Dr. Christopher Longhurst KSO
There is something wonderfully reassuring about the current language of church leaders. We live in an age where the words “dialogue,” “human dignity,” “listening,” and “walking together” have become almost sacred vocabulary. They appear frequently in papal speeches, bishops’ statements, pastoral plans, conferences, and carefully crafted public messages from church communications managers.
Dialogue is celebrated as the pathway to reconciliation. Human dignity is affirmed as a foundational value. Listening is presented as the mark of a compassionate institution.
How inspiring! The only slight difficulty arises when someone actually arrives wanting to have a dialogue.
Because dialogue is a little like hospitality. It is easy to praise when you are the host. The real test comes when the guest brings an uncomfortable story.
Survivors of faith-based institutional harm know this tension well. Many have spent years hearing about the importance of healing, safeguarding, and pastoral care. Yet when survivors seek conversations about decisions, processes, accountability, or the ways their complaints have been handled, the language of dialogue can suddenly become rather quieter, or in my case hostile.
Recently, I experienced this contradiction when I invited the New Zealand Society of Mary to dialogue regarding concerns I had raised about their handling of an historical clerical abuse complaint. My request was not an invitation to litigation, hostility, or public confrontation. It was an invitation to meet together, listen, and seek understanding. In other words: dialogue.
But the response from the Society’s Provincial Mervyn Duffy was a refusal. Instead, he instructed his lawyer, Gerard Dewar, to advise me that the Society of Mary would not dialogue, that they would not attend mediation, and that he was authorised to accept service of legal proceedings.
So perhaps the next time we hear the words ‘dialogue’ and ‘human dignity’ from Marist leadership — or from any Church body that speaks readily about accountability in public but resists it in private — we might ask a simple question. What exactly do religious leaders mean when they speak about dialogue?
Is dialogue a genuine commitment to encounter — including with those who challenge institutional decisions — or is it simply a pleasant word used for conversations where everyone already agrees?
True dialogue is not a performance of agreement. It is not a public relations exercise. It is not an opportunity to demonstrate compassion only when the conversation is comfortable.
True dialogue requires openness and vulnerability. It requires the willingness to hear perspectives that may unsettle us. It requires the humility to ask whether our own actions, systems, and structures have caused harm or failed to respond adequately.
In practice, that might have looked like nothing more dramatic than a meeting — the provincial and I, perhaps with a mediator present, in a room, talking. Instead, I received a letter from a lawyer.
The irony is difficult to miss. Bishops, congregational leaders, even the Pope, often encourage society to embrace dialogue across religious, cultural, and political differences. They rightly celebrate dialogue as essential for peace and understanding.
But what happens when the person requesting dialogue is not a stranger from another tradition, but someone asking questions from within the institution’s own history?
Perhaps the greatest test of a religious leader’s commitment to human dignity is not how they speak about dignity in public statements. It is how they treat those who challenge them privately.
Anyone can celebrate dialogue when it produces harmony. The harder and more authentic form of dialogue, however, begins when there is disagreement.
So perhaps the next time we hear the words “dialogue” and “human dignity,” from the mouths of New Zealand’s church leaders, we might ask a simple question: Dialogue with whom? Because dialogue that excludes critics is not dialogue. It is a carefully managed conversation with oneself.
And human dignity that disappears the moment someone asks uncomfortable questions is not dignity fully lived. It is dignity with conditions attached.
