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Educators Need to Be Reminded: The Truth Will Set You Free<\/strong><\/p>\n source: http:\/\/aleteia.org\/2016\/06\/15\/educators-need-to-be-reminded-the-truth-will-set-you-free\/<\/a><\/p>\n Our very salvation is threatened when even Catholic institutions are afraid to speak of “the truth” for fear of implying that others are “wrong.”<\/p>\n \u201cFather, \u2018truth\u2019 is divisive!\u201d<\/p>\n They spoke to me slowly, gently, yet firmly\u2014as if I were a child being warned about the dangers of a hot stove.<\/p>\n I was a young priest then, on a committee to rewrite a school\u2019s mission statement. I was admonished after pointing out that the proposed mission statement included the word \u201cdiversity\u201d three times, but not the word \u201ctruth.\u201d (Back then, \u201cDiversity is our strength!\u201d was not yet a slogan. Instead we had: \u201cUNITY + DIVERSITY = UNIVERSITY!\u201d)<\/p>\n The members of the committee stared at me blankly when I asked, \u201cIs your library still under warranty? Can you return it?\u201d I then pointed out the window towards the school\u2019s shiny new library, which had these words inscribed (in stone<\/em>!) in the archway over the door: \u201cTHE TRUTH WILL SET YOU FREE. John 8:32<\/a>\u201d I\u2019ve repeatedly found since then that committees have little sense of irony, and even less of a sense of humor.<\/p>\n These folks were not full-blown relativists<\/a>. Their position was actually a strategy that could be summarized this way: 1) \u201c Everybody\u201d agrees that diversity is an unqualified good; 2) If the advocates of the truth are right, then advocates of the not-truth (what used to be called \u201cfalsehood\u201d or \u201cerror\u201d) would be wrong\u2014and then feelings might be hurt; 3) We can all rally around diversity without hurt feelings and without having to define \u201cdiversity\u201d (I did ask for a definition but never got one); 4) Therefore let\u2019s all agree not to mention \u201ctruth\u201d anymore because it is \u201cdivisive\u201d (that is, some people who were not right would be wrong\u2014and who wants to be wrong?).<\/p>\n Etienne Gilson<\/a> warned against such a strategy decades ago in his essay, The Intelligence in the Service of Christ the King<\/a>:<\/p>\n \u201c\u2026we are continually tempted to diminish or adapt our truth, in order to lessen the distance which separates our thinking from those of the world, or indeed, and sometimes in all sincerity, in the hope of rendering Christianity more acceptable to the world\u2026 To imitate the Church ought to be our rule, if we wish to put our intelligence in the service of Christ the King. For, to serve Him, is to unite our efforts to His\u2026 to\u2026 permit Him to work in us and through us for the salvation of the intelligence blinded by sin.\u201d<\/p>\n In other words, we do not serve Christ, and we do not serve our neighbor, if we abandon the service of the truth. And remember, Truth\u2014yes, Truth with a capital \u2018T\u2019\u2014is not an abstraction but a person. Truth is Christ Himself<\/em>: \u201cI am the way, the truth and the life.\u201d (John 14:6<\/a>) To be coy or indifferent about proclaiming the liberating and healing power of Truth is to blaspheme against Christ and to deprive our neighbor of what he needs most.<\/p>\n Decades before Gilson, Sertillanges<\/a> wrote in The Intellectual Life<\/a>: \u201c\u2026your neighbor is the person who needs the truth, as the neighbor of the good Samaritan was the wounded man by the wayside. Before giving out the truth, acquire it for yourself\u2026\u201d Father Sertillanges makes clear that the lack of zeal for truth that marks and mars our present culture is rooted in a lack of love: \u201cOne throws oneself wholeheartedly only into causes that one would die for. Are you ready to die for the truth? Everything that a real lover of truth writes, everything that he thinks, should be like the letters that St. Peter Martyr traced with the blood of his wound as he was dying: Credo<\/em> (I believe).\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n