25 January 2008 - 1 February 2008 Volume: 18 Issue: 2 Cricket ...

Volume 18 Issue: 2
25 January 2008 - 1 February 2008
straightforward, that of a man talking to his equals. He also remarks on the tendency
of media to create reality, in this case to see a conflict between Pope and Jesuits. He
remarks that it is as easy instinctively to impose an image of conflict over these
relationships as it is to impose it over the daily ebb and flow of family life. In family
life we should expect differences, but it is misleading and unilluminating to describe
them simply as conflict. It makes a pathology out of the stuff of everyday life.
Fr Nicolás also is able to enter the Pope’s world view, which looks surely from the
Catholic tradition at a world to which this tradition is strange. But he offers a different
perspective. His own life was shaped by his move from Spain to Japan. There he
found a world in which many of his own natural responses and instinctive values
were not shared. He found also that where his own understanding of life differed
from that which he encountered in Japan ways, this new world offered a richness that
could enrich his own tradition.
Like the Pope, he concludes with the claims of truth in the media. But he promises
his media audience a complex dialogue that goes beyond truth to engagement: ‘In the
dialogue which we will have I hope to follow the principles of Ghandi, who said that
when we speak, it first must be true, because if it is not true it is not interesting;
second, it must be charitable, and do good; and third, it must do good for others.’
Benedict XVI and Adolfo Nicolás take a different way to the truth — the Pope
directly from the tradition to a world of diversity, the Jesuit through a new world
laboriously entered back to the tradition. The differences do not add up to conflict but
to rich complementarity.
Click here for Fr Nicolás’ full speech.
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