(Death, Heaven, Purgatory, Hell)
Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults
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TELL THE WHOLE TRUTH?
Ronald Stanley, O.P.
One day a woman came to my South Bronx parish. She was terrified. Her husband had beaten her in the past, and was now threatening her again. She didn't want to involve the police. She had come to the rectory to escape him, seeking sanctuary.
After I had been listening to her for a while, the doorbell rang. The woman cringed in fear. She begged me: "If that's my husband, please don't tell him I'm here!"
It was her husband. I kept him at the front door. He told me he was looking for his wife. I said nothing. Eventually he asked me to let him know if she should come by. I told him "OK." He left.
I returned to his wife in the office. About a half hour later, her husband was again at our door. He asked me if his wife had come by. I told him "She hasn't come by since you were here."
Was I lying to the husband? No. But, because of the danger he posed to his wife, I had not told him the whole truth. I had not directly lied to him. I never told him I had not seen his wife, or that she was not in the rectory. I had let him deceive himself. The way I was speaking to him led him to presume she was not there.
There are times when people have no right to know the truth. In the example give above, the husband's pattern of abusing his wife nullified his right to be informed of her whereabouts. I was not permitted to directly lie. But the situation did permit me to let him reach the wrong conclusion, by denying him the whole truth.
A more subtle justification for not revealing the whole truth is when people are not capable of handling it. For many years I worked as a social worker at a foster care agency. How do you tell a foster child the truth about his or her biological mother, when the child is too young or too vulnerable to bear the whole truth? You need to be conscious of the child's limitations. For example, the child might ask why his or her mother is not taking care of him, or visiting her. If the mother, in truth, has show no interest in visiting or caring for the child, it is not helpful to try to protect the child's feelings by lying and telling the child that his mother is sick. But neither is it appropriate to tell a five year old that the mother has just been arrested again for prostitution.
You try, sensitively, to tell the child as much of the truth as the child can handle. "Your mother is OK, but she has some serious problems. Her problems have even gotten her into trouble with the police. We are trying to help your mother with her problems. We hope she will be able to solve her problems and visit you. In the meantime your foster mother is going to take good care of you." We are not lying to the child, nor creating false hopes. But neither are we overwhelming the child with the whole truth.
Sometimes adults too have a limited capacity to cope with the truth. We need to deal with people, not the way they should be, nor the way we wish they were, but with the way they actually are, with their limitations. That does not give us permission to blatantly lie to our family and friends, or to withhold the truth from those who have the right to know. The trustworthiness of our word must be sacred to us. Preserving our personal integrity and credibility is worth telling the truth, even when that truth exposes our mistakes.
But neither should we be naive or simplistic. There are those instances when people do not have the right to the whole truth, or are unable to handle it. We need to learn how to honestly recognize these special situations. Then, with practice, we can develop the skills needed to plot a middle course between lying and telling the whole truth.