A Different Kind of Listening

The Catholic Thing

The Dante's post-election crowing and whinging are both already wearying. The race is decided. What matters now is not endless analyses of how or why the winners won (that's best left to journalists, political consultants, and other practitioners of dark arts), but what they will do. I expect a lot. But before the recent campaign passes into the merciful mists of time, it has uncovered some more interesting and longer-lasting matters, Catholic matters, about our democratic peoples just now and several recent developments in the Church.
Something we heard a lot about during the long years of the Synod on Synodality was the need to "listen," especially to the poor. Indeed, Pope Francis says that when he was elected, his friend, Brazilian Cardinal Hummes embraced him and told him "Don't forget about the poor."
As if. . . .
But what secular politicians and, sorry to say, many Catholic prelates usually mean when they talk about "the poor" is not real people living in hard circumstances, but something already turned into an ideological concept.
What if, when they're asked and listened to via the crude tabulation of the ballot box, growing numbers of "the poor" prefer an opportunity society rather than the "social assistance state" that Pope St. John Paul II warned us about in Centesimus Annus? Do we - and the Church - listen? And perhaps rethink our idea of who the poor are and what they need, other than more government programs?
Or are poor people who think that way - like the black Americans Joe Biden instructed "ain't black" if they didn't vote for him - not really "poor"? Are they suffering from what the Marxists called "false consciousness"? Who decides whether to "listen" to them - or not?
Or why is it, if capitalism is as rapacious as many in the Church hierarchy seem to think, that the most capitalist society on earth - the United States of America - is the desired destination of hundreds of millions of "poor" people around the globe? Do they, too, just want to be rapacious and greedy, or are they mistakenly willing to subject themselves and their families to the running dogs of capitalism? In either case, does anyone listen to them?
All this is somehow connected in my mind with another phrase that we heard during the elections - and by a strange synchronicity - during the Synod, too: "We aren't going back." This slogan expresses belief in a single-lane superhighway to progress, by people who are sure what the future should be and what is deplorable "backwardism."
But as Chesterton says somewhere - and the dark wood at beginning of Dante's Commedia also confirms - if you've gone off the right road, going back is the most progressive thing you can do. You, of course, don't go back to following that road in the direction that got you into the ditch in the first place. You go back a sadder and a wiser person, with eyes open to where you really need to go.
It's curious that it's not only in America that the people have chosen a different path than what has been presented to us as the shining progressive pathway. In several European countries, peoples tired of being ignored - and denigrated - by their own elites have sought another way.
Italy, Hungary, and the Netherlands already have governments that reject the immigration schemes and woke policies of the European Union. In addition, Austria, Germany, and France have growing, strongly populist parties - "far-right" in the journalese, which means they are now far distant from the progressive rulers who have moved to the far-left.
The elite apologists have been trying to impose a kind of cordon sanitaire around the populist movements by claiming that they are "fascist." Yet they only grow the more they are denounced. There's plenty to criticize about any political or social movement, to be sure, but maybe they ought to be listened to, really listened to, first.
I'm sorry to have to say that almost no one in the Church pays any attention - "listens" - to these voices now emergin...