Benefit of the Doubt Presumes Doubt

A lot has been going on in the Church in the past few weeks. Most of it has happened too fast for me to event digest let alone have any sort of cogent commentary on - and that's okay, because I don't feel any need to keep up with it all. As God lives, I rejoice that I don't. I recently posted an article on the sister site on the history of Eucharistic Adoration from the apostolic age to the year 1254 and that was much more edifying.

The other day I waded onto social media to see what some of the chatter-boxes were saying about these developments. It was very disappointing. I have never seen so many otherwise faithful and intelligent people sticking their heads in the sand about the present pontificate. "Maybe he is being misreported" they say. Ugh...I've been hearing that line since the days of John Paul II and I am so sick of it. It's been repeated ad nauseam for three pontificates. If the popes are so constantly being misquoted, you would think that once—just one time in three pontificates—at least one of those popes who are always being "misquoted" would have stepped up and corrected the misquotation.

"Hrum hrum...I would check the Vatican website. If it's not in an official publication of the Vatican, I wouldn't believe it", says the guy who didn't believe John Paul II said "May St. John the Baptist protect Islam!"...until I showed it to him on the Vatican website.

"Well, we always have to give people the benefit of the doubt." You know, this is certainly true, and a very solid piece of Christian advice. We must always first seek to give someone the benefit of the doubt and interpret their words in the most charitable way possible. But the other day I heard an interesting corollary of this: instead of "always give people the benefit of the doubt," a priest said, "I can always find a benefit of the doubt." The difference is subtle but important. "Always give people the benefit of the doubt" means that before assuming the worst, we assume the best. Only if the best proves incorrect do we then assume the worst.

But saying "always give the benefit of the doubt" also implies that sometimes the benefit of the doubt is the wrong assessment of what is happening. Any rational judgment of a situation requires that we reserve the right to simply see what is going on—to acknowledge that our first impression, while charitable, might be wrong. To say "I can always find a benefit of the doubt" seems to say "No matter what the truth of the situation is, I can always find some way to spin this to avoid confronting the truth." It is the difference between saying I will always offer a benefit of the doubt and "I know I can find a beneficial way to interpret this."

I admire people who seek for the truth and understand offering benefits to facts that may seem unflattering. I despise it when people have already determined they have found their narrative when it runs counter to everything else that we know. I will always extend our pontiff or any other clergyman the benefit of the doubt—but hell, sometime the facts are so manifest there is no more doubt. Sometimes, for example, we hear someone make a comment that could have racist overtones, depending on how it is interpreted. And if we are uncertain, we say, "Well, perhaps he just made a poor choice of words." But other times we hear racist diatribes whose choice of wording, delivery, and deliberate malice leave no question as to what is meant. In these cases,  there is really no "doubt" left to give the benefit of. In such a case, one must simply accept the truth, unpleasant though it is. The guy is racist. That's all there is to it.

However, suppose one of our brightsiders approaches the problem with characteristic head-in-the-sand logic when confronted with blatant racism. "Perhaps when he said the N-word he wasn't referring to black people", or, "Well, yeah, he says he hates them, and used the N-word, but if you ignore that one statement and look at all the other non-racist statements he made, you'll see he's not really racist at all", or "Maybe all those media outlets misquoted him when he said he hates them, even though neither he nor his office have offered any clarification suggesting otherwise," or "Well, reality is very complex and I am sure there was much, much more to the story than just saying he 'hates' blacks and used a racial slur, and since I don't know every single last fact I can't possibly make any judgement."

In other words, to give the "benefit of the doubt" in the face of plain evidence to the contrary becomes no longer a benefit accorded to a doubt, but rather wishful thinking of the most fantastical sort.

Please, I am not referring to any one issue or statement or action of the pope or anyone else. I just talking about...the same stupid ho-hum-fingers-in-the-ears-nothing-to-see-here-nobody-can-know-all-the-facts-nothing-new-who-made-you-judge? sort or nonsense.

Ugh. I am so sick of it.