Let's Talk About Judgment

Well, I’m not following any particular plan with this Wednesday series on the ‘Gnarly Questions’, the genuinely difficult matters of Catholic theology or faith practice that puzzle or confound many. Like so much else of this blog, it’s mainly a matter of what I’m thinking about when I wake up in the morning, or something I read this week or whatever.

That being said, let’s talk this time about a word that is one of the most red flag words around, a word guaranteed to get people’s hackles up and knives out, one way or the other. Let’s talk about judgment.

‘Do not judge, so that you may not be judged.’ (Matt 7: 1, Lk 6:37). These are the Lord’s own words, and we ignore them at our peril. To be a Christian is to be non-judgmental—let’s get that straight. ‘For with the judgment you make, you will be judged’ (Matt 7:2) – the consequences are grave if we do not come to grips with this call and live it out faithfully.

What does it mean, anyhow? The problem is that many people today abuse that one saying of the Lord by taking it out of its proper context, which is the whole of Scripture. And from that, they interpret ‘do not judge’ as meaning that we cannot advance any sort of moral norm, make any kind of claim as to the good and evil of specific human acts. The whole thing collapses into a sort of fuzzy relativism in which nobody can ever say to anyone else ‘You ought not do that.’

Well, that is silly. The moral law has been given to us as a gift to make our lives beautiful, not as a curse to burden and afflict us. Certain actions are morally wrong simply because, and only because, they harm us, harm particularly the one who does them. A specific action is morally good because it helps the one doing it become more the person he or she is created to become.

It is incoherent to say that, say, ‘murdering another human being is wrong’, and then, beholding Stanley bathed in the blood of Jim, not be able to say ‘Stanley has done a wrong thing.’ That is not being non-judgmental; that is being an idiot. Nor is it being non-judgmental to refuse on principle to go to Stanley and say ‘Yo, Stan, you have done a wrong thing there, killing Jim!’ That is not being non-judgmental; that is being a coward.

So what is non-judgment? It is the blank refusal to say that another person is in a state of sin. People do wrong things all the time, objectively manifestly wrong things. But whether they have actually sinned or not depends on a host of factors that are utterly unknown to us.

For an action to be a mortal sin, it has to be grave matter (something serious, Ten Commandment stuff). The person also has to have full knowledge that what they are doing is wrong. They have to be doing it freely and without compulsion, with deliberate intent (cf Catechism 1857). These latter two conditions are known only to God, since they pertain to the interiority of the person.

It is not a judgmental thing to say to a person, “You know, I really don’t think you should be doing that. Did you know that was against the moral law? It is, you know!” That is a work of mercy, actually, provided it is done with prudence and charity. It is a judgmental thing to say to someone, “You are a sinner – you’re going to go to Hell if you don’t cut that out right now.”

Mind you, most of us, in our judgmentalism, don’t actually say those things out loud. The late Fred Phelps and his so-called ‘church’ (of ‘God Hates Fags’ notoriety) really are extreme outliers. But for many Christians it is more a matter of the up-turned nose, the pursed lips, the raised eyebrow, the dirty look, the cold demeanour, the sneer. And these things, because they cannot be directly countered or corrected, because they are matters of non-verbal and unspoken judgments, can be much more damaging in the end.

We have to pray for, and choose, really choose, to have a compassionate heart and a friendly disposition towards all men and women—the ones who always get it right and do everything they’re supposed to do (whoever those happy few may be), and the ones who struggle and fall down and are lost in any number of immoral paths and bad choices.

We don’t know how God sees them, although we do know He loves them enough to die for them. Perhaps we could love them enough to stifle our criticisms and carping and unkindness?

There is much more to say about this—so often we jump to conclusions about situations, make assumptions about what a person is doing and what is in their hearts, and our assumptions are quite often not charitable and are astonishingly often wildly inaccurate.

Judgment belongs to God. We are indeed to know what is right and what is wrong—why on earth would God want us to be ignorant of such vital matters? But to assess whether another person is in the grace of God or is cut off from Him—this is simply not our business and we indulge in such matters to our own immortal peril, as the Lord Himself took pains to tell us.

Do not judge, lest you be judged.

Let's Talk About Conscience

I would like to spend Wednesdays on the blog looking at some of the gnarlier questions of Catholic teaching and theology. I realize from both my priestly ministry of spiritual direction and my presence on Catholic social media that there is quite a bit of misunderstanding of Catholicism, even among Catholics. And of course some of the issues I hope to treat are hotly contested, widely rejected, and bitterly opposed. As those who know me and have read me for years know, that sort of thing only encourages me to keep writing about it. I don’t mind being disagreed with, but fiercely resist efforts to silence me.

Let’s start with something a bit less juicy, but fairly central in many of the hard questions of our day. Let’s talk about conscience. Now, in a single blog post I cannot do justice to the whole theology and philosophy of this matter, but let’s talk about why the Church insists on the primacy of conscience (cf Catechism of the Catholic Church 1782) and what that really means.

Conscience is the practical intellect, that part of our reasoning faculty by which, examining a decision that is to be made, we determine what is the good course of action, also known as the moral good. We determine the right thing to do, and we determine this right thing to do by the exercise of our conscience.

This is not moral relativism. Those Catholics and others who bridle at the mention of the word conscience are hearing it in a morally relativistic way, but that is simply not what the Church means by it. Using one’s intellect to determine what is the right and moral course of action is no different in essence from using one’s intellect to solve a math problem. You indeed have to do the solving (or, if you are using a calculator, you can have someone else do the solving for you), but nobody claims you can decide that 2 and 2 are five or that you can divide by zero and come up with a rational number.

And if you are doing math in the service of some practical project—building a house or paying your taxes—making mistakes in the numbers will have practical effects in the world. The house will fall down and kill you and your family; the taxes won’t get paid properly and there are legal consequences to that.

Conscience is much like that; we use our intellects to determine the right course of action. If we determine wrongly, and do something that is in fact morally wrong, we may be innocent in intent, but the wrong is still done. And actions are morally wrong, not by some arbitrary law given by a heedless Lawgiver, but because they are harmful to us. Some harms are immediate and obvious (reckless driving causes a crash) and some are long-term and gradual (smoking causes lung cancer), but the harm is done nonetheless.

It is absolutely vital that people exercise their consciences freely. Sometimes it comes up in pastoral ministry that a person wishes they didn’t have free will, that God would just tell them directly moment by moment what to do and even completely take over their volition. This is not the deal God has with us, though. The reason we must exercise our conscience is rooted in the very purpose and goal of God’s creative and salvific will for us. He made human beings so that there would be creatures of flesh, material creatures, who could freely choose to know Him and love Him, who could make a free choice to enter communion with Him and so give glory to God.

There is much more that can be said on that front (I hope to write a book about it some day). But that is the fundamental reason why conscience is primary and free will absolutely necessary. God does not violate us, does not force Himself on us, does not make us know Him and love Him (this is also why He hides Himself from us, painful as we find that hiding).

Conscience being free and primary does not do away with the moral law and with moral doctrine or teaching. That is really quite silly if you think of it. If I have a really hard math problem to solve, I am actually grateful to have a calculator, both to save time and to protect me from costly errors. And I trust the makers of the calculator to have created an instrument that provides reliable calculation.

Well, it is no different with conscience and morality. The ‘Maker’ of the moral law has provided us with a sure and trustworthy instrument to provide us with helpful guidance and answers, to save us from needlessly laborious moral reasoning and preserve us from deadly errors. And that instrument is the Catholic Church in its teaching office.

People often bridle at this. “So it comes down to just do whatever the Church tells you, then? Phooey!” Well, calm down there. For one thing, the Church is not telling me right now to write this blog post, nor is it telling you to read it. There are vast swaths of life we all live each day where we are making free choices that the Church offers us at best general principles to decide with (e.g., I should use my writing and intellectual gifts to help people, you should read helpful things).

The Church simply tells us that 2 + 2 = 4 and not 5. Sex is for marriage. Don’t steal - other people’s property is to be respected. Don’t tell lies. Don’t kill people. That kind of thing. Most of us can find quite a bit of freedom in our lives within the walls of the moral law; those walls enclose quite a vast estate of human action and choice.

Well, there is much more to be said about conscience – I wrote a whole series about it a while ago that you can access by clicking on the ‘talking about conscience’ label at the bottom of this post. But that’s more than enough for one day. My conscience is telling me to post this up and move on with the next duties of my state of life, and I guess I’d better obey it!

Mould and Vinegar, Bless The Lord

Thursday’s on this blog is Liturgy Day. I am going through the Mass, bit by bit, to see how each small part of the Mass shows forth the pattern of Christian discipleship in the world.

We are at the very end of the offertory rite, with the prayer over the offerings. This is one of the changeable texts of the Mass, varying according to the season or feast or saint of the day. The liturgy always does this, referring back to where we are in time while pulling us into the contemplation of eternity. I will talk more about this next week when we discuss the preface.

This Prayer Over the Offerings sums up everything we just did, and so it is a good place to review what I’ve been talking about the previous weeks. We bring bread and wine to the priest, and he brings it to the altar. He gives thanks to God for these natural gifts ‘fruit of the earth and work of human hands’, and in various ways prays for God to mercifully accept this offering and make it His own.

The concluding prayer encapsulates all these themes in various ways. The prayer for today, for example is this: “Accept, O Lord, the sacred offerings which at your bidding we dedicate to your name and, in order that through these gifts we may become worthy of your love, grant us unfailing obedience to your commands.”

As I have discussed in past weeks, there is a certain path of Christian discipleship laid out in this simple and fairly short rite of the Mass. Going on from here, we will see what Christ does with the offering, and the emphasis surely and deeply shifts to His action, and rightly so. But at this juncture, we see our own part in it, what we are to do.

We are to bring whatever we have—the bread and wine that is the whole substance of our person, our lives and everything in them—and give it to Christ (symbolized by the priest) who brings it to the altar (to His own place of love and gift, the Cross). We are to give thanks to God for everything we are and have, that which delights us and brings us pleasure, that which is heavy and burdensome.

We are to be utterly mindful of our complete unworthiness, that the gifts we bring God—our whole life—is marred and marked by sin and selfishness. His acceptance of the gift and His choice to unite Himself to us and transform our lives into His life is a gift of mercy on His part, not anything we deserve.

We see in the prayer I quote above that He does graciously make us worthy of His love, and that He does this by giving us the grace to obey His commands. Boy, do we ever have to take this prayer to heart! I am always a little perplexed these days at some of the conversations around ‘communion and who may receive it’, when churchmen who are older than I by far do not seem to acknowledge in their positions that… well, that God’s grace is real, you know?

That we are not left orphans. That we are not left without help from on high, and that this help is specifically given to us that we may obey His commands. There seems to be some disconnect somewhere—that somehow God’s moral law is over here, but the messy reality of people’s lives is way over there… and that’s all there is to it. A gulf separating the moral law, the Divine Law which springs from the eternal Wisdom of God, and the ‘real world’ of human stumbling and striving and mess. And since it is an unbridgeable gap, let’s just ignore it and pretend it doesn’t exist. Everyone come to communion, yay! Really?

Do we not believe that Jesus really has come to us to bridge that gap? That we can bring Him our messed up lives, our moldy bread and cheap vinegary wine, and He will help us to make it into pure fine wheat and choicest vintage? And that it is worth it? And that we need to have come to some basic point of obedience before we can enter the fullest depths of communion? But that even while we’re on the way, there is mercy and grace surrounding us in the process?

We have to bring our bread and wine to the Priest and lay it on the Altar—basic surrender, basic discipleship. Everyone has to do that—people whose lives are in some kind of sort of basic order… well, sort of (we’re all sinners, after all), and people who may have some terrible disorder to some degree baked into the structure of their lives—irregular marriages, homosexual orientation, cohabitation, work situations that are unethical.

We all bring whatever we have to Christ, but the bringing it to Him is the surrender of it to Him so He can purify us, not so that we can arrogantly demand He take us as we are so that we can take Him as we like. All are welcome, all are called, but the welcome and the call is to the obedience of faith, which takes the incarnate form of obedience to the moral law and to the Gospel.

So that is Christian discipleship, both revealed in the liturgy but also lived out truly in the liturgy. And that is why we cannot mess around with these things and change things carelessly out of some misguided sense of compassion. We have to help people, meet them where they are… but always in tenderness and in truth. Anything less, and we are no longer offering our gifts to the Lord, but instead holding our gifts to ourselves and demanding that God give us Himself on our terms, not His. And that is not Christian discipleship.

A Dried Up Hamburger

I usually write a ‘This Week in Madonna House’ wrap-up on Saturday. At this point in the summer, it gets hard to do this, as the weeks start to look pretty much like one another, and I could virtually get away with copying and pasting last week’s post. Work and hospitality, hospitality and work, rinse and repeat… such is life in high summer at MH.

Meanwhile, something cropped up on my Facebook page lately that I was unable to respond to in the narrow confines of an FB comment thread. Namely, this:

Now it first must be said that this quote is wholly fabricated – Pope Francis has never said these words. And that if someone is trying to make a larger point about being a good person without God, it’s probably not a good idea to start off by TELLING A LIE. Just a thought.

But what about the actual quote? Is there some validity to these words, anyhow? Leaving aside the parts of the quote that are so vague that they are impossible to respond to (the traditional notion of God… part, for example – what does that mean?), let’s focus in on the question of ‘can you be a good person and not believe in God.’ What is the Catholic answer to that.

The Catholic answer to that is that, no, it is not really possible to be a good person and not have a relationship to God. I would go further and say that it is impossible to be a good person, really, and not go to church (the ‘money’ thing is a total red herring here, since the Church does not absolutely command people to financially support it).

OK, shocking! Intolerant! Hateful! Right? I thought you were a nice guy, Fr. Denis! All that jazz. Well, I hope I’m a nice guy (more or less, on a good day), but it’s a question here of thinking clearly through things. What does it mean to be ‘good’? That is the question. When we say something is good, we mean that the thing is everything that thing should be. Goodness is possessing all the desirable qualities a thing should possess. A good hamburger is juicy, flavorful, just the right size, and so forth. A good dog is happy, loyal, affectionate, and obedient.

And a good human being is a human being who is everything a human being should be. And we are made by God, for God. We are made and our entire human vocation consists in having a relationship to the One who made us, who loves us, and who wants to fill us with Himself eternally in a free gift of love, the response to which gift of love is the obedience of faith—believing in Him and so doing what He asks of us.

And we believe that He has revealed what He wants of us in Jesus Christ. And that Jesus Christ has saved us and as an essential part of that work of salvation has established us as a ‘people’, a community that comes together to receive the grace of God in the sacraments and to embody the love of God by working to form a community of love among ourselves.

So we cannot be ‘a good person’ without possessing those necessary qualities—relationship with God, obedience to His plan, membership in the community of believers. Not because everyone who lacks those qualities is a depraved fiend lacking in any good quality (that is an utter non-sequitur) but simply because to lack those qualities is to be a hamburger full of flavour but dried up and crumbly. It is to lack what we need to be what we are supposed to be, the kind of ‘thing’ that we are.

Now where this FB meme does have a point (and I suspect it’s the point the author was going for) is that simply professing faith in God and simply showing up in church weekly does not suffice to make one a good person. It is necessary, but not sufficient. Part of the reason I knew immediately that Pope Francis never said these words is because they are a banal observation—everyone knows that lots of ‘religious’ people are total jerks. We who go to church regularly are actually the most aware of this, since we are rubbing shoulders with said jerks constantly! Furthermore, on any given day, we may be those very jerks.

And of course there are many atheists or unchurched theists who are kind, generous, truthful, and a host of other virtues, and thank God for that. But that too, while necessary, is not sufficient for 'goodness', because we are made by God, for God, and without God and our obedience to His plan for humanity (the Church) we are not being what we are made to be, and so we are not really good. And that is the Catholic answer to that particular cultural meme.