As the professor who wrote letter to the editor that left Joshua Dzielak, “saddened and disheartened,” I feel a need to respond to his concerns.
Let me start by thanking him for stating publicly what I could not say for a variety of reasons: “If she had received that love and respect previously, maybe she wouldn’t have been pushed to act as she did. If we’re wondering what our community could have done for her, maybe this is where we should have started.” I could not agree more with Dzielak. One of my goals in writing the letter was to have someone from within the student body call on the Cabrini family to search their own hearts for the love we should have shared with her.
If my freshmen are any indication, there is a real need for such a public statement: in each of my classes, students brought up her attempt and struggled in the absence of any meaningful facts to try and understand what could have driven her to jump, what elements within the Cabrini family may have encouraged that choice, what we as a family could have done to help prevent this, and what we should do in the future. Unfortunately, nobody officially wanted to talk about these problems, either in a Christian or merely moral way. So I thank Dzielak for being the one person willing to do that. While I disagree with most of what he said, the campus needed to be reminded that the fundamental need we all share as a family is for love and respect.
Having said that, the religious issues he raises leave me deeply concerned. The logic of his position hinges on the following: that Cabrini is a family (a belief I share), that as a family, we are charged with a specific mission based in Christian traditions (a belief I also share), that chief among these traditions is the command to love one another (a point with which I could not agree more), and that this Christian love means we should keep silent about the personal problems we see our family members experiencing to spare them embarrassment (an idea that I find antithetical to my understanding of Christ’s love). My question is this: why is silence tantamount to “love and respect” in his vision of a truly Christian response?
As a non-Catholic raised in the Christian tradition, I chose to become a member of the Cabrini family because it roots itself in Christian activism. The “education of the heart” encapsulates this idea quite nicely: to show Christ’s love, we must learn to take action. To take action, we must identify where action is needed. To identify where action is needed, we must talk about difficult issues. These issues cannot exclude the problems faced within the Cabrini family. If we willfully ignore them out of a misguided sense of propriety, I would suggest that we are letting the appearance of respect smother the very love Christ calls us to show one another. By writing my letter, I feel I was showing my love for her and for the entire Cabrini campus because we desperately need to talk about the difficult problems many members of our community endure daily because of their own personal failings or the pressure exerted by others.
Dzielak’s concept of how we show love towards troubled family members disturbs me deeply. It reminds me of families that willfully allow alcoholic uncles to continue their destructive behavior without so much as a comment in order to spare him (and them) embarrassment. We see this kind of “love” when a family pretends that the bruises on the face of a child or a spouse are from an accident rather than abuse because we don’t wish to embarrass the victim or the perpetrator. We even see this in the Church itself when, to spare both the institution and the individual clergymen embarrassment (and legal liability), it quietly denies that sexual molestation occurs, often citing the need to protect the privacy of the child as a reason to deny anything ever happened. These kinds of collective denial are not Christ’s love. I would go so far as to suggest that this kind of silence breeds only further pain.
As a child, I admired the way Jesus rejected the calls from his own followers to ignore the unpleasant problems within their society, such as leprosy, prostitution, poverty, and difficult political questions. My Jesus asked his followers to acknowledge and embrace these difficulties in order to help relieve suffering and to make the community stronger. That, to me, is the nature of Christ’s love. According to John, Christ said, “And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free” (John 8:32). We cannot find the truth in silence, and without acknowledging the truth, we cannot take the action that Christ’s love compels us to take.
I urge the Cabrini family to ask themselves why at a school that prides itself on its outreach towards others we are afraid to talk openly about painful issues at home. Silence does not equal love, nor does it lead to action. Why do we so desperately cling to this view?
-Dr. Harold William Halbert
English and communication
