind as we approach “the holidays.” A time of excessive materialism nowadays, but one that is meant to be a time of faith, family, gratitude, and purpose. Christmas is the celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ. A deep meditation on that is worth more than any campaign the human mind can imagine. And what can that mean as we share our thoughts on Donald Trump and assisted suicide (now legal in California and threatening to come to my own state, New York) and Planned Parenthood and anything else under the sun?

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In the new revised book How to Defend the Faith without Raising Your Voice from Our Sunday Visitor, I join Austen Ivereigh, co-founder of Catholic Voices in England, in discussing how to approach some of our most contentious issues by always leading with love and, yes, mercy. What does that mean? It means trying to enter such a conversation with the goal not of winning so much as of being a witness to what we know and believe to be true about human life, about faith, hope, and, yes, love. It means that when we enter into a conversation on a subject where these is tremendous misunderstanding, and even pain, we are ready to absorb some of the pain and heartache and tough experiences that may be behind an ardent, passionate defense of a position we reject with all our heart. Have a conversation with a person. If you’re in the context of a public speech or an interview — a situation where you have the opportunity to speak to more than one person — bear this in mind perhaps all the more. You have no idea where the people listening may be coming from. Be sensitive to this, and keep doors open.

#share#Maybe the most liberating of the principles of civil communications laid out in How to Defend the Faith without Raising Your Voice is the one that explains that you don’t have to win every argument. In the ninth of ten civil-communications principles, we realize: “It’s about witnessing, not winning. People who come to a new way of seeing the world find that a prejudice or preconception is challenged, or even reversed.” I think here of the courage of Kirsten Powers, the author of The Silencing. On Fox News she’s known as a Democrat, but that does an injustice to who she is and what she does. She’s a model of never being comfortable in an ideological colony, to borrow a Pope Francis phrase. She’s not afraid to change her mind when facing new information and truth. The light of faith illuminates everything, Pope Francis and Pope Emeritus Benedict wrote together (in a document the latter had drafted and the former signed off on and published). Kirsten Powers can tell you all about that, as an adult convert to Christianity, recently rejoicing at becoming Catholic (rejoicing even on cable news!). Faith sheds light anew all the time, if we’re willing to look and listen and share.

And so, for the sharing, How to Defend the Faith explains: “Every challenge to us is an opportunity to witness.”

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Beware the enemy when seeking to do so, though. That enemy is “a desire to ‘win’ and ‘defeat.’” “Rivalry and victory, winners and losers, them and us — this is the mindset of the world; Jesus shows another way. Watch him in the Gospel of John: endlessly harried and challenged, he never responds with aggression or the attitude of the persecuted victim, but stands firm, planted in love.” Especially if you are a professed religious believer, this is a matter of integrity. “Be what you represent.”

If you’re in politics for the right reasons — a call to public service and genuine concern for the common good — this is where you want to be. If you find yourself involved in a campaign, amidst the placards and polling, don’t lose sight of this. Debates and campaign rallies and conversations about them can easily devolve if we forget civility, if we forget that we are talking with and listening to and engaging with and working for fellow human beings. Every candidate currently running for president professes belief in the same God. Most profess to be Christian. Brothers and sisters, in the light of faith. Imagine if our politics were to manifest this.

Have mercy!

#related#Pope Francis says mercy is “the fundamental law that dwells in the heart of every person who looks sincerely into the eyes of his brothers and sisters on the path of life.” He calls it “the bridge that connects God and man, opening our hearts to a hope of being loved forever despite our sinfulness.”

Sin is often apparent in the course of politics. So how about telling the truth in love with the full knowledge of our own wounds and failings, and with mercy for those of others? How about seeking and serving the common good with compassion and doing the hard work of making a case compelling, not to win, but to make lives better? So that even if you don’t win, you’ve done something good. And remember that if your guy or gal wins, the witnessing has only just begun. We can only hope people might have some mercy as that new journey begins.

— Kathryn Jean Lopez is senior fellow at the National Review Institute, directing its new Center on Religion, Culture, and Civil Society, and editor-at-large of National Review Online. She is co-author of the new revised and updated edition of How to Defend the Faith without Raising Your Voice (available from Our Sunday Visitor and Amazon.com). Sign up for her weekly newsletter here. This column is based on one available exclusively through Andrews McMeel Universal’s Newspaper Enterprise Association.