Religion & Law

In 1949, Wittgenstein wrote the following:" The older I grow the more I realize how terribly difficult it is for people to understand each other, and I think that what misleads one is the fact that they all look so much like each other.  If some people looked like elephants and others like cats, or fish, one wouldn't expect tem to understand each other and things would look much more like what they really are."  When I read this the other day, it really got my attention.  I'll grant that understanding one another can be work, sometimes (but not necessarily always) very hard work.  I think here of Longergan and what he says about the task of fidelity to the transcendental precepts: Be attentive, be intelligent, be reasonable, be responsible!  But Longergan also holds that sometimes love floods our hearts, and when it does the usual order by which we come to understand is reversed.  Setting Lonergan aside for now, though, the question I'm pondering is what our Catholic faith teaches about our capacity to understand one another.  Is the task of interpersonal understanding (necessarily?) as fraught with difficulty as communication between, say, cats and fishes?  Obviously, the answer to this question has serious ramifications for the possible success of communicative theories of law (and the competing non-communicative theories of law).