Long ago I lost track of how many parish seminars I have given. My friends assure me my forgetfulness arises from an overabundance of talks. Detractors say it arises from a weak mind. Perhaps both are right.
One thing I never forget is that the traditional opening for a talk, even though I don’t use it, is “Ladies and gentlemen.” What would be the reaction if a speaker opened with the converse, “Gentlemen and ladies”? Where would the listeners’ attention be focused? On the substance of the opening remarks? Hardly. I suspect half the people would spend the first five minutes wondering what possessed the speaker to transpose the terms of the greeting.
The result of this legerdemain would be to place the audience’s attention where it shouldn’t be. That’s precisely what a magician wants to do with his patter, but it’s not what a speaker wants to do with his opening words. He wants the audience to follow the whole course of his reasoning closely. By disturbing a traditional formula he undercuts his plans by emphasizing the wrong thing.
“Ladies and gentlemen” is a throwaway line. No one really pays attention to it; people notice only its absence or the absence of a substitute greeting. “Gentlemen and ladies” captures–and holds–attention. The speaker starts off on the wrong foot. He wants attention drawn to the substance of his talk, not to the formal appendages, but he has diminished his chances for success with the first words he utters.
Consider this sentence from your childhood: “Jack and Jill went up the hill.” As in any sentence, the key words are nouns and verbs. Conjunctions, adverbs, and articles can’t carry the sense, but they’re needed for clarity. If you drop them out, you have “Jack Jill went hill.” You still get the gist. If you speak the full sentence and a temperamental microphone allows only the nouns and verbs to pass, you’ll be understood, though imperfectly. You won’t be understood at all if only the auxiliary words are passed along: “and up the.”
Mass Confusion
I’ve heard this false emphasis at Mass. One priest, a professor at a nominally Catholic university, does not say “Peace be with you all” in the normal way. He puts a deliberate and long pause before the last word: “Peace be with you [one, two, three] all.” His timing is so odd that everyone’s attention focuses on the pause. He loses the rhythm of the sentence, and some people, thrown for a loop, forget to say, “And also with you.”
When you hear him speak, you must run your memory in reverse for a moment so you can listen again to what he said. You must piece the words back together in their normal cadence. “Ah, yes. I recognize that sentence! Now what’s my response?”
This exercise shouldn’t be necessary, but at this priest’s Mass it is. You must hit the rewind button repeatedly. Perhaps he read somewhere that the Mass is a drama, and he knows that in dramatic productions we find pregnant pauses, even unexpected full stops. But the liturgy is not Hamlet, and the priest should not imagine himself to be Laurence Olivier.
Now an example closer to “Gentlemen and ladies.” Another priest I’ve heard emphasizes the wrong phrases by trying to sound compassionate. Instead of saying “brothers and sisters” during the Mass, he says “sisters and brothers.” I suspect he does so because he doesn’t want to be badgered by a few people who might complain that he is insufficiently “sensitive.” But what he is perpetuating by his modest revisionism is misattention.
For all I know it is permissible under the rubrics for a priest to use either “brothers and sisters” or “sisters and brothers.” I’m not writing about proper rubrics. I’m writing about the psychological impact of everyday words. By transforming what should be a throwaway expression into the center of attention, this priest focuses attention in the wrong place. He might counter, “I want to show I don’t discriminate against women.” Not very persuasive. Has anyone ever claimed we discriminate against men when we begin with “Ladies and gentlemen”? I doubt it–and if someone were to take exception to “Ladies and gentlemen” on that ground, wouldn’t we be right to conclude his eccentricities should his problem and not ours?
Who takes exception to “brothers and sisters”? Mainly people looking for a fight. I have yet to come across anyone, male or female, who objects to the traditional formula, thinking it indicates a preference for one gender over the other. Such people may exist. They may even abound. But I can’t take them seriously.
What Would Jefferson Think?
Analogously, I have yet to meet anyone who thinks that Thomas Jefferson was referring only to males when he wrote, in the Declaration of Independence, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” Yes, if you wish to quote the Declaration you are free to emend it to suit your ideological proclivities. You may cite the line as “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all people are created equal,” and no one will stop you–and you will be able to stop no one from laughing behind your back.
The altered sentence means what Jefferson wrote, but it isn’t what he wrote. Do we really fool anyone when we alter his words? No, all we do is throw a false emphasis into the sentence. The change of a single word changes the focus so much that no longer do we think of the meaning of the Declaration but of the political correctness of the emender.
In all these cases–the speaker on the dais, the priest at the altar, the quoter mangling the Declaration–we see a problem which occurs not just in “regular” activities, but in apologetics too. We try to speak about the faith, in defense of the faith, but find ourselves throwing the emphasis on the wrong word, on the wrong idea, on the wrong line of reasoning. This is fatal to apologetics.
Before we open our mouths we should open our minds and decide what we wish to accomplish. We need to train ourselves to perceive what is worthwhile and what is worthless.
“Comparative Atrocity Statistics”
Recently a reader faxed me a column which appeared in a Virginia newspaper. The columnist decried all brands of Christianity, but singled out Catholicism by saying that during the Inquisition “millions” of people were killed under that institution. I composed a letter to the editor, explaining that reputable historians, both Catholic and Protestant, estimate that about three thousand died at the hands of the Inquisition. This meant the columnist exaggerated the extent of the executions a thousandfold.
Was it proper for me to explain how wrong she was arithmetically? Yes, and perhaps some good came from it, and perhaps that was all I could hope to accomplish. But my short reply had no room for the larger point. The columnist, if honest, might have answered, “Yes, I erred, and I accept your figure of three thousand deaths–but that’s still a large number and still proves my point.” Whatpoint? That Christianity has been not a boon, but a boondoggle.
If I had the woman opposite me in a debate, and if we had time, I would give the true number of executions, but I wouldn’t want the audience to focus on what Ronald Knox termed “comparative atrocity statistics.” To focus on the number of deaths is to focus on the wrong thing. The columnist was writing only indirectly about a figure. She was writing mainly against religion. The implied conclusion in her column was that these deaths, whether “millions” or only three thousand, establish that Christianity is still the opiate of the people.
When the Inquisition is used by a Fundamentalist in argument (the columnist was not a Fundamentalist, but a secularist), the emphasis is somewhat different: The numbers, whatever they are, demonstrate that the Catholic Church is not the true Church. That’s where our focus should be–not on the numbers themselves, not on finding a larger pile of corpses on the Protestant side. Yes, more people were executed in Reformation England for witchcraft than were executed by the Inquisition for heresy, but that’s not a reply to the anti-Catholic’s real point, which is that the Catholic Church and the Christian Church are distinct.
Taking a Wider Look
What all this means is that you can win a local argument and lose the wider engagement, and you can do that by drawing the attention of your opponent and of listeners to the wrong points. You always must step back from an argument raised against the Church and ask yourself, before replying, “What is this really supposed to prove?” If you can determine that, you can determine how properly to respond. If you can’t determine the true focus of the argument, you’ll find yourself mouthing the apologetical equivalent of “Gentlemen and ladies.”