God is not interested in a uniform humanity.
This is a very hard truth, because most of us can sympathize with Dmitri Karamazov’s complaint: “Man is too broad; I would narrow him.”
It’s hard to relate to people who are very different from ourselves. The problem is not merely that the heart is too constricted to look without judgment, but that there becomes a very deep fear that we will be judged.
This is the psychological wellspring of judgmentalism.
The heart goes out into the world, bearing its personality, talents, loves, and it finds itself criticized. The impetus to kick back in self-defense is very strong.
Consider, for example, how the highly intelligent child who is called names on the playground armors himself with a contemptuous disregard for the opinions of his name-callers. This disregard can develop over time into a hard shell of disdain no longer directed only at those who hurt him, but at the entire mass of humanity, who are seen as stupid and incapable of thought.
Many Catholics experience the same thing with regard to their faith. They go out bearing the gift of the Gospel and are stoned outside of the gates of the City of the World.
Suddenly ashamed of that which is truly good within their hearts, they often feel they have only two comfortable options — join in the laughter and sacrifice something beautiful within their souls or wrap up their goodness in a shell of contempt and look down their noses at the unrepentant sinners.
Judgmentalism, then, becomes a protection for virtue.
But this kind of protection suffocates the good that it is meant to protect. The intelligent man is nowhere more stupid than when he talks of the stupidity of others. The virtuous man is nowhere more evil than when he talks of others’ sin.
There is a third way: authenticity, the Way of Truth.
“For this I was born, and for this I have come into the world: to bear witness to the truth” (John 18:37).
Christ gave himself as a gift to the entire human race. He did not worry about public opinion, but did make himself into a gift that people would feel blessed to receive.
He was authentically himself, yet when people decided to crucify him, he did not cry: “Yokels! Infidels! Philistines! Sinners!” He said, “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34).
This is the Christian calling. We must make ourselves into a sincere gift of self for the entire human race. It is tempting, however, to try to become a different kind of person to avoid risking one’s pearls in the swine pen.
Catholics may do this by adopting the superficial characteristics of a particular saint or holy stereotype. I recall a highly intelligent friend, a bookworm with a Shakespearean tongue, trying to become a holy simpleton via St. Francis. The experiment was self-evidently ridiculous, and he soon gave it up and went off to get a doctorate in theology; yet many others do the same thing in ways that slip more easily under the radar.
Think of the Catholic woman who surrenders her interests and talents to conform to a shallow stereotype of the good wife and mother. Or of Father Anonymous, who stifles his quirky personality to present a blandly pastoral persona to his parishioners.
These people are trying to be good and set a good example, but they are making themselves unhappy and their outreach sterile; few things are less appealing than a cookie-cutter saint.
If the Church wishes to breed true saints, then Christians must strive to receive the gifts of all with joy.
As God explained to St. Catherine of Siena, “I distribute the virtues quite diversely; I do not give all of them to each person. ... I shall give principally charity to one; justice to another; humility to this one; a living faith to that one. ... And so, I have given many gifts and graces, both spiritual and temporal, with such diversity that I have not given everything to one single person, so that you may be constrained to practice charity towards one another” (Catechism, 1937).
Those who have the virtue of orthodoxy, of wisdom or of obedience are called to make of this a gift.
It is not a license to look down on the confused and the dissenting. Nor is the gift of use to anyone if it is offered Jonah-like, as though to say, “I know you’re not interested, and you don’t have ears to hear. But at least I’ve done my bit. Let your blood be upon your head.”
Nor will the Church be of any use to the righteous man if he doesn’t recognize himself also to be poor in other virtues, to be a pauper who must receive from the hands of those who lack his own virtues or have the virtues which he himself lacks.
Melinda Selmys is a staff writer at VulgataMagazine.org.
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The St. Francis example doesn’t quite work. Many saints who were very intelligent and eloquent became simple holy souls—such as St. Francis, Blessed Charles De Foucauld and even St Paul (from rabbi to tent-maker). The first two of these men were full of pride, sloth and a love of luxury. Similarly, God takes men who have the heart of a gladiator (think of the early martyrs who were Roman officers), and transform them into men who meekly accept martyrdom. So God often transforms us to be the exact opposite in key respects to who we have always been.
Amen, and Amen - Spot on. I was one of those “smart” kids and “strict” Catholics. God forgive the elitist Pharisee I became because of it. It happens exactly as described.
I think this is a beautiful reminder of God’s love for each of us and that each of us has a gift. Thank-you. I needed to read that.
I couldn’t agree with you more. Thank you for writing this. I can see that God gave you a gift of writing gracefully and discerning his will.
“Even on the biological level life is not like a pool but like a tree. It does not move towards unity but away from it and the creatures grow further apart as they increase in perfection. Good, as it ripens, becomes continually more different not only from evil, but from other good.”
-C.S. Lewis
This was truly wonderful. Thank you very much. Very insightful.
I don’t know what a cookie cutter saint is. Every saint on the books was an exceptional person in life. I’ve never met a Catholic woman who surrenders her interests and talents to conform to a shallow stereotype of the good wife and mother. But we’ve elected more cookie cutter politicians whose values reject God. And we’ve seen many Catholic women abandon being a good wife and mother for wordly pursuits. It isn’t judgemental to recognize souls in trouble and pray for them. None of the faithful Catholics I know would ever wrap up their goodness in a shell of contempt and look down their noses at the unrepentant sinners. This is a straw man argument. Right now it is the secular world that denigrates and castigates good men and women for reproaching their conscience. They call Catholics hypocrites. But true hypocrites are those that claim to be Catholic while flagrantly disobeying the magesterium. Those are the ones that faithful Catholics call sinners.
Good article, thanks
Good article! We need to be ourselves, using our unique gifts from God to “preach the gospel, using words when necessary,” to paraphrase or borrow a quote from St. Francis.
I suspect that, in being authentic, but always trying to behave under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, we will find that we influence some people more than others inasmuch as we’ll resonate more with some of them than with others as well. For example, some people may really click with the “real” Father Anonymous, and others may be a little more aloof. In any event, we probably all would be more effective if we could drop the pretenses and just be the spiritual works in progress that we really are (and it would take less energy to do so.)
I very much like this treatment of virtues, gifts, and the danger of judgmentalism. Perhaps especially those involved in the Church’s intellectual apostolate—e.g., articulating cogent reasons for affirming the reality of God, or for opposing societal recognition of same-sex marriages—must seek both humility and patience. The latter, of course, is a gift of the Holy Spirit, but also, in its natural analogue, an adjunct of the cardinal virtue of fortitude—and thus necessary for any authentic moral life. Humility, as well as patience, are to be desired both for themselves and in light of the common experience of discovering that, however sound one’s reasonings, a good portion of one’s typical audience is, for all practical purposes, in a state of “invincible ignorance.” If genuine humility is not developed, one will be prone in such situations to the sorts of moral failure Ms. Selmys describes, rather than being the gifts to others that persons of orthodoxy are called to be.
There are a lot of good points and truth to this article and I enjoyed reading it. However portraying being a good wife and mother as a shallow endeavor is a little unfair. I think that women that do take on the burden of being a good wife and mother especially in this day and age. When most people and perhaps even you feel that it is a shallow endeavor. Will be rewarded greatly when judgement comes and I suspect that their crowns of glory will be quite brilliant. Perhaps we should keep in mind that our Lord Jesus Christ came into this world not to do his will but the will of his Father. As I recall reading he wasn’t glorified by the world for his humility and obedience. But he was glorified by His Father and ours. If you truly have a talent given to you by God it won’t disappear no matter what you do. May God Bless all those who sacrifice to make their home an example of peace harmony and love.
Nice article. It made me think about how I hide when at work, that I might not make myself the fool.
But I still am left with the question of, ‘How does one balance the boldness of your faith, without making yourself look the fool and not help anyone at all? What is the balance?’ Also, how does one find the tools to do this work. I don’t know how to move others to faith.
Yes, which is the gift I have? I would pick humility, then I don’t have to have boldness. I know that is not the answer. We all must have boldness, but how?
This answered a prayer for me tonight. Thank you!
First, I want to commend you for bringing forth an important point that most of us miss today. I agree with most everything in this article but your description of a ‘Catholic woman who surrenders her interests and talents to conform to a shallow stereotype of the good wife and mother’ is offensive itself. God created woman to be just that, a good wife and mother, just as he created the man to be a good husband and father. In just one sentence you showed so much judgementalism that the rest of the article seemed just a promotion of the ideologies that brought us the destructive forces in the Catholic Church of the 1970s, 80s, and 90s. I know that can’t be what you intended, but I lived through that time, I have watched as my family went from being good loving non-judgemental Catholics to becoming ‘relativistic’, selfish, unloving non-Catholics. I was among them, non-judgmental as I myself became involved in depraved, selfish, unloving sin. I followed the majority of the strong voices of the Catholic Church in the 1970s, with their strong attacks on the Church prior to Vatican II as a judgemental and harsh church. Yet it was the selflessness and love for others that brought us the overabundance of vocation to the priesthood and religious life in those days.
We see these old but grand churches that poor factory workers of old sacrificed to build and our modern Catholic that can’t even make it to worship God once a week. We should demand first more of ourselves, but as Jesus demanded much of his disciples and ‘judged’ the pharisees, after we remove the beam from our own eye, we can help our brothers to get the straw out of their own.
We must recognize that while we need to judge ourselves first, we need to understand that their is value in being Catholic. Salvation only comes through the Church. Relativism has been accepted as the good while judgementalism as the bad. We must recognize the evil in the world but balance that for the love of individuals, helping them to overcome the sin. In effect, when we evangelize, we are judging the other person. We have to determine if they are Catholic or not. Many times we determine this by their actions. Most Catholics today need our help to grow their faith and come close to God again, we must ‘judge’ them in order to determine if they need our help.
Yes, the dark, angry, hateful judgement is evil and can’t be tolerated in ourselves but we must use the ‘judgement’, in reality discernment, that helps us show true love for our brothers and those in the world that need our help.
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