Joe Heschmeyer discusses the art of engaging with individuals who may hold differing views on the Catholic Church. He emphasizes the importance of understanding their motivations and addressing their concerns with empathy and respect. Drawing on biblical examples, Joe outlines strategies for navigating difficult conversations and discerning when to continue dialogue and when to gracefully disengage.
Transcript:
Hey, Joe, good afternoon. Like the previous callers, big fan of your work, the YouTube channel, the stuff that Catholic Answers puts out on social media.
And my question, sort of actually related to the previous question before the break is, as you have these engagements with folks that are not Catholic and are interested in the faith, or perhaps not, but they demonstrate an unwillingness to avail themselves fully of the historical record and maybe deny some of the very good points that you make in your books and in your presentations about how the early church was the Catholic church, at what point or what is your criteria for is it worth continuing that dialogue?
Yeah, that’s a really good question. So I’m a big believer of answering the person and not the argument as much as possible. And I know I’ve given this example on the show before, but I’m going to give it again. In John 11, at the death of Lazarus, when Jesus gets there, he waits a couple days.
And Martha sees him and says, “Lord, if you’d been here, my brother would not have died.” And she’s trying to grapple with some theological questions. And so Jesus talks to her about the resurrection and kind of leads her into faith in a deeper way in him.
Then when he gets to Mary, Mary’s weeping, and she says verbatim the same thing. “Lord, if you’d been here, my brother would not have died.” But she’s crying. And so Jesus doesn’t go on with theological excursions about the resurrection.
He cries with her and then goes with her to the tomb of her brother, and then eventually raises the brother from the dead. But he enters emotionally into a situation that isn’t primarily a theological problem. And so one of the trickiest things to do, both as an apologist and just interpersonally, is know when is this a problem that needs solving? When is this a theological nut that needs to be cracked at all? When is something else kind of going on? And so you can have people who raise any number of issues against the Catholic Church, that’s not really the issue they care about. So sometimes in one-on-one conversation, I know that’s not explicitly what you’re asking about, but in one-on-one conversation, Jay Butitshevsky has a good test that I will sometimes use, where I’ll ask something like, “Okay, well, if this thing you’re raising, it turned out that the Catholic Church was right and you were wrong,
would that make you more open to becoming Catholic?” And if they say no,
then it’s like, “Okay, well, let’s not waste our time with that. What are the actual barriers keeping you back? What are the actual issues? Not just the ones that sound good. What are the issues that are stopping you from being a Catholic right now?” Because that’s the stuff that matters. Let’s not waste our time.
And so that can be a good way of just streamlining the conversation away from the salacious and scandalous to the actual things that are holding people back, which sometimes it’s the salacious and scandalous stuff, but that’s rarely it, in my experience. It’s usually other things.
And so there are times where someone is just acting in bad faith. They’re just being a troll. And there’s nothing you can do there. In Mark 11, the scribes and Pharisees come up to Jesus and they ask, “By what authority are you doing these things and who gave you the authority to do them?” And they’re just trying to trap Jesus, but I get them to explicitly declare that He is the Messiah and explicitly declare Himself to have this divine authority so then they can arrest Him for blasphemy. They’re not asking a good faith question. They’re not trying to understand. They’re just trying to get Him to say something indicting or something that they can indict Him for.
And so Jesus doesn’t answer their question. He responds by asking them a question. He says, “I’ll ask you a question, answer me, and I will tell you about what authority I do these things. Was the baptism of John from heaven or from men? Answer me.” And they wouldn’t because they knew the political calculation. If they said that John’s baptism was from heaven, people would turn on them for saying, “Well, why didn’t you follow John?” But if they explicitly denied John’s baptism and said, “It’s manmade,” then they would say, “Well, you know, we like John.” So they’re going to risk alienating people politically either way. And fascinatingly, in this discussion, they don’t even speak a word of, “Well, what’s the actual right answer?” They don’t seem even at all interested in the truth. It’s just this kind of political question. And so when they reveal themselves, and Jesus gives them a chance to reveal themselves as being of good or bad faith, once they reveal themselves of bad faith, He’s done talking with them. And so I try to follow that same advice. There are times where someone reveals themselves to be of bad faith.
Now, I think when you’re talking to Protestants, you have to recognize that they often are not very deep in history, often have gotten a distorted version of history if they’ve gotten it at all, or they’ve gotten it mediated through Protestant sources, or it’s possible they just aren’t reading the things in the same way you’ve read them.
And so we want to make a lot of space for that without assuming bad faith. I try to keep that a very high bar. I’d rather at the end of my life know, or have it revealed to me by God, that I wasted my own time dealing with somebody who turned out to not have an open heart, than discover that I turned somebody away who was genuinely seeking the truth and genuinely trying to find out more about Christ and His Church.