Dear brothers and sisters:

Last year we reflected on the need to “go and see” in order to discover reality and be able to tell it based on the experience of events and encounters with people. Continuing along this line, I now wish to focus attention on another verb, “listen,” which is decisive in the grammar of communication and a condition for authentic dialogue.

Indeed, we are losing the ability to listen to the person in front of us, whether in the normal fabric of everyday relationships or in debates on the most important issues of civil life. At the same time, listening is experiencing a new and important development in the communicative and informational field, through various offerings of podcast and chat audio, which confirms that listening remains essential for human communication.

To an illustrious doctor, accustomed to healing the wounds of the soul, they asked what the greatest need of human beings was. He replied: “The unlimited desire to be listened to.” It is a desire that often remains hidden, but that challenges all those called to be educators or trainers, or who play a role as communicators: parents and teachers, pastors and pastoral agents, information workers and those who provide social or political services.

Listening with the ears of the heart

In biblical pages, we learn that listening does not only have the meaning of acoustic perception, but is essentially linked to the dialogical relationship between God and humanity. “Shema’ Israel – Hear, Israel” (Deut 6:4), the incipit of the first commandment of the Torah, is continually presented in the Bible, to the point that St. Paul affirms that “faith comes from hearing” (Rom 10:17). Indeed, the initiative is from God who speaks to us, and we respond by listening to Him; but this listening, at its core, also comes from His grace, as happens with the newborn who responds to the gaze and voice of mother and father. Of the five senses, it seems that the privileged one by God is precisely the ear, perhaps because it is less invasive, more discreet than sight, and therefore leaves human beings freer.

Listening corresponds to God’s humble style. It is that action which allows God to reveal Himself as the One who, speaking, creates man in His image, and, listening, recognizes him as His interlocutor. God loves man: that is why He addresses His Word to him, that is why He “inclines His ear” to listen.

Man, on the other hand, tends to flee from relationship, to turn his back and “close his ears” so as not to have to listen. Refusing to listen often ends up becoming aggression towards the other, as happened to the hearers of Deacon Stephen, who, covering their ears, all rushed against him (cf. Acts 7:57).

Thus, on one side is God, who always reveals Himself by communicating freely; and on the other, man, who is asked to listen. The Lord explicitly calls man to a covenant of love, so that he can become fully what he is: the image and likeness of God in his capacity to listen, to welcome, to give space to the other. Listening, at its core, is a dimension of love.

That is why Jesus asks His disciples to verify the quality of their listening: “Pay attention to the way you listen” (Luke 8:18); He exhorts them in this way after telling them the parable of the sower, implying that it is not enough to listen, but to do so well. Only those who receive the Word with a “good and ready” heart and keep it faithfully (Luke 8:15) bear fruits of life and salvation. Only by paying attention to who we listen to, what we listen to, and how we listen can we grow in the art of communication, whose center is not a theory or technique, but the “capacity of the heart that makes proximity possible” (Exhort. ap. Evangelii gaudium, 171).

We all have ears, but many times even those with perfect hearing cannot listen to others. There is truly a worse inner deafness than physical deafness. Listening, in fact, does not only concern the sense of hearing, but the whole person. The true seat of listening is the heart. King Solomon, despite being very young, demonstrated wisdom because he asked the Lord to grant him “a heart capable of listening” (1 Kings 3:9). And St. Augustine invited us to listen with the heart (corde audire), to receive words not externally in the ears, but spiritually in the heart: “Do not have your heart in your ears, but your ears in your heart” [1]. And St. Francis of Assisi exhorted his brothers to “incline the ear of the heart” [2].

The first listening that must be rediscovered when seeking true communication is the listening to oneself, to one’s deepest needs, those inscribed in the innermost being of every person. And we can only listen to what makes us unique in creation: the desire to relate to others and to the Other. We are not made to live as atoms, but together.

Listening as a condition for good communication

There is a use of the ear that is not true listening, but the opposite: listening in secret. In fact, a temptation always present and which today, in the age of social networks, seems to have intensified, is to listen secretly and spy, instrumentalizing others for our own interest. Conversely, what makes communication good and fully human is precisely listening to the person in front of us, face to face, listening to the other whom we approach with loyal, trusting, and honest openness.

Unfortunately, the lack of listening, which we often experience in daily life, is also evident in public life, where, instead of hearing the other, what we like is to listen to ourselves. This is a sign that, more than truth and goodness, we seek consensus; more than listening, we pay attention to the audience. Good communication, on the other hand, does not aim to impress the audience with a clever comment aimed at ridiculing the interlocutor, but pays attention to the reasons of the other and tries to make the complexity of reality understood. It is sad when, even in the Church, ideological factions form, listening disappears, and sterile oppositions take its place.

In reality, in many of our dialogues, we do not communicate at all. We are simply waiting for the other to finish speaking to impose our point of view. In these situations, as philosopher Abraham Kaplan [3] points out, dialogue is a “duologue,” a monologue with two voices. In true communication, however, both the you and the I are “on the way out,” leaning toward each other.

Listening is, therefore, the first and indispensable ingredient of dialogue and good communication. One does not communicate if one has not listened first, and good journalism is not possible without the capacity to listen. To offer solid, balanced, and complete information, it is necessary to have listened for a long time. To tell an event or describe a reality in a report, it is essential to have known how to listen, also willing to change one’s mind, to modify initial hypotheses.

Indeed, only by leaving the monologue can one reach that harmony of voices that guarantees true communication. Listening to diverse sources, “not settling for the first thing we find”—as expert professionals teach—ensures reliability and seriousness in the information we transmit. Listening to more voices, listening to each other, also in the Church, among brothers and sisters, allows us to exercise the art of discernment, which always appears as the capacity to orient oneself amid a symphony of voices.

But why undertake the effort that listening requires? A great diplomat of the Holy See, Cardinal Agostino Casaroli, spoke of the “martyrdom of patience,” necessary to listen and be heard in negotiations with the most difficult interlocutors, in order to achieve the greatest good possible under conditions of limited freedom. But even in less difficult situations, listening always requires the virtue of patience, along with the capacity to be surprised by the truth—even if it is only a fragment of the truth—of the person we are listening to. Only wonder allows knowledge. I refer to the infinite curiosity of a child who looks at the world around him with wide-open eyes. Listening with this attitude—childlike wonder with adult awareness—is enriching, because there will always be something, even if minimal, that I can learn from the other and apply to my life.

The capacity to listen to society is extremely precious in this wounded time caused by the long pandemic. Much accumulated distrust towards “official information” has caused an “infodemic,” within which it is increasingly difficult to make the world of information credible and transparent. It is necessary to attune the ear and listen deeply, especially to social unrest increased by the reduction or cessation of many economic activities.

The reality of forced migrations is also a complex problem, and no one has a ready recipe to solve it. I repeat that, to overcome prejudices about migrants and soften the hardness of our hearts, it would be necessary to try to listen to their stories, to give a name and a story to each of them. Many good journalists already do this. And many others would do so if they could. Let’s encourage them! Let’s listen to these stories! Then, each one will be free to support the migration policies they consider most appropriate for their country. But, in any case, before our eyes, we will no longer see numbers or dangerous invaders, but faces and stories of concrete people, gazes, hopes, sufferings of men and women who must be listened to.

Listening to oneself in the Church

There is also a great need in the Church to listen and to listen to each other. It is the most precious and generative gift we can offer one another. We Christians forget that the service of listening has been entrusted to us by the One who is the perfect listener, to whose work we are called to participate. “We must listen with the ears of God to be able to speak with the word of God” [4]. The Protestant theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer reminds us that the first service to others in communion consists in listening to them. Whoever does not know how to listen to the brother will soon be unable to listen to God [5].

In pastoral action, the most important work is “the apostolate of the ear.” Listening before speaking, as the apostle James exhorts: “Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak” (James 1:19). Giving freely a little of one’s own time to listen to people is the first gesture of charity.

Recently, a synodal process has begun. Let us pray that it will be a great occasion for reciprocal listening. Communion is not the result of strategies and programs, but is built on mutual listening among brothers and sisters. Like a choir, unity does not require uniformity, monotony, but plurality and variety of voices, polyphony. At the same time, each voice in the choir sings listening to the others and in relation to the harmony of the whole. This harmony has been conceived by the composer, but its realization depends on the symphony of all and each of the voices.

Aware of participating in a communion that precedes and includes us, we can rediscover a symphonic Church, in which each one can sing with his own voice, welcoming others’ as a gift, to manifest the harmony of the whole that the Holy Spirit composes.

Rome, San Giovanni in Laterano, January 24, 2022, Memorial of St. Francis de Sales.