What is and isn’t holy tolerance

In short, we should be engaged in a continuous dialogue with our companions, our friends, with everybody we meet. This is holy tolerance. We could certainly just call it tolerance, but I think that tolerance by itself does not go far enough, because it is not simply a matter of tolerating as a lesser or inevitable evil the fact that people think differently from us or are mistaken.

Debatable matters

We have to be ready to give way and yield in everything personal, in debatable matters, in whatever could be a cause of disagreement, so long as it is not something essential. We must reduce friction wherever possible in order to create a basis of understanding which can provide light to those who are mistaken.

Not watering down dogma

There are many people who are all in favour of tolerance, who are prepared to yield in matters of Christian morality, or who don’t have any problem with perverting dogma. But they will not tolerate anyone touching their money, their comfort, their whims, their reputation, or their opinions. They may have no problem with people encroaching on the rights of the Church, but they attack like vipers if anyone tries to intervene in matters which they regard as their personal rights, although very often they are not rights at all but rather baseless whims or just muddled ideas.

Fanaticism

There are others who do the opposite. Their life is a perpetual crusade, a constant defence of the faith, but sometimes they are blinded, and forgetting that their good desires should be governed by charity and prudence, they become fanatics. In spite of their good intentions, the great service they seek to render to the truth becomes distorted and they end up doing more harm than good, defending perhaps their own opinion, their self-esteem, or their narrow-mindedness.

Like the knight of La Mancha, they see giants where there are only windmills. They become quarrelsome, irritable, full of bitter zeal, rough-mannered. They can never find anything good but see everything as bleak; they fear people’s legitimate freedom, and are unable to smile.

On a certain occasion a journalist told me about his attempts to find the tomb of Cesare Borgia, the famous condottiero, hated by some and esteemed by others. He went to Viana in Navarre, because he heard that Borgia had been buried in front of the door of the church. He explained what he was looking for, and someone said: “Don’t bother looking for him. I dug him up myself and scattered his ashes to the winds.”

Lazy, self-centred scepticism

Finally, there are some people who neither attack the faith nor defend it. They have slipped into a comfortable, self-centred scepticism which, under the guise of respect for other people’s opinions, takes refuge in indecision and irresponsibility. Their attitude is well reflected in the verses which somebody wrote in jest (if he wrote them in earnest, we would have to conclude that he understood the Gospel as poorly as he did literary style): “In this hostile world, / There is nobody you can trust. / It’s every man for himself, / Me for me, you for you, / And let him save himself who can.”