This is a written adaptation of a part of a keynote I gave in the Catholic Creators Conference at Franciscan University in Steubenville the last weekend of May.

You know the scene without me naming a single real example: A Catholic with a large following says something. Another Catholic with a large following takes it apart in public. The replies arrive by the thousand, sorted into camps.

By nightfall two people who will kneel before the same Eucharist have spent the day proving that the other is barely Catholic at all. A stranger watching from the outside learns none of the fine points of the dispute. But he does learn a simpler thing.

He learns what we are like: See how they fight.

And we call this evangelizing.

We tell ourselves it falls to us to correct the wrong Catholic, loudly, in front of everyone, as though Twitter was a faith courtroom and we had been hired as prosecutors.

How can we claim to carry Christ’s mission online while witnessing this way?

The very people we say we want to reach are reading our timelines, and what they are reading is contempt.

There appears to be a very specific fear underneath it.

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We are terrified that someone will associate us with a Catholic who thinks very differently, who is wrong, in our judgment, about things that matter, and assume we agree with them.

So we prefer to distance ourselves. We attack first, in public, so no one can accuse us of standing too close. I am not associated with him!!!

That instinct is not Catholic. Not even slightly.

Jesus spent his public life beside the people the respectable refused to be seen with. He ate with tax collectors (Mark 2:15-16). He let a woman the whole town knew as a sinner wash his feet with her hair (Luke 7:37-38). He told the most religious people to their faces that the prostitutes were entering the kingdom ahead of them (Matthew 21:31).

One complaint followed him from town to town: this man welcomes sinners and eats with them (Luke 15:2). Agreeing was never the price of his company.

So we have forgotten something the Church has known from the start. We sit down with people we disagree with because we are Catholic, not because we have agreed on everything first.

And when a brother is wrong, there is an older move than the public takedown. St. Paul watched the Corinthians drag their quarrels in front of outsiders, and he told them that to be fighting that way at all, where unbelievers could watch, was already a defeat for them (1 Corinthians 6).

Lose the argument, he was saying, before you lose that.

The counsel survives the jump to a screen without a scratch. Please, please reach out in a private message! Pick up the phone. Have the disagreement over a Zoom or better, with a beer, where the other person gets to be a face instead of a target.

One could argue that the future of the Church in this country runs partly through whether we can do that, whether we can disagree and still belong to one another.

It was not always the sentence we are earning now.

Near the end of the second century, a sharp-tongued lawyer in North Africa named Tertullian wrote a defense of Christians to the Roman authorities, and he set down the words their pagan neighbors kept repeating, almost against their will: See how they love one another.

He had opened that same chapter by calling the Church a body knit together by a common faith and the bond of a common hope. The watching world could not account for these people, so it described them instead, and the word it reached for was love.

That sentence did not begin with Tertullian either.

He was quoting, without the citation, a line first spoken in a borrowed upper room, on the last night of a condemned man’s life: By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another (John 13:35).

Jesus gave his friends one mark to be known by: Love.

That was the test he set, the way the watching world would pick them out.

And even that was not the beginning.

The same night, a few hours before the soldiers came, he prayed. With anything in heaven and earth available to ask for at the end, he asked for one thing about the people he was leaving behind: That they may all be one, so that the world may believe that you have sent me (John 17:21).

He was saying that the world will believe in Christ when we are one. Wow. Our oneness was the last request of a man about to die, and he tied the world’s believing to it. Sounds crazy, right?

We stand and profess it every Sunday: Credo in unam, sanctam, catholicam et apostolicam Ecclesiam. And then it is so easy to go and contradict it online.

That is as far back as the sentence goes. A dying man’s prayer, which became a command at a table, which hardened into the astonished verdict of pagans, and which arrives, at last, in our hands, on our screens, ours to keep or to spend.

He is still praying it. The world is still reading us to see how the sentence ends.

See how they…