Be Polite

Not that long ago, Pope Benedict XVI visited Westminster Abbey and the then-Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams. The two entered in procession, and as they did so, the Pope shook hands with the clerics there. One of the clerics was a woman, they have those in Anglicanism, and the Pope shook her hand.

I watched this video on line once (can’t find it right now) and there was some journalist narrating, and they said something like “Oh, wow, the Pope shaking hands with a woman priest, wow, isn’t that strange.” And my first thought was “Um, what did you expect he would do? Spit in her face? Give her a curse? Shriek like a little girl and run away?”

(When he started to speak in the abbey, a small part of me did wish he went “What a very nice place. Can we get it back, please?“)

This is actually part of a broader phenomenon. It is a fact, infallibly enunciated by the Pope, that Anglican orders are null and void. And yet, Catholics mostly don’t refer to Anglican “bishops” as “so-called bishop So-and-So” or something. Instead, we say “bishop So-and-So” even though he is as much bishop as I am Queen of England.

Why is that? Because it’s polite.

Being polite is actually a virtue. Common courtesy is the social expression of the recognition of the profound truth of the intrinsic dignity of the image of God in every single one of his children. Courtesy is pleasing to God. Yes, yes, there are times when common courtesy must be set aside for the sake of a greater good, but it stands to reason that these times are much fewer and far-between than we scheming swindlers are most likely to think. And being polite to someone does not actually, in itself, mean that you accept or endorse any of their claims, as any diplomat or negotiator or grown-up will tell you.

I bring all this up, in part, because it looks like the next front in this great “culture war” we always seem to find ourselves in, after homosexuality, is transgenderism. And within this front there is another mini-controversy about whether transgender people should be referred to by the pronouns and names they have chosen for themselves or the ones they were assigned at birth.

This is no place for a considered treatment of the question of transgenderism, but I think one of the few things we know about it is just how little we know about it. Scientifically, there is very little we know either about the causes or the consequences of transgenderism (and political correctness virtually ensures that we will be kept in the dark longer than we need to be). And theologically, it seems to me that this is a field where, though we can be sure of some guiding rules, too little sustained reflection has obtained.

Another thing that we can know with great certainty is that the vast majority of transgender people are sufferers. Nothing is impossible, but I don’t think most transgender people just wake up one day and decide to be a girl or a boy. I think that most of them experience what they call their transgender identity as a trial, and also have experienced suffering from others as a result of transgenderism.

All of which is a long-winded way of saying, should you refer to someone by their chosen name/pronoun? (Or, for that matter, do you refer to someone’s same-sex spouse as “husband” or “wife”?) Actually, we already have a very good rule of thumb about these sorts of things: when in doubt, be polite.

We Christians are called to the difficult vocation of not just speaking truth in love, but being love in truth, caritas in veritate. It seems to me that common courtesy is in no way a hindrance, but rather a precondition, of fulfilling this vocation.