who am i to judge essay

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Who Am I To Judge?

On most Wednesdays, the Pope gives a general audience, and this one was packed. It was a balmy October morning, and more than a hundred thousand pilgrims, tourists, and Romans had funnelled into St. Peter’s Square. It was the first of three large gatherings Pope Francis presided over that week for a celebration of the family during the Catholic Church’s “Year of Faith.”

Wooden railings imposed order in the square. I was about thirty yards from the Pope. In front of me were a pair of Vatican ushers in white tie and tails, several clergy, a short man in a yarmulke, and a handsome couple holding hands. Beyond them, Francis, seventy-six years old, in his stark-white cassock and skullcap, seemed energized by the festive crowd. A large man with a ready smile, he read from a brief text in Italian, but with fervor. “What kind of love do we bring to others? . . . Do we treat each other like brothers and sisters? Or do we judge one another?” The throng was silent, listening carefully. After Francis spoke, others summarized the remarks in various languages. Then a line of prelates approached his chair.

Now the prelates were gone, and Francis, with guards at a discreet distance, moved along the railing, greeting the people. The couple in the front row were in their thirties, tall, and dressed in dark clothing. Unlike others at the railing, who were waving and calling, “Papa Francesco! Papa Francesco!,” they held back. But when Francis turned to them the woman leaned forward with such gravity that the Pope took notice and stopped. Tears streaked her face. Francis reached for her hand, which she took as license to put her mouth by his ear. She whispered something. Francis looked startled, drew back a bit, then turned to her partner. The Pope embraced him, then drew the woman in. They stood like that for a while, the couple enveloped in the arms of the Bishop of Rome. Then Francis placed his hands on the man’s head. The man’s shoulders shook slightly. The Pope made a sign of the cross in the air above them and moved on.

As the crowd dispersed, I approached the couple. The man was weeping. The woman told me, “My husband has a brain tumor for the last four and a half years. He’s getting worse and worse. We came just for this, for his blessing, whatever it is—physical, emotional, or spiritual.” She told me that they were from Argentina, as is Francis. “I feel very near him. His look, his voice, everything is near to my heart. But surely not because he is from Argentina.”

Once, I felt that way myself, about another Pope. This was 1960, and I was seventeen, aiming to be an Air Force officer, like my father, a major general. My family was granted a private audience with Pope John XXIII. My parents, my grandmother, my four brothers, and I made our way up the Bernini staircase to the papal apartments in Vatican City. My father was in uniform, two stars on each shoulder. My mother and grandmother were draped in black mantillas. We were shown into a small, high-ceilinged room with red fabric walls; an elevated throne stood at one end. A monsignor lined us up. Then Pope John walked in, grinning, with outstretched hands. He was short and stout—all in white, although his shoes were red. His eyes danced. With a cry of “Bravo!,” he clapped, saluting my parents for their large Catholic family. Pope John, who was born Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli, in Lombardy, was one of fourteen children, a sharecropper’s son.

I was a tall boy, and the Pope reached up to my shoulders to pull me down. He put his mouth by my ear, his cheek against mine. I felt his whiskers and could smell his soap. He spoke to me in Italian—or was it Latin?—in an intimate whisper. Years later, I would look back on my reaction as naïve, yet in Pope John’s arms I felt the embrace of God. I had no way to grasp the meaning of John’s coming ecumenical council—the gathering of bishops known as Vatican II, which met in four sessions between 1962 and 1965 and which would reform the Church—but for me he played a pivotal role. Before long, I abandoned my Air Force dream and entered the seminary, to become a Catholic priest. I left the priesthood after five years, but I never stopped being a Pope John XXIII Catholic, which, given the reactionary slant of subsequent papacies, meant long decades of internal exile. Lately, the fact that I once sought transcendence in the presence of a Pope has stopped seeming naïve.

“Who am I to judge?” With those five words, spoken in late July in reply to a reporter’s question about the status of gay priests in the Church, Pope Francis stepped away from the disapproving tone, the explicit moralizing typical of Popes and bishops. This gesture of openness, which startled the Catholic world, would prove not to be an isolated event. In a series of interviews and speeches in the first few months after his election, in March, the Pope unilaterally declared a kind of truce in the culture wars that have divided the Vatican and much of the world. Repeatedly, he argued that the Church’s purpose was more to proclaim God’s merciful love for all people than to condemn sinners for having fallen short of strictures, especially those having to do with gender and sexual orientation. His break from his immediate predecessors—John Paul II, who died in 2005, and Benedict XVI, the traditionalist German theologian who stepped down from the papacy in February—is less ideological than intuitive, an inclusive vision of the Church centered on an identification with the poor. From this vision, theological and organizational innovations flow. The move from rule by non-negotiable imperatives to leadership by invitation and welcome is as fundamental to the meaning of the faith as any dogma.

Of the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics, about forty-one per cent live in Latin America. Catholicism has declined in Europe and the United States, but the pews of churches throughout the developing world are crowded. The election by the College of Cardinals of the first Latin-American Pope is a signal of the Church’s demographic pivot. Francis’s place of origin alone would make him a historic figure, but the statements he has made, and the example he has set, with gestures of modesty and compassion, show a man determined to realign the vast institution with the core message of Jesus.

Late last month, Francis issued the first major declaration of his pontificate, an “apostolic exhortation,” a long document addressed to Catholics which covers a range of issues. Titled “The Joy of the Gospel” and reflecting Francis’s style—there is no pontifical “we”—the exhortation is unrelentingly positive in tone. Francis writes, “We want to enter fully into the fabric of society, sharing the lives of all, listening to their concerns, helping them materially and spiritually in their needs, rejoicing with those who rejoice, weeping with those who weep; arm in arm with others, we are committed to building a new world.”

In an interview with Antonio Spadaro, S.J., of the Jesuit journal La Civiltà Cattolica, in August (later published in English in the magazine America ), Francis elaborated his thinking about homosexuals. Benedict had defended the “dignity” of all peoples, including homosexuals, but called homosexual acts “an intrinsic moral evil.” Saying that “the inclination itself must be seen as an objective disorder,” he barred the admission of gay men to seminaries, even if they were celibate, and denounced the idea of gay marriage. Francis hasn’t altered the impossibility of gay marriage in the Church, but his tone is very different. “A person once asked me, in a provocative manner, if I approved of homosexuality,” he said. “I replied with another question: ‘Tell me: when God looks at a gay person, does he endorse the existence of this person with love, or reject and condemn this person?’ We must always consider the person.” He continued, “We cannot insist only on issues related to abortion, gay marriage, and the use of contraceptive methods.”

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John Paul and Benedict used the Catholic tradition as a bulwark against the triple threat of liberalism, relativism, and secularism. In fact, Benedict, as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger and Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith from 1981 to 2005, has been the era’s chief sentinel of orthodoxy. But Francis views the Church as a field hospital after a battle. “The thing the Church needs most today is the ability to heal wounds and to warm the hearts of the faithful,” he said. “It is useless to ask a seriously injured person if he has high cholesterol and about the level of his blood sugars! You have to heal his wounds. Then we can talk about everything else. Heal the wounds.”

Francis has not hesitated to criticize the Church itself—including the clerical inner circle on which he now depends. Speaking before a gathering of newly consecrated bishops in September, he denounced the “psychology of princes,” and called the ambitious trek up the ladder of episcopal appointments a form of “spiritual adultery.” “The spirit of careerism,” he warned, “is a form of cancer.” But neither does he exempt himself from criticism. “Since I am called to put into practice what I ask of others,” he wrote in “The Joy of the Gospel,” “I too must think about a conversion of the papacy.”

This change in course was not to be expected from Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio. He was said to have been runner-up to Ratzinger in the 2005 conclave, but was not seen as a figure of innovation. Upon his election to the papacy, the Times described him as “a conventional choice, a theological conservative of Italian ancestry who vigorously backs Vatican positions on abortion, gay marriage, the ordination of women and other major issues.” As Archbishop of Buenos Aires, Bergoglio criticized government initiatives to legalize gay marriage and to loosen restrictions on abortion in Argentina, leading President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner to accuse him of “ideological malfeasance.” In 2010, when Bergoglio denounced same-sex-marriage legislation as “a maneuver by the devil,” Kirchner said, “Bergoglio’s position is medieval.”

Recently, Francis has sounded anything but medieval. He seemed to reverse long-set Catholic attitudes, if not actual doctrines, when he told Spadaro, “I have a dogmatic certainty: God is in every person’s life.” In an early-morning homily in the Vatican hostel where he lives, he anticipated traditionalists’ objections, saying, “Not just Catholics. Everyone! ‘Father, the atheists?’ Even the atheists. Everyone!” For Francis, the Church’s purpose is not to bring God to the world but simply to emphasize God’s presence—already there.

Francis violated a set code of Catholic ethical and philosophical discourse when, in an open letter to the prominent Italian journalist and atheist Eugenio Scalfari, in September, he wrote, “I would not speak about ‘absolute’ truths, even for believers. . . . Truth is a relationship. As such, each one of us receives the truth and expresses it from within, that is to say, according to one’s own circumstances, culture, and situation in life.” When Spadaro asked Francis about “the great changes in society, as well as the way human beings are reinterpreting themselves,” Francis got up to retrieve his well-thumbed breviary. He read from a fifth-century saint’s writings on the laws governing progress: “Even the dogma of the Christian religion must proceed from these laws. It progresses, solidifying with years, growing over time.” Then Francis commented, “So we grow in the understanding of the truth. . . . There are ecclesiastical rules and precepts that were once effective, but now they have lost value or meaning. The view of the Church’s teaching as a monolith to defend without nuance or different understandings is wrong.”

The first clue to the nature of the new Pope was his choice of name—an emphatic echo of St. Francis of Assisi. The thirteenth-century saint is associated with three things: love for creation, as reflected in his legendary ability to commune with animals; commitment to peace, which is said to have prompted his mediating intervention with Muslims during the Crusades; and care for the poor. (After the last round of voting for the papacy, a Brazilian cardinal whispered to Bergoglio, “Don’t forget the poor.”)

As Pope, Francis has simplified the Renaissance regalia of the papacy by abandoning fur-trimmed velvet capes, choosing to live in a two-room apartment instead of the Apostolic Palace, and replacing the papal Mercedes with a Ford Focus. Instead of the traditional red slip-ons, Francis wears ordinary black shoes. He declined to order a new set of fine tableware from Leone Limentani, the high-end Roman porcelain company that, since 1870, has supplied every Pope from Pius IX to Benedict XVI with crest-embossed table settings. I visited the shop, where a proprietor told me with a shrug, “Pope Francis has not ordered a new ring—why should he order new dishes?” Yet Francis didn’t criticize the choices of other prelates. “He makes changes without attacking people,” a Jesuit official told me. In his interview with La Civiltà Cattolica , Francis said, “My choices, including those related to the day-to-day aspects of life, like the use of a modest car, are related to a spiritual discernment that responds to a need that arises from looking at things, at people, and from reading the signs of the times.”

St. Francis is said to have declared, “Preach the Gospel, and if necessary use words.” A couple of weeks after his election, the new Pope went to the Casal del Marmo jail, a juvenile detention center on Rome’s outskirts. On Holy Thursday, Jesus’ washing of the feet of the twelve apostles is reënacted in Catholic churches all over the world. Popes typically perform the rite at St. Peter’s or at the magnificent Basilica of St. John Lateran, about four miles from the Vatican. The Pope usually bends for a token swipe at the feet of twelve selected priests. But at Casal del Marmo, Francis knelt on the cold stone floor and put his white skullcap aside. He washed, dried, and kissed the feet of twelve young inmates, some of them bearing tattoos. Two were Muslim. More pointedly, in violation of Church tradition, two of the apostolic stand-ins were women. When one of the inmates asked the Pope why he had come to them, he said, “Things from the heart don’t have an explanation.”

In his discussions with Spadaro, Francis made clear his affinity for John XXIII, the most liberal of modern Popes: “John XXIII adopted this attitude with regard to the government of the Church, when he repeated the motto, ‘See everything; turn a blind eye to much; correct a little.’ John XXIII saw all things, the maximum dimension, but he chose to correct a few, the minimum dimension.” Francis continued, “Many think that changes and reforms can take place in a short time. I believe that we always need time to lay the foundations for real, effective change. And this is the time of discernment. Sometimes discernment instead urges us to do precisely what you had at first thought you would do later.”

Shortly before I left Boston for Rome, I saw Paul Farmer, the Harvard anthropologist and physician who, for twenty-five years, has worked with the poor in Haiti, Peru, and Rwanda. Raised Catholic, Farmer was inspired by the egalitarian Catholic political movement called liberation theology, and recently published a book with its founder, Gustavo Gutiérrez. I asked Farmer what he made of the Pope’s Holy Thursday display at the prison. Farmer shrugged, and said, “If it’s just for show, I say keep showing it.”

Father Federico Lombardi, S.J., was appointed the director of the press office of the Holy See near the start of the pontificate of Benedict XVI, so he has been explaining Vatican policies for more than seven years. Early in his papacy, Benedict gave a speech that insulted Islam. He reinstated the Holocaust-denying bishop Richard Williamson, brought back a Good Friday ritual that includes a denigrating reference to Jews, and issued a list of “more grave crimes” that seemed to equate the ordination of women with sexual abuse of children by priests. The Vatican was often having to clarify its positions.

I met Lombardi in a spartan room in a grand Mussolini-era building just outside St. Peter’s Square. Lombardi is a dark-eyed, silver-haired man of seventy-one, who looks as if he could be an Italian film director. I asked what his life had been like since Benedict stepped down. Lombardi broke into a broad smile. Then he said, “We experienced for years—and for good reason, also—that the Church said, ‘No! This is not the right way! This is against the commandments of God!’ The negative aspect of the announcement . . . this was in my personal experience one of the problems.” Father Lombardi and I are almost the same age. In his earnest good will and kindliness, he struck me as the priest I would have liked to become. He said, “The people thought I always had a negative message for them. I am very happy that, with Francis, the situation has changed.” He laughed. “Now I am at the service of a message . . . of love and mercy.” He laughed again.

A member of the press corps in Rome told me that during the Benedict years Father Lombardi, when addressing reporters, was bothered by a persistent nervous cough. The cough is no longer in evidence.

II—JUDGMENT

Jorge Mario Bergoglio was born in Buenos Aires in 1936, the first of five children. His father, an immigrant from northern Italy, was a bookkeeper. As a teen-ager, Bergoglio attended a vocational school, trained to be a chemical technician, and eventually found work at a Buenos Aires laboratory. “I had an extraordinary boss there,” he later recalled. “Esther Balestrino de Careaga, a Paraguayan woman and Communist sympathizer.” She took young Jorge Bergoglio under her wing, ushering him into adulthood. “I owe a huge amount to that great woman.” She taught him the discipline of work, yet was unrelentingly positive. “I loved her very much.”

Bergoglio left the laboratory and at twenty-one began to train for the priesthood. He became a Jesuit novice, embarking on the intellectually demanding course of Jesuit formation that typically involves a dozen or more years of expansive study, teaching, and spiritual discipline. The Jesuit founder, Ignatius Loyola, had been a soldier before his conversion, and a spirit of military rigidity, expressly at the service of the Pope, was traditionally a mark of the order. A man who chose the Jesuits over other ways of being a priest was embarking on a harder path. Among Bergoglio’s influences was the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, a friend whom Bergoglio happily recalled as “an agnostic who said the Our Father every night because he had made a promise to his mother.”

Through the sixties, Bergoglio studied Catholic theology just as the Second Vatican Council was upending the life of the Church. For Catholicism, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and the arrival of liberal democracy had each posed unresolved threats, but Vatican II was the great turning toward the modern world. As the Church, in John XXIII’s image, threw its windows wide open, the Gospel was read anew as a demand for justice and peace. “In this age which boasts of its atomic power,” John wrote in his 1963 encyclical, “Pacem in Terris,” “it no longer makes sense to maintain that war is a fit instrument with which to repair the violation of justice.” Theology left the classroom, and clergy left the sacristy for the street.

Throughout Latin America, Vatican II sparked a severe crisis, as a reactionary Church hierarchy, aligned with oligarchs and dictators, was suddenly challenged by priests, nuns, and grassroots “base communities” that took the council as a mandate for social change. Liberation theology, developed by priests like Gutiérrez, of Peru, and Leonardo Boff, of Brazil, held up Jesus Christ as a critic of unjust social and economic structures and articulated a Gospel mandate for “the preferential option for the poor.” In Argentina, a left-right civil war was brewing, and Catholics found themselves on both sides of the conflict. To the oligarchs and their allies in the hierarchy, the religious critique seemed all too political. Some Catholic leftists threw in with revolutionaries, although most embraced nonviolence. The anti-Soviet paranoia of the era made it easy to see the movement as influenced more by Karl Marx than by Jesus Christ. Archbishop Hélder Câmara, of Brazil, famously captured the tension, saying, “When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a Communist.”

Soon after Bergoglio was made a full-fledged—“professed”—Jesuit, in 1973, he was named Provincial Superior for Argentina, which meant he was responsible for supervising all Jesuit schools, parishes, and missions. At thirty-six, he was exceptionally young for such a position. He served as Provincial between 1973 and 1979, a span that overlapped with the so-called Dirty War, in which Argentina’s far-right military junta murdered many thousands of people. One of those who were arrested was the daughter of his early mentor, Esther de Careaga.

The story of Bergoglio and de Careaga is recounted in Paul Vallely’s indispensable biography, “Pope Francis: Untying the Knots,” which was published in August. Bergoglio’s former boss became active with a group of mothers advocating for the disappeared. When her daughter was freed and fled Argentina, de Careaga refused to abandon her work for the victims of the junta. Fearing arrest, and knowing that even the books in her house would incriminate her, she turned to her old friend. Bergoglio went to her house and took away the books, including “Das Kapital,” which he hid in a Jesuit library. Working at a church with other mothers of the disappeared, de Careaga was kidnapped by a death squad. Like so many, she was dropped from a helicopter into the sea. When her corpse washed ashore, Bergoglio had her buried in the garden of the church where she’d been seized.

By Bergoglio’s admission, he was not prepared for the challenges of exercising authority in such a tumultuous context. Liberation theology, with its questioning of authority, was a particular challenge to the Jesuit order, which had always defined itself around the vow of obedience. As the Provincial, Bergoglio tried to rein in Jesuits who had embraced a profound solidarity with the poor. He ordered two priests, Father Francisco Jalics and Father Orlando Yorio, to stop living and working in the Buenos Aires villas miserias , or slums. (Bergoglio has claimed that the instructions came from Rome.) They disobeyed. As to what followed, accounts differ to this day. But the defiance of the priests seems to have angered Bergoglio, who recently criticized himself, saying, “My authoritarian and quick manner of making decisions led me to have serious problems and to be accused of being ultraconservative.”

Bergoglio’s conflict with the priests escalated, apparently to the point of their being threatened with expulsion from the Jesuits, whether by the Provincial himself or by authorities in Rome. (Bergoglio, in a 2010 interview, said the priests were preparing to establish a new religious order, effectively resigning from the Jesuits.) In March, 1976, a military coup overthrew the government of Argentina. The junta began targeting left-wing activists like Jalics and Yorio. Their conflict with the Jesuit Provincial, and their uncertain religious status, may have been part of what sparked the junta’s move against them. (Bergoglio says that he offered them the chance to come live in the society’s Provincial house.) In May, Jalics and Yorio, along with several others, were arrested by the death squads. The priests thought that Bergoglio had betrayed them; by his account, he went to work at once trying to secure their release. “The very night I learned they had been kidnapped, I set the ball rolling,” he said. The people with whom Jalics and Yorio were arrested were murdered; the two priests were brutally tortured and finally released in October. Bergoglio’s intervention may have saved them, but, in the words of a friend, he has since “constantly reproached himself for not doing enough.”

Yorio died in 2000, five years after publishing a book in which he claimed that Bergoglio had informed the military of the priests’ activities. Jalics is still a Jesuit, living in Germany. After the papal conclave, he denied that Bergoglio had betrayed him and Yorio, but others in Argentina are not convinced of the Pope’s innocence. Vallely concludes that he “should have seen the danger in which he was placing his two priests. Bergoglio behaved recklessly and has been trying to atone for his behavior ever since.” Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1980 for his defense of human rights in Argentina, said after the papal election, “There were bishops that were accomplices to the dictatorship, but Bergoglio was not one of them,” though he added, “I think he lacked the courage to accompany our struggle for human rights in the most difficult times.”

The years of the Dirty War form the general ground of the Pope’s striking self-criticism: his experience, one Jesuit told me, was “searing.” After leaving office as Provincial, Bergoglio was rector of a Jesuit seminary for a time, then worked on a dissertation for a degree in theology. He was sent to a Jesuit house of studies in Córdoba, Argentina, as spiritual director, yet these were wilderness years for him. He told Spadaro that in Córdoba he “lived a time of great interior crisis.” In an earlier interview, he had confided, “I had to learn from my errors along the way because, to tell you the truth, I made hundreds of errors. Errors and sins.” He told Spadaro bluntly, “I am a sinner. This is the most accurate definition. It is not a figure of speech.”

Francis’s background has fostered a deep identification with the poor.

Whatever Bergoglio made of liberation theology during his time as a Jesuit authority, he came to embody its spirit after he was named a bishop, in 1992. “How I would like a Church which is poor and for the poor,” he declared in his first week as Pope, an attitude that has marked him since his fresh start as a bishop in Buenos Aires. That he was tapped to be bishop was unusual for a Jesuit, since the order discourages its members from holding ecclesiastical office, and has over the centuries been embroiled in political disputes that mainly kept the hugely influential group on the margins of Church power. Kings and at least one Pope periodically sought to stamp out the Jesuits, and in some places succeeded.

By the time Bergoglio was named a cardinal, in 2001, his simplicity of style had already set him apart from other prelates. He preferred a small apartment to a palatial residence and travelled by public transportation instead of chauffeured car. As Archbishop of Buenos Aires, he encouraged his best priests to live in the slums, joining them for Mass and often walking through the shantytowns. While he was a critic of the government on questions like abortion and gay marriage, he also was strident in his denunciations of neoliberal economic policies that condemned many to abject poverty. His attention to the poor completed the decades-long transformation that finally drew the gaze of his fellow-cardinals to Jorge Mario Bergoglio.

When the papal conclave convened, in the wake of Pope Benedict XVI’s surprising resignation, Vatican watchers thought they knew what to expect. Between them, John Paul and Benedict had appointed every voting member of the College of Cardinals. There are two hundred cardinals, of whom a hundred and seventeen were under eighty and therefore eligible to vote when the papal election was called. There seemed to be no way that the barque of St. Peter could change course.

But that assumed that the great vessel had not run aground. Pope Benedict’s resignation seemed, in most ways, to be a courageous reckoning with personal limitations and, for the Church, a possible liberation. But his quick exit was also a clear sign of the gravity of the Church’s crisis. One issue pressed in upon the prelates more than others: they were broadly regarded as having failed to deal forthrightly with the sexual-abuse crisis. Cardinal Keith O’Brien had just been forced to resign as head of the Church in Scotland after accusations emerged of inappropriate sexual relations with young priests.

Beginning in 2002, revelations that Catholic clergy had been molesting young people on a horrendous scale for decades spread from the United States to Europe; heavily Catholic countries like Ireland, Belgium, and Austria were particularly shaken. The many thousands of abusers were a minority of priests, yet almost all bishops who knew of violations sought to cover up the scandal, allowing many predators to continue their abuse. Disillusioned and angry, Catholics left the Church in droves. In the United States, ten per cent of adults are former Catholics, a group that far exceeds every other religious denomination except the remaining Catholics.

As Cardinal, Ratzinger had instructed bishops to forward accusations against priests to the Vatican, affirming secrecy. That policy, along with the Vatican’s long-standing practice of discouraging bishops from reporting to civil authorities, made the scandal worse. Finally, as Pope, Benedict acknowledged the role of the state in prosecuting crimes, imposed stricter controls on the Church’s process, and repeatedly apologized to victims. Yet all this was undercut by the Vatican’s own ongoing denial, from John Paul forward, of the criminal obfuscation of bishops. Cardinal Bernard Law was driven in disgrace from Boston in 2002, yet was then honorably ensconced at the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore, one of the most prestigious churches in Rome, where he remains Archpriest Emeritus. In 2012, the Bishop of Kansas City, Robert Finn, was convicted of the crime of not reporting an abusive priest to civil authorities. The priest had continued to exploit children, and when caught he was sentenced to fifty years in prison. Finn, the first U.S. bishop convicted, was sentenced to two years’ probation. He remains the Bishop of Kansas City-St. Joseph today.

The word “conclave” means “with a key.” After the extra omnes —Latin for “everybody out”—was pronounced, the grand doors of the Sistine Chapel were locked to outsiders, but before that the cardinals were confronted with their situation. As is customary, they had elected one of their members to deliver an opening meditation—eighty-seven-year-old Cardinal Prospero Grech, a Maltese theologian who has spent much of his career teaching in Rome. Unsurprisingly, Cardinal Grech began his brief discourse with a reference to St. Peter, whose successor was about to be chosen. But instead of the usual Tu es Petrus —“You are Peter!”—triumphalism with which Jesus commissioned the Apostle, giving him the keys to the kingdom, Grech invoked a very different Gospel scene, in which the Risen Jesus challenges Peter over his having three times betrayed him on the night of his Passion. Peter was like Judas.

For each of Peter’s denials, Jesus pointedly asks, “Peter, do you love me?” The abject Peter replies, “Lord, you know everything. You know that I love you.” Being able to answer the question like that, Grech said, is the only important thing for the man elected Pope. Grech made no reference to Peter’s denials, but he confronted the cardinals with the parameters of the crisis they faced: sexual abuse of children and the Church’s lack of transparency. He referred to violations “even in the papal household,” which include “VatiLeaks,” the papal butler’s revelations that led to discoveries of alleged homosexual blackmail and talk of a whistle-blowing prelate being sent abroad. In recent years, a Vatican chorister was fired for acting as a pimp; hugely inflated contracts for routine maintenance of Vatican buildings were traced to paybacks and bribery schemes; and the Bank of Italy shut down all Vatican A.T.M.s because of money-laundering risks. Grech recalled that Church evils in the past had been far worse, but still, he said, “the truth is spoken to us.”

It was markedly different from the sermon delivered by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger on the eve of the previous conclave, in 2005, when he rallied the cardinals by pitting the virtuous Church against the world’s “dictatorship of relativism.” That sermon, encapsulating Ratzinger’s vision of the Church’s moral superiority, was widely perceived as having sealed his election. Now a cardinal was speaking very differently. “One must humble himself before God and men, and try to eradicate the evil at all costs,” Grech said.

I met with Grech in a parlor at St. Monica’s, the Augustinian monastery abutting Bernini’s colonnade at St. Peter’s Square, where he has lived off and on since 1946. He is a lanky man with an aristocratic bearing. When I noted the penitent tone he had struck in his meditation, he said, “Mind you, these things had already been raised by the cardinals themselves before the conclave.”

Toward the end of his meditation, Grech had asked the cardinals, “And you, why are you here?” He answered, “In 1961, John XXIII . . . pointed out the dominant figure of Christ the Judge in the fresco of Michelangelo.” The stark “Last Judgment” takes up much of the wall behind the Sistine Chapel’s high altar. The painting is from later in Michelangelo’s life, made when the savage wars of the Reformation were breaking out. Its dark vision stands in marked contrast to his “Creation of Adam,” painted decades earlier: the optimistic ceiling fresco of God’s outstretched finger almost touching Adam’s. The two paintings make a statement about a Church that is, in Martin Luther’s phrase, simul iustus et peccator —as sinful as it is virtuous. The “Last Judgment” shows a stern Christ, judging the righteous and sinners alike. Michelangelo put his own face on the shrivelled, flayed body of a martyr. Grech said to the cardinals, “You find yourself in this same chapel, under the figure of that Christ, with his hand raised not to crush but to illuminate your vote.”

Late one day in Rome, I attended an Evensong service at Caravita, a small Baroque church on Via del Collegio Romano, in the center of the city. The street name refers to the first of the many Jesuit schools that now cover the world, and the assembled worshippers included Jesuit faculty from the Pontifical Gregorian University, where the Church’s theological élite are trained. I struck up a conversation with a Jesuit during the social hour after the service, and was startled when he introduced himself as Norman Tanner. He was the editor of a legendary English translation of the documents of the Church Councils, including Vatican II. Last year, in observance of the council’s fiftieth anniversary, a new edition of the translation was issued, titled “Vatican II: The Essential Texts.” I wrote one of two introductions to the volume. I had never met Father Tanner, a professor of Church history at the Gregorian. “You’re James Carroll?” he said. Then he grinned. “You provided a nice balance.”

The other introduction was by Pope Benedict: the text of an address about Vatican II that he had given to the Roman Curia in 2005. I was intimidated to be paired with him. Our essays turned out to exemplify the tension between two Catholic views of Vatican II. In a review of the book in the British Catholic journal The Tablet , Hilmar Pabel wrote that the essays “make the book a curiosity. Combined, they have a confusing effect.” Pope Benedict, Pabel wrote, “distinguishes two conflicting ways of interpreting the council: the ‘hermeneutic of reform,’ advocated by the Pope, and ‘the hermeneutic of discontinuity and rupture.’ He might consider Carroll an adherent of the latter hermeneutic for his description of the council as a ‘revolution from the top’ whose ‘momentous changes must be acknowledged as such.’ ”

Francis describes himself as a loyal “son of the Church,” and has a record as a doctrinal conservative. Many observers insist that in a Church understood as semper idem —always the same—the most that even an apparently innovative figure like Francis can effect is “pastoral” adjustments in discipline or practice: a merciful easing up on rules without repealing them. Even if he wanted to, Pope Francis could not alter the basic beliefs of the Church.

But in fact the Church has made profound doctrinal changes in living memory. In 1964, the council repudiated a millennium-long tradition of “No Salvation Outside the Church.” That formulation dates at least to the Fourth Lateran Council, in 1215, and was reiterated by councils and Popes through my youth. Vatican II overturned the doctrine by affirming the primacy of conscience—a teaching Francis has reiterated, applying it to atheists as well.

Still more momentous is the council’s rejection of the “Christ-killer” slander against Jews, which has its roots in the Gospels. The council even affirmed that the covenant which God made with Israel is full and permanent—a reversal of the “replacement” theology that had defined Catholic self-understanding from the time of the Church fathers. Francis affirmed the rupture that separates current attitudes from tradition when he said, “Through the awful trials of these last centuries, the Jews have preserved their faith in God. And for this, we, the Church and the whole human family, can never be sufficiently grateful to them.” Jewish preservation of faith, of course, presumed an ongoing Jewish rejection of claims made for Christ. What Jews were condemned for across centuries, that is, they must be thanked for today. None of the potential changes to doctrine facing the contemporary Church compare with the depth of this revision.

Cardinal Timothy Dolan, of New York, is typical of those conservatives who insist that Francis’s unprecedented “style” alters nothing of “substance,” a position Dolan reiterated early this month. “A Pope, by his nature, can’t make doctrinal changes,” Dolan said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “He can make a lot of changes in the way, the style, the manner in which it’s presented.”

I took the question up with Antonio Spadaro, the editor of La Civiltà Cattolica . His interview with Pope Francis had, after all, sparked much of this discussion. Spadaro, who is forty-seven, is balding and energetic, and works from a modern office in a villa not far from the Spanish Steps. The day I interviewed him was the twenty-fifth anniversary of his admission to the Jesuits, and I sensed the amiable good will that had won him the trust of the new Pope. “The Pope is a volcano!” he said, grinning.

When I asked Spadaro about the style-versus-substance debate, he banged his fist down on a book on a table next to his desk. “Style is not just the cover of the book,” he declared. “It’s the book itself!” He continued, “Style is the message. The substance is the Gospel. This is what the Gospel looks like.”

Another Jesuit, Father Joseph Daoust, a senior officer in the order’s Rome headquarters, told me, “The way we practice our faith affects how we believe. How we believe affects how we practice. There’s a back and forth, and has been all through history. I don’t want to say his style will lead nowhere—doctrinally. I think it will. . . . That’s been the normal history of the Church.” Before leaving Spadaro’s office, I looked again at the book on his table: it was “Bruce,” a biography of Bruce Springsteen. The book next to it—the breadth of a Jesuit’s interest!—was “Ratzinger: Opera Omnia.”

Last July, Pope Francis took his first official trip outside of Rome, to celebrate a Mass on Lampedusa, a remote island in the Mediterranean between Sicily and Tunisia. He used the upended wreck of a fishing boat as an altar. About seventy miles from the Tunisian coast, Lampedusa covers roughly eight square miles. It has been the landfall for thousands of desperate African migrants seeking a better life in Europe. Before the Mass, Pope Francis spoke in a sprawling sports field to a crowd of mostly Muslim African migrants. Living in squalid camps, they are the lucky ones; thousands of others have died at sea. In the first months of the new pontificate, every few weeks the tragedy of migrant drownings was repeated. Few in Europe seemed to notice. “What hurts the most,” the mayor of Lampedusa wrote in an open letter, “is that Europe is a bystander.”

In his homily, Francis spoke of “immigrants dying at sea, in boats which were vehicles of hope and became vehicles of death.” Two weeks before I arrived in Rome, yet another boat had sunk near Lampedusa. About three hundred and sixty people drowned. A week later, another boat sank, with two hundred aboard. “In this globalized world, we have fallen into globalized indifference,” Francis said. “We have become used to the suffering of others.” During Francis’s visit, an archbishop handed out phone cards to the survivors. The Pope made Lampedusa an issue. In October, a European Union commissioner called for “a big save-rescue operation in the Mediterranean.”

If, as Pope, Francis has tempered his opinions on matters of sexual morality, his advocacy for the poor has become even more acute. In last month’s exhortation, Francis expanded his critique of the world economy: “In this system, which tends to devour everything which stands in the way of increased profits, whatever is fragile, like the environment, is defenseless before the interests of a deified market, which becomes the only rule.” This problem is fundamental to every problem: “Inequality eventually engenders a violence which recourse to arms cannot and never will be able to resolve.” Conservative critics faulted Francis’s analysis. Rush Limbaugh called it “pure Marxism.” Samuel Gregg, the author of “Tea Party Catholic,” writing in National Review , was more respectful but still rejected the Pope’s “straw-man arguments about the economy.”

Daoust observed that for Francis “the bottom line is what’s happening to the poor.” A trained economist, Daoust said that Pope Francis was not proposing an alternative structure of global exchange. Rather, he was making a simple point of right and wrong. “Ignoring the refugees at Lampedusa is just intolerable,” Daoust said. President Barack Obama, joining the Pope’s protest against inequality, saluted Francis for being an “extraordinarily thoughtful and soulful messenger of peace and justice.”

Francis is the first Jesuit Pope in history, and his fierce conviction has the particular accent of a religious order that has redefined itself since Vatican II around “faith that promotes justice,” as Jesuits put it now. If Jorge Mario Bergoglio had a conversion moment, Daoust told me, it was probably at the 1974-75 Jesuit Congregation, the worldwide meeting in Rome of the society’s leadership that was summoned by Superior General Pedro Arrupe, of Spain, a controversial liberalizing figure. Arrupe’s priesthood had been defined by the experience of being in Hiroshima when the atom bomb fell, and as Superior he set a new course. Given what Bergoglio was facing in Buenos Aires, the gathering must have been tumultuous for him: his own positions were being challenged. The order embraced an unprecedented understanding of itself. “We can no longer pretend that the inequalities and injustices of our world must be borne as part of the inevitable order of things,” the Congregation declared. To be a Jesuit today “is to engage, under the standard of the Cross, in the crucial struggle of our time: the struggle for faith and that struggle for justice which it includes.” The Jesuits affirmed “belief in a God who is justice because he is love.”

Critics regarded the turn as a betrayal of transcendent values in favor of an overemphasis on the secular world. Vatican suspicion of liberation theology extended now to the Jesuits, and soon Jesuits were dying in the struggle for justice, especially in Latin America. “If you kill one of us,” Daoust said to me, recalling the spirit of the time, when six Jesuits were murdered in El Salvador, “we’ll send three.” When Arrupe was disabled by a stroke, in 1981, Pope John Paul II rejected the man Arrupe had chosen to oversee the selection of his successor, and appointed his own delegate, which was taken as an insult to Arrupe and a rebuke to the order. Philip Pullella, the longtime Vatican correspondent for Reuters, told me that some called John Paul’s intervention an act of papal martial law.

In September, Pope Francis gathered with several hundred other Jesuits at the Church of the Gesù, in the center of Rome, where St. Ignatius is buried. Arrupe, who died in 1991, is also buried there. After Mass, Francis stood silently before the tomb of Arrupe. More than one Jesuit told me that this simple act was profoundly moving.

Once a religious order puts world justice at the center of its identity, the ethical concern must apply within the Church, too. What about women? A subsequent Jesuit Congregation, in 1995, addressed “the unjust treatment and exploitation of women,” denouncing the “ ‘feminization of poverty’ and a distinctive ‘feminine face of oppression.’ ” The Jesuits also decried “the alienation of women who no longer feel at home in the Church.” Under Francis, the Vatican has kept in place Benedict XVI’s punitive investigation of American nuns, whose stalwart commitment to Vatican II had become a bad fit in a retrenching Church. For example, the public support of some groups of Catholic sisters for Obama’s health-care reform, which bishops mainly opposed, offered decisive cover to Catholic legislators voting yes. Nuns on the Bus, a social-justice pressure group, was accused of caring too little about abortion. The Vatican moved to increase the oversight of a group that represents many of the sisters, sparking a backlash. “People do not know how hurt and disillusioned women are,” Sister Mary C. Boys, a prominent theologian and the Dean of Academic Affairs at Union Theological Seminary, in New York, told me. “So much more could be accomplished by engaging us in genuine conversation.”

V—HER EMINENCE

In November, the Irish Times cited reports that Mary McAleese, the former President of Ireland, was being considered by Pope Francis for appointment to the College of Cardinals. It was an astonishing thought, but, unlike the priesthood, whose all-male character is said to have been set by Jesus’ choice of twelve men as apostles, no theological obstacle prevents a woman from being offered the red hat. The choice is the Pope’s alone. Last year, Cardinal Dolan said he had heard that Pope John Paul II considered naming Mother Teresa to the body. Still, Lombardi, the papal spokesman, dismissed the notion of the former Irish President’s appointment as “nonsense.”

A Catholic born in Belfast, McAleese was the first person from Northern Ireland to be President of the Irish Republic, in the south—a potent symbol of the bridge building that gave her two terms as President their theme. In 1998, she helped solidify the Good Friday Agreement, which ushered in Ireland’s era of peace. At the end of her second term, in 2011, she moved to Rome to study canon law at the Gregorian. She is now working toward her doctorate and will be one of the few women to have earned the ecclesiastical degree.

In speaking of women’s ordination, Francis has cited John Paul II’s “definitive formulation,” agreeing, “That door is closed.” He reiterated the exclusion last month. I asked McAleese what she made of the prospects for women under the new Pope. We were sitting in a café at Boston College, where she was spending the fall semester as a visiting scholar. She stirred her hot chocolate. “That ties in with the other issue, which is collegiality, which he has opened up,” she said. A blond woman of sixty-two, McAleese has a winning smile, but her firm voice conveys the habit of authority. “Women in priesthood, women in diaconate are important issues, but they are not the only issues.” McAleese takes for granted that women should be ordained, but she also sees the constraints within which the Pope must operate. Because his predecessors “came very close” to tying the prohibition to infallibility, “he has to act with some degree of political nuance.”

Since Vatican II, the word “collegiality” has become a euphemism for dismantling the top-down power structure of the Church. The council sought, unsuccessfully, to flatten the pyramid that has the Pope on the pinnacle, bishops and priests arrayed in the upper echelons, and laypeople, well, squashed at the bottom. But Francis is changing that, moving from the vertical to the horizontal. In last month’s exhortation, he said, “Excessive centralization, rather than proving helpful, complicates the Church’s life.”

Early in his pontificate, the Pope established a council of eight cardinals, representing six continents, charged with bringing the experience of local churches to bear on decisions made in Rome. They met with the Pope in October, and again this month, beginning the reform of the dysfunctional Curia. Concluding their October meeting, Pope Francis emphasized—and elevated in importance—an upcoming synod, or representative body of bishops, set to convene in 2014. The synod will take up the question of “The Pastoral Challenges to the Family in the Context of Evangelization.”

Under Francis’s guidance, a subsequent directive called on dioceses to distribute to parishioners a Vatican questionnaire that asks about divorce, birth control, unmarried people living together, and gay marriage. This panoply of sex-related issues that has divided the Church and decimated its authority must now be considered. Not long ago, Rome was insisting that change on any of these issues was out of the question. But why ask for input if no change is possible?

When Archbishop Lorenzo Baldisseri, the Secretary General of the synod, was recently asked if remarried divorcees might be admitted to the sacraments, he replied, “The fact that it has been included in the questionnaire means it is going to be looked at, and the intention is to discuss the issue without any taboos, otherwise it would not have been mentioned. This seems obvious to me.”

“This is a great opportunity for Francis,” McAleese said of the synod. “Please, let us not have a bunch of men who have deliberately chosen not to have families tell us as members of families how we’re going to live our family life. Please, let us have a broad-ranging discussion in which people who have real experience of family lead the reflection.” The synod will be a test of Francis’s papacy. “If it’s going to be solely bishops talking at the synod in the way they have talked in the past, they may as well not bother going to Rome,” McAleese said.

It is clear that Pope Francis is not a liberal. But if he initiates a true shift in the way that power is exercised in the Church he may turn out to be a radical. “Can he do it?” McAleese asked. Then she answered, “He’s the Pope!”

But, in all this anticipated progress, the Church’s sexual-abuse crisis still lingers. Anne Barrett Doyle, the co-director of BishopAccountability.org, a comprehensive archive of the abuse crisis, pointed out to me that the Vatican questionnaire contains no questions about what the exploitation of children by priests has done to Catholic families. What of the broken trust? When will parents again resume the easy confidence in parish priests that was once a defining mark of Catholic life? And how will bishops resume their role as dependable shepherds?

Early this month, Francis met in Rome with bishops from the Netherlands. In 2011, an official Dutch commission concluded that Church officials had “failed to take adequate action” regarding the abuse of tens of thousands of children in Catholic institutions, going back to 1945. The Dutch Church, humiliated and penitent, was staggered. More victims surfaced. In prepared remarks, Francis was to have said to the bishops, “I wish to express my compassion and to insure my closeness in prayer to every victim of sexual abuse, and to their families. I ask you to continue to support them along the painful path of healing that they have undertaken with courage.” The text was handed to the bishops, but instead of actually speaking it Francis engaged the bishops informally, and the prepared expression of compassion, while released by the Vatican press office, was not delivered as written.

Since becoming Pope, Francis has hardly mentioned the abuse crisis. He has not met with victims, and, though continuing Benedict’s espoused “zero tolerance” of sexual abuse itself, he has yet to adjust Vatican policies governing the responsibilities of bishops. Two days after Francis’s meeting with Dutch bishops, the Vatican refused to provide the U.N. Committee on the Rights of the Child with records of its sexual-abuse investigations. A fierce critic of self-serving and entitled priests, Francis has yet to confront the way in which the inbred clerical culture itself provided the cover—and the license—both for abuse and for the denial and deflection with which bishops responded to it.

For Doyle and other critics, the failure starts with Bergoglio’s role in Argentina, a country where sexual abuse of children by priests remains a largely untold story. “The Pope should begin with his own record in Argentina,” Doyle said in a statement. “We urge him to release a complete list of all credibly accused clerics with whom he dealt. . . . He should then compel every bishop and religious superior worldwide to publish a similar list, as twenty-six U.S. bishops and religious superiors have done.”

Miriam Lewin is a prominent Argentine journalist whose investigations into priests’ abuse of children over a dozen years have helped push the scandal into the open in Buenos Aires. I asked her what she made of the Pope’s recent expression of compassion for victims. “Just words,” she said. “He should meet personally with victims. He should support civil justice against priests and send the pedophiles to jail. After that, his words will mean something.” When I asked her what she thought of Bergoglio, she answered that he has a different “kind of responsibility now.” She added, “Bergoglio is one thing. Francesco is another.”

The day after I spoke with Lewin, the Vatican announced that Pope Francis had ordered the establishment of a sexual-abuse commission, made up of priests, nuns, and lay experts, to safeguard children and respond to victims. In a statement, Doyle said that BishopAccountability.org “cautiously welcomes” the pending commission. “There is no indication that the commission will study either the Vatican’s culpability or the crucial need to discipline bishops, religious superiors and other church supervisors who enable child rape and molestation.”

VI—PRODIGAL FATHER

Last month, in his exhortation, Francis said, “We have to be like the father of the prodigal son, who always keeps his door open so that when the son returns, he can readily pass through it.” In Jesus’ parable, related in the Gospel of Luke, the younger brother has squandered his legacy, but then repents, returns home, and is fêted by the delighted father. The older brother, who stayed close and tended the homestead, is resentful. When was a fatted calf ever slain for him? Francis did not mention the brother. Yet, as John L. Allen, Jr., wrote, in the National Catholic Reporter , some Catholic conservatives, having faithfully toed the line of Church discipline, respond to the open-armed inclusiveness of Francis by identifying with that unhappy brother. The Times columnist Ross Douthat, who offers “praise for Pope Francis’s rhetoric and emphases,” worries that “what we’re seeing is just the pendulum swinging back toward the progressive style in Catholic theology, in ways that may win the Church a temporary wave of good publicity but ultimately just promise to sustain the long post-Vatican II civil war.” Douthat, who is thirty-four, is especially impatient with Catholics of my generation for, as he sees it, forcing the choice between “God’s love and God’s justice, between the immanent and the transcendent, between solidarity with the marginalized and doctrinal fidelity.” The ambivalence of Catholic conservatives was perfectly caught by Stephen Colbert in October at the white-tie Al Smith dinner, at the Waldorf-Astoria. Self-described as “America’s most famous Catholic,” Colbert said, “I believe the Pope is infallible. But he’s also wrong about a lot of things.” Colbert added that if Francis were at the dinner we “wouldn’t know, because His Humbleness would be out washing the feet of the coat-check guy.”

Archbishop Charles Chaput, of Philadelphia, a leading conservative figure in the American Catholic Church, became famous during the Presidential campaign of 2004 for raising the issue of whether John Kerry, a pro-choice Catholic, should be allowed to receive Communion. Chaput was widely quoted last summer as having said that Catholic conservatives “generally have not been really happy” with Francis. Last month, at a meeting of U.S. bishops in Baltimore, he clarified his remarks. “I was not criticizing the Holy Father,” Chaput said. “What I brought up was that I’m aware there are people who are critical of the Holy Father.” (Francis himself told Spadaro he had been “reprimanded” by critics.) As if speaking for the disgruntled older brothers, Chaput added, “And that it’s important that he talk to them, too.” Chaput encouraged disapproving conservatives to suspend judgment about Francis. “We should look at him after a year, rather than trying to size him up at each speech.”

I went to see Davíd Carrasco, the Harvard historian of religion. His high-ceilinged office at the Mesoamerican Archive, in the Peabody Museum, is dominated by an image of Our Lady of Guadalupe. He is a large middle-aged Latino, bearded and balding, and wears his hair nearly to his shoulders. Without any cue, he said of Francis’s papacy, “What came to me was the prodigal-son story, only here it’s the prodigal father! It’s not the prodigal son who’s gone out and is returning. It’s the prodigal father—the father of the Church who seemed to have gone away.” Carrasco added, “Away from so much of what John XXIII meant.” He went on, “It’s as though there’s a return of this father who is supposed to protect us, guide us, and love us.” A return from abuse, authoritarianism, misogyny—all the ways, beyond the Church, the fathers of this age have let us down.

Is that why the response to Pope Francis has been so outsized? Catholic enthusiasm is understandable, but the globe’s? Mary McAleese told me that even “kick the Pope” Orangemen in Northern Ireland love Pope Francis. The press is obsessed with him. Time recently named him Person of the Year. The Huffington Post reported the speculation that Francis, garbed as a lowly priest, steals out of the Vatican at night to care for Rome’s homeless. Legends like that suggest a new readiness to look at what a Pope can be. Francis is clearly a world figure, but a figure of what? “I would like us to make noise,” he told a throng of young people in Brazil in July. “I want the Church to be in the streets; I want us to defend ourselves against all that is worldliness, comfort, being closed and turned within. Parishes, colleges, and institutions must get out, otherwise they risk becoming N.G.O.s, and the Church is not a non-governmental organization.” But, of course, the Church is an N.G.O.—the largest in the world. Roman Catholicism is the only worldwide institution that crosses boundaries of north and south, east and west, affluence and abject poverty. Given that reach, how can the human family thrive without a reformed, critically minded, ethically responsible Catholic Church? Does Francis’s explicitly Christian message of a loving merciful God survive, even in the secular age, as an inchoate symbol of the human longing for transcendence?

Observing the couple who presented themselves to the Pope in St. Peter’s Square, I realized, as the Pope pressed his hands on the bowed head of the stricken man, that curing and healing are not the same thing. To cure is to remove disease. To heal is to make whole, and wholeness can belong as much to the infirm as to the healthy. “The first reform,” Pope Francis said, “must be the attitude.” ♦

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Pope Francis explains 'who am I to judge' in his new book

Vatican City, Jan 12, 2016 / 03:02 am

In his new book on God's mercy, Pope Francis explains that his oft-quoted words "who am I to judge", about a homosexual person who is searching for the Lord with a good will, is simply his reflection on Church teaching found in the catechism.

The Name of God is Mercy , to be released Jan. 12, is a book-length interview of Pope Francis by Italian journalist Andrea Tornielli. The book is meant to "reveal the heart of Francis and his vision," according to Tornielli's foreward. He had wanted to ask the Pope about mercy and forgiveness, "to analyze what those words mean to him, as a man and a priest."

The journalist asked Pope Francis about his experience as a confessor to homosexual persons and about his "who am I to judge" comment, made during his in-flight press conference from Rio de Janeiro to Rome July 28, 2013.

"On that occasion I said this:  If a person is gay and seeks out the Lord and is willing, who am I to judge that person?" Pope Francis told Tornielli. "I was paraphrasing by heart the Catechism of the Catholic Church where it says that these people should be treated with delicacy and not be marginalized."

"I am glad that we are talking about 'homosexual people' because before all else comes the individual person, in his wholeness and dignity. And people should not be defined only by their sexual tendencies: let us not forget that God loves all his creatures and we are destined to receive his infinite love. I prefer that homosexuals come to confession, that they stay close to the Lord, and that we pray all together. You can advise them to pray, show goodwill, show them the way, and accompany them along it."

The book includes nine chapters following the foreword by Tornielli, consisting of questions-and-answers between him and Pope Francis. It includes as an appendix Misericordiae vultus , Francis' papal bull announcing the Extraordinary Jubilee of Mercy.

In the work, Pope Francis explains that he considers the present day a special time of mercy for the Church. He chose to hold a Year for Mercy through prayer and reflection on the teachings of recent Popes, as well as his own thought of the Church as a field hospital for sinners.

"Mercy is God's identity card. God of Mercy, merciful God. For me, this really is the Lord's identity," he reflects.

In The Name of God is Mercy, Pope Francis includes advice for confessors and for penitents.

More in Vatican

 Pope Francis receives Amazon founder Jeff Bezos

"I feel compelled to say to confessors: talk, listen with patience, and above all tell people that God loves them," he said.

And Pope Francis' advice for making a good confession is that the penitent "ought to reflect on the truth of his life, of what he feels and what he thinks before God. He ought to be able to look earnestly at himself and his sin. He ought to feel like a sinner, so that he can be amazed by God. In order to be filled with his gift of infinite mercy, we need to recognize our need, our emptiness, our wretchedness. We cannot be arrogant."

The best way to participate in the Year of Mercy, Pope Francis said, is to be open to God's mercy.

A believer "should open up to the Mercy of God, open up his heart and himself, and allow Jesus to come toward him by approaching the confessional with faith. And he should try and be merciful with others."

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• Franciscan Spirit Blog

Pope Francis: Who Am I to Judge?

• March 13, 2017
• Diane M. Houdek

A Word from Pope Francis

We are all masters, we are all experts, when it comes to justifying ourselves. We all have an alibi to justify our shortcomings, our sins. We so often respond with an ‘I don’t know!’ face, or with an ‘I didn’t do it, it must have been someone else!’ face. We are always ready to play innocent. Before and after confession, in your life, in your prayer, are you able to blame yourself? Or is it easier to blame others?

When one learns to blame himself he is merciful with others. And he is able to say: “Who am I to judge him, if I am capable of doing worse things?” This is an important phrase: “Who am I to judge another?” This is understood in the light of Jesus’s words: “Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful,” and with his call not to judge. How we like to judge others, to speak ill of them! Yet the Lord is clear: “Stop judging and you will not be judged. Stop condemning and you will not be condemned. Forgive and you will be forgiven.” It is certainly not an easy road, which begins with blaming oneself, it begins from that shame before God and from asking forgiveness from Him: ask forgiveness. Precisely from that first step we arrive at what the Lord asks us: to be merciful, to judge no one, to condemn no one, to be generous with others.

Taking the Word to Heart

One of the phrases most likely to be associated with Pope Francis is the one he uses here: “Who am I to judge?” He used it in a conversation with journalists early in his papacy, when someone asked him about gay priests. And he used it again in the summer of 2016 in response to the tragic mass shooting at a gay nightclub in Orlando. Some people have tried to explain it away, saying that he was caught off guard, didn’t mean what he said, or perhaps it was a problem of translation. But here we see that it’s a phrase that he has thought about deeply and taken to heart. This isn’t a question of moral relativism. Rather, it’s an openness to the mercy of God not only for oneself but for everyone. If God doesn’t judge us for our many failings, who are we to judge others harshly?

Blaming others, especially for something we’ve done, is an attitude that we ought to outgrow sometime in our toddler years. But like many of the other remnants of original sin (remember Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden), we cling to this finger-pointing, especially when we feel challenged, threatened, or perhaps just embarrassed at being caught in a compromising situation. Pope Francis has been an extraordinary role model in the art of being perfectly human and perfectly Christian. He makes it look and sound so easy, perhaps because he comes to us with the wisdom of decades learning to do this himself.

Bringing the Word to Life

Jesus reserved his harshest words in the Gospels for those who thought they were religiously and spiritually superior to others. As soon as we think we’re better than someone else, we set ourselves up for a fall. When are you likely to do this? What might be a better response?

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Who Am I to Judge?

Pope Francis asked the title question aboard the papal plane while returning from Brazil on July 28, 2013. He made international news when asked whether there was a gay lobby in the Vatican during a press conference aboard the plane. He answered, “If a person is gay and seeks God and has good will, who am I to judge?” This question later returned in December 2019 with the two-year synodal process of the German bishops which ended in February 2022. According to a press release issued by the German bishops at its opening, the process began with an “expert consultation” conducted by four diocesan bishops “on whether the prohibition of homosexual acts by the Church’s magisterium was ‘still up-to-date’ – and whether artificial contraception should still be condemned by the Church for ‘both married and unmarried’ couples,” among other things. The purpose of this essay will be to answer Pope Francis’s question in view of assessing the results of the German Synod which recently concluded “with votes in favor of draft texts calling for same-sex blessings and changes to the Catechism on homosexuality.”

So, who am I to judge? An obvious answer to the question is, “I am no one to judge,” since the Father has committed all judgment to his Son, Jesus Christ (Jn. 5:22), leading St. Paul to exhort the Romans “to stop judging one another” (Rm. 14:13). We are not meant to judge another person by closing the loop of justice on his or her life with a final verdict before God when the final verdict belongs to Christ, and Him alone. There is always hope for any man or woman this side of the grave to meet God, repent, and return to the way of salvation. Jesus testified to this upon the cross when He forgave the repentant thief (Lk. 23:43). The conclusion follows: we are no one to judge and so, “stop judging,” right? Well, yes and no.

We are not meant to judge another person by closing the loop of justice with a final verdict on his or her life before God, since all such determinations have been handed over to Jesus by the Father. But there is another sense in which we must judge, namely, as it relates to conscience, because conscience is a judgment. Pope Saint John Paul II defined conscience as follows in Veritatis Splendor (#59): “The judgment of conscience is a practical judgment , a judgment which makes known what man must do or not do, or which assesses an act already performed by him. It is a judgment that applies to a concrete situation the rational conviction that one must love and do good and avoid evil. This first principle of practical reason is part of the natural law” (italics in the original).

We are obliged to form our conscience on how to make judgments about good deeds to be done or evil ones to be avoided, while suspending fully resolved judgments about persons as they stand before God, whether in life or in death. As regards discernible judgments relative to good and evil, it would be indefensible to say that Pope Francis intended for us to suppress our consciences by asking the question, “who am I to judge?” In fact, we are making these judgments all the time. For example, it is commonplace today to judge McDonald’s as a subpar establishment for eating dinner and when was the last time anyone mounted a vigorous defense of laying on the couch, day and night, binging series episodes on Netflix ? Judgments about diet, exercise, and entertainment affect our life in the body, but so do judgments about sexual behavior and practice. It would be inconsistent to say that one set of judgments about life in the body is acceptable, namely, diet and exercise, while the other set of judgments is not.

It would be unsustainable for Catholic life to press the no-judgment clause into becoming a full-blown suppression of conscience, whereby deeds are no longer assessed and judged as to their goodness or evil. There’s too much at stake – like salvation and life – to sustain that degree of negligence. The received word of God has perennially assessed same-sex activity and artificial birth control to be contrary to human nature as designed by the Logos and so to be avoided. Yet the German bishops were poised to suppress well-formed judgments of conscience based in the received word of God which, according to Dei Verbum (#10), is not “Scripture alone” but Scripture and tradition: “Sacred tradition and Sacred Scripture form one sacred deposit of the word of God.” The sacred deposit of the word of God possesses power for promoting life in time and in eternity; it is the message of salvation laid down in Christ who entrusted it, not to scholars in Jerusalem by disputation, but to the apostles in His life, death and resurrection. It doesn’t belong to scientific “experts,” but to believers and experts who believe. Authentic interpretation of this sacred deposit is entrusted to “the living teaching office of the Church” which “is not above the word of God, but serves it, teaching only what has been handed on, listening to it devoutly, guarding it scrupulously and explaining it faithfully in accord with a divine commission and with the help of the Holy Spirit.”

This means that the word of God in the Catholic Church concerning sexual morality possesses an eternal horizon and not only a temporal one. By our life in the body, the horizon should be dawn, not dusk; the Son should be rising on our life, not setting and the sacred deposit of the word of God is our guide. It was, however, judged suspect by the German bishops for being “out of date” with more recent “advancements” in science whose aim and focus is temporal, not eternal. Human reason and the sciences enter into the formation of conscience to be sure, but the genius of the word of God down through the ages has been the convergence of human reason with divine revelation through faith, a convergence of the temporal with the eternal, not only for this generation, but perennially and consistently throughout all generations, everywhere, since the time of Christ and the apostles. Science alone cannot supply a goal to Catholic life that does it justice. This comes only through divine revelation laid down and fulfilled in Christ which provides the eternal perspective and instruction necessary for properly evaluating the truth and benefit claims found within science.

So, to answer the question, “who am I to judge?” might look something like this in the first person for any practicing Catholic: I am a fully initiated and believing member of the Catholic Church who has inherited a long and rich tradition of Catholic teaching, universally applied, which aims to preserve and enhance, rather than harm or compromise human life and dignity in time and for all eternity. I, therefore, attempt to put the long held, developed, and sacred deposit of the word of God into practice by allowing it to form my judgments about life in the body, seeking to put into practice good deeds while avoiding evil ones. By the sacramental calling I receive as a Catholic through faith, I feel challenged to conform the times to eternity rather than eternity to the times and remain grateful for this sacred heritage.

Image: BERLIN, GERMANY, FEBRUARY – 16, 2017: The painting of Last Judgment in church Marienkirche by Michael Ribestein (1558). Shutterstock: Renata Sedmakova

By Fr. Dan Pattee

Fr. Dan Pattee, TOR currently serves as a Parochial Vicar at St. Andrew Catholic Church in Fort Worth, Texas. He previously served for 29 years as a professor of theology at Franciscan University in Steubenville, OH and has been a priest for 35 years and a TOR Franciscan for 41 years.

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By Msgr. Charles Pope, September 12, 2017

A few years ago a certain famous Catholic posed the following rhetorical question: “Who am I to judge?” It was a question heard ’round the world. Although the remark was taken out of context (he was speaking of a person with sinful and disordered tendencies who was living uprightly nonetheless), the world didn’t care. For a sinful, slothful world to hear a clergyman say, “Who am I to judge” was a cathartic victory. “Yes!” a jubilant but jaded world acclaimed. “The mean, hateful, judgmental Church has been tamed. All is well. Everything is just opinion. No one has the right to judge me!” Never mind that the very ones who are telling us not to judge are enacting a moral law in their very act of banishing moral law; they are making a judgment in the very act of forbidding judgment. Logic and rational consistency do not seem to be necessary in times like these.

The question “Who am I to judge?” is not really a rhetorical question, though. It actually has an answer—in fact many answers. Let’s look at some of them, especially in the this past Sunday’s (23rd Sunday of the Year) focus on fraternal correction.

Who am I to Judge? I am a watchman. Scripture says, Son of man, I have made you a watchman for the house of Israel; whenever you hear a word from my mouth, you shall give them warning from me. If I say to the wicked, “You shall surely die,” and you give him no warning, nor speak to warn the wicked from his wicked way, in order to save his life, that wicked man shall die in his iniquity; but his blood I will require at your hand (Ez 3:17).

Thus I am commanded, under pain of the loss of my own soul, to correct the sinner. This requires that I judge, according to the Lord’s teachings, what is right from what is wrong, and that I must warn those who persist in sin unrepentantly or who celebrate sin. If I fail to do so, I become part of the problem and will share in the penalty.

Who am I to Judge? I am a lover of souls, called to concern for the salvation of all. Scripture says, You shall not hate your brother in your heart: rather, you shall rebuke your neighbor, and not suffer sin upon him (Lev 19:17).

Notice how this text equates a failure to correct the sinner with hating him. This is precisely the opposite of what many people say when they equate any rebuking of sinful behavior with “hate speech.” However, it is those who wink at sins who are acting hatefully and promoting trouble for souls (see Proverbs 10:10).

St. Thomas sets forth fraternal correction as an act of charity, for to love is to will the good of the other. Being free of sin and on the road to salvation is good for the other.

This Levitical text above reminds us that if we love others we cannot suffer sin to be upon them because sin promotes suffering and endangers salvation.

Scripture also says, Whoever turns a sinner from the error of his way will save him from death and cover over a multitude of sins (James 5:19).

In judging what is right from what is wrong, I am acting as a lover of souls who does not want to see others die in their sins.

St. Paul goes so far to command the community of Corinth in regard to a certain sinner: You are to deliver this man to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus (1 Cor 5:1). In other words, Paul instructed the Corinthians to excommunicate him, thus exposing him to the full effects of his sin. Note that this was not done for vengeance; it was a loving, last effort to save the man’s soul before the last judgment.

Who am I to Judge? I am a guardian, called to protect the Church, my family, and the world from wrongdoing. St. Paul warns that Bad company corrupts good morals (1 Cor 15:33) and that a little leaven (i.e., evil) leavens the whole lump (Gal 5:8).

Thus, in correcting the sinner, we are concerned not only for him or her, but for the community and the common good as well. Sinful and disordered behavior is harmful to community. Not only does it bring suffering to the sinner and others affected by the sin, but it also gives scandal and may incite unhealthy responses such as vengeance or hateful anger.

There are times when, after repeated correction of the sinner fails, we must purge the sinful influence for the sake of the community. St. Paul says, We instruct you, brethren, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, to shun any brother who walks in a disorderly way and not according to the tradition they received from us (2 Thess 3:6). Here, St. Paul seeks to preserve the community from disorder and heresy. He also declares, I wrote to you not to associate with anyone who bears the name of brother if he is guilty of sexual immorality or greed, or is an idolater, reviler, drunkard, or robber—not even to eat with such a one. Is it not those inside the church whom you are to judge? (1 Cor 5:11)

These more severe methods are sometimes necessary to reach a hardened sinner as well as to protect the community. Once again, this requires judgment.

Who am I to Judge? I am one who has been commanded by Jesus to do so. Jesus sayid, If your brother sins, go and point out his fault, just between the two of you. If he listens to you, you have won him over (Mat 18:15).

The clear mandate of the Lord to set others right. This is not possible without first judging what is right from what is wrong based on the Lord’s teaching. Then, having observed wrongdoing or error, we must seek to correct it.

The Lord expects us to correct people we know and who are in sin. We ought to do it in humility and with love, but we are to do it. This is especially true if we are in a role of leadership or prominence: a pastor, teacher, parent, or elder.

In all of these senses, who are you not to judge?

There are certain judgments that we cannot make. For example, I cannot judge that I am holier than you, or that you are more holy than I. Scripture says, Man sees the appearance, but God looks into the heart (1 Sam 16:7). I cannot tell you if someone is in Hell; only God can make that judgment. I am also forbidden the “judgment of condemnation,” wherein I am unnecessarily harsh in punishments or conclusions. In this regard, Jesus, using the poetry of couplets, says, Do not judge and you will not be judged; do not condemn and you will not be condemned (Luke 6:37). Indeed, the Lord further issues this warning regarding unnecessarily harsh judgments: For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured back to you (Mat 7:2).

None of this is a mandate for silence in the face of sin or wrongdoing. We must judge between good and evil; we cannot shirk our duties to correct error and to rebuke sin in others. Who am I to judge in this regard? I am a watchman, a lover of souls, a guardian, and one who has been commanded by Christ to speak to a brother who sins. And just we are called to correct, we must also be open to correction ourselves.

Here is a final word from Paul, reminding us of our need to judge what is right from what is wrong and compassionately call to those lost in error and sin:

Brethren, if a man is overtaken in any sin, you who are spiritual should recall him in a spirit of gentleness. Look to yourself, lest you too be tempted. Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ (Gal 6:1).

_________________________________________

Msgr. Charles Pope is currently a dean and pastor in the Archdiocese of Washington, DC, where he has served on the Priest Council, the College of Consultors, and the Priest Personnel Board. Along with publishing a daily blog at the Archdiocese of Washington website, he has written in pastoral journals, conducted numerous retreats for priests and lay faithful, and has also conducted weekly Bible studies in the U.S. Congress and the White House. He was named a Monsignor in 2005.

http://www.ncregister.com/blog/msgr-pope/how-to-respond-when-people-say-who-am-i-to-judge

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The Two-Way

International, pope francis discusses gay catholics: 'who am i to judge'.

Bill Chappell

Pope Francis returned to Rome on Monday after his trip to Brazil. The flight included a news conference in which the pope struck a conciliatory tone about gay Catholics. He also explained what he keeps in his black bag. Andreas Solaro/AFP/Getty Images hide caption

Pope Francis returned to Rome on Monday after his trip to Brazil. The flight included a news conference in which the pope struck a conciliatory tone about gay Catholics. He also explained what he keeps in his black bag.

Gay people should be integrated into society instead of ostracized, Pope Francis told journalists after his weeklong trip to Brazil. Answering a question about reports of homosexuals in the clergy, the pope answered, "If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge?"

In what's being called an unusually broad and candid news conference, Francis took questions from reporters for more than an hour as he flew from Brazil to the Vatican; his plane landed Monday.

One question centered on recent reports in Italian media that accused the Vatican Bank's Monsignor Battista Ricca of having an affair with a Swiss Army captain. In response, Francis said he looked into the reports but found nothing to support the allegations.

The pope also used the occasion to expand on his June remarks about a "gay lobby" in the Vatican, clarifying that "he was against all lobbies, not just gay ones," the Italian news agency ANSA reports.

"Being gay is a tendency. The problem is the lobby," ANSA quotes the pontiff saying. "The lobby is unacceptable, the gay one, the political one, the Masonic one."

The pope's view of gays is being seen as diverging from his predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI. As The Associated Press reminds us, Benedict "signed a document in 2005 that said men with deep-rooted homosexual tendencies should not be priests. Francis was much more conciliatory, saying gay clergymen should be forgiven and their sins forgotten."

"The Catechism of the Catholic Church explains this very well," Francis said, according to the BBC . "It says they should not be marginalized because of this but that they must be integrated into society."

During the news conference on the 12-hour flight home, the pope was also asked about women's role in Catholicism.

Pope Francis reiterated that the Church will not ordain female priests, saying that the stance was "definitive." But he also said that the question of how to reflect the importance of women had not yet been answered fully.

"It is not enough to have altar girls, women readers or women as the president of Caritas," he said, according to the Catholic Herald . "Women in the church are more important than bishops and priests," he said, in the same way that "Mary is more important than the apostles."

The pontiff also addressed a less serious question: What did he have in the black bag he carried during his trip?

The AP reports:

" 'The keys to the atomic bomb weren't in it,' Francis quipped. Rather, he said, the bag merely contained a razor, his breviary prayer book, his agenda and a book on St. Terese of Lisieux, to whom he is particularly devoted. " 'It's normal' to carry a bag when traveling, he said. 'We have to get use to this being normal, this normalcy of life,' for a pope, he added."

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What Pope Francis really meant with 'Who am I to judge?'

by Robert McClory

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What Pope Francis really meant

There's been a lot of discussion in the secular media about what Pope Francis really meant when he said, "Who am I to judge?" Some (including Chicago Cardinal Francis George) insist the statement changes nothing; some believe the words mark an epochal opening up of the church's approach to gay issues; still others see the pope's words as a betrayal of official church teaching.

I tend to disagree with the most extreme positions, wherever they come from. But I firmly believe the pope's words were meant to change church practice regarding homosexuality in the priesthood and the acceptance of candidates for the priesthood who are gay. And that is no small thing.

Pope Benedict XVI several years ago signed a document declaring that bishops should not ordain anyone who had "deep-seated homosexual tendencies." Their orientation to the same sex, he said, must be considered a "disorder." I think for most bishops, Benedict's declaration became the law. Men aspiring to the priesthood either had to stay in the closet and deny their tendencies or discard their hopes of being ordained. It's hard to imagine someone approaching a seminary rector or a vocations director and acknowledging that he indeed has homosexual tendencies but that they are "shallowly seated," not deep-seated. Where can you go from there?

As he flew back from Brazil, Francis was responding to a question about the so-called gay lobby among clergy in the Vatican. He dismissed the lobby part, but then went on to say this about gay clergy: "If they love the Lord and have goodwill, who am I to judge them?" adding that gay priests "shouldn't be marginalized. A tendency to homosexuality isn't the problem. They are our brothers."

In other words, gays who are willing to take on the basic requirements of priesthood and are otherwise qualified should be welcomed into seminaries, ordained and treated as equal to their heterosexually oriented brothers. In view of the pope's statement, Benedict's ban has become outdated. I think it will be practically impossible in the future for a bishop to reject a candidate solely on the grounds that he has gay tendencies.

The more Pope Francis speaks, the more he sounds like John XXIII, and that is something to rejoice over. Since the end of the Second Vatican Council, I don't believe we've really had a Vatican II pope until Francis. His words about the poor, the laity and the need for listening with open hearts seem like they're coming straight out of Vatican II's documents themselves.

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'Who am I to judge?': The pope's most powerful phrase in 2013

Could five little words uttered in 2013 change the course of the Catholic Church?

Pope Francis — also known as Time's Person of the Year and Twitter's #bestpopeever — has done a lot of talking since he was installed on the throne of St. Peter in March, tackling everything from luxury cars to income inequality in a series of interviews, sermons and written exhortations.

But for veteran Vatican watcher John Thavis, the pontiff's most significant pontificating came July 29 when he gave a press conference on a flight back from Brazil.

"Who am I to judge?" he asked.

Francis was addressing the issue of gays in the church, but it was the tone as much as the topic that caught the public's attention.

"The fact is that previous popes in talking about homosexuality had always mentioned the word 'disordered' and when you use that term, it immediately alienates," said Thavis, author of "The Vatican Diairies."

"Not only did Francis not use that word. He avoided the whole concept."

The fact that the pope — the infallible leader of the world's 1 billion Roman Catholics — refused to sit in judgement of gay priests (who were banned by his predecessor) was hailed as remarkable, even revolutionary.

It's an approach he has taken on any number of subjects — atheists, unwed mothers, divorcees. Scolding is out in Rome; hand-holding is in.

"This comes after Pope John Paul II spent 15 years rewriting the catechism of the Catholic Church and eight years of Benedict reinforcing that: 'How do you measure up to our teachings? Are you qualified to call yourself Catholic?'" Thavis said. 

"Francis is saying the church is a big tent and he has to be welcoming. It's an incredible change."

For Thomas Reese, a Jesuit priest like Francis, the most important words from Francis this year were written, not spoken.

"Look at the title of his latest apostolic exhortation. It's 'the joy of the Gospel,' not the 'the truth of the Gospel,'" he said.

"He has rebranded the church as welcoming, compassionate, a church for the poor as opposed to a church that nags people and is worried about rules and regulations," said Reese, author of "Inside the Vatican."

"The analogy I love to use is when you go home for Christmas, what you want is a hug from your mom. You don't want to be asked about your nose ring, or why you dyed your hair, or who are you sleeping with now? He is trying to turn the church into a loving parent, not a nagging parent."

More often than not, when asked which of Francis' comments this year resonated most with them, Catholics immediately mentioned his gestures, not his quotes.

Riding the bus back to the guest house after being named pope. Washing the feet of prisoners on Holy Thursday. Turning an '84 Renault into the Popemobile. Celebrating his birthday with the homeless. Embracing a disfigured fan. Cold-calling people who write to him.

Some have suggested it's style over substance. Despite what he says and no matter how many selfies he takes with visitors, Francis has not changed church doctrine.

Priests still can't get married, abortion remains a grave sin, and two men can't walk up the aisle in a Catholic Church. Francis even excommunicated an Australian priest who advocated the ordination of women and gay marriage.

And yet his words have given hope to those pushing for change.

Deborah Rose Milovec, the head of FutureChurch, which supports the ordination of women, seized on this line from his November apostolic exhortion: "Demands that the legitimate rights of women be respected, based on the firm conviction that men and women are equal in dignity, present the Church with profound and challenging questions which cannot be lightly evaded."

"Giving people permission to dialogue — that's a breath of fresh air," she said. "There are many ways he has held his hand up and said, 'No, not yet,' but that sort of statement begins to open a crack in the door.

"That kind of statement is important because it says to me we have something to work with here. I have real hope he will sit down with feminist theologians and listen to what they have to say."

If there is one theme that has dominated Francis' public pronouncements this year it has been his love and sympathy for the poor and downtrodden.

"How I would like a church that is poor and for the poor," he said days after the black smoke wafted out of the Sistine Chapel chimney. His November exhortation slammed unchecked capitalism and income inequality.

Rush Limbaugh frothed that the new pope is a Marxist. But in Melbourne, Fla., Kathy Gilliland, 56, liked what she was hearing.

Visiting the majestic St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York City this week, Gilliland said it both surprised and delighted her that her spiritual leader — who has forsaken the opulent trappings of the Vatican for a spartan guest house — understood the struggles of the middle class at a time when the wealthy are richer than ever.

"I think it shows he's in touch with the modern world," she said. "It shows he's more humane."

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“Who Am I to Judge?” Revisited

James v. schall, s.j..

On the Internet, Pope Francis’ question  “Who am I to judge?” – is cited hundreds of times. Almost always, the citation implies some approval of homosexual life-style. Two scriptural passages are close to the same phrase: “Who was I (Peter) that could withstand God?” (Acts 11:17); “Who are you to pass judgment on another’s servant?”   (Romans 14:4)

Pope Francis’s question occurred in and interview as he was returning from   World Youth Day in Rio . The pope referred to a gay person who “is searching for the Lord and has good will.” In that context, one could say: “Who am I to judge?” But what of one who does not “search” or have “good will?”

If the same gay man were actually confessing in the Sacrament, the priest would have to “judge” either to give absolution or not, depending on his assessment of the man’s resolve to “sin no more.” If the man did sin and was repentant, his sins are forgiven. Forgiveness, however, is not license to return to old ways, even though it is difficult to change habits. We can sin again and be forgiven again. Forgiveness of sins is what Christianity is about. It is not about making what is a sin not a sin.

Pope Francis words – “Who am I go judge?” – are usually understood to mean that what is called by the Scripture or the Church a “sin” need not be considered as such. Thus, analogously, practitioners of divorce, contraception, homosexuality, drugs, adultery, abortion, fetal experimentation, and euthanasia are no longer “judged” to be “wrong.”

In this misreading, the Church has “changed.” Not even the pope, by his own admission, can say anything effective about those who engage in such practices.

A whole industry has arisen to show that this pope did not “mean” to change any basic teachings. He was restating the classical doctrine that God was the final judge of each individual soul. He did not mean that God suddenly changed His mind on divorce, fornication, adultery, abortion, homosexuality, gay marriages, euthanasia or other widely practiced issues.

“Who am I to judge?” means, basically, that God makes the laws of being. We do not. But He does make them. They are for our good. To violate any one of them will undermine some aspect of our being and good. We can trace what happens when we make what is evil to be good in the lives of human beings and societies.

“Sin,” as such, is evil, but that is not the last word. We can freely repent. The New Testament begins with “repent and believe.” What cannot be “forgiven” are “ideas” that make evil good in such a way that we now advocate what is evil as “our good.” When Pope Francis cited the “Who am I to judge?” passage, he was widely understood to have, in effect, blessed relativism. Many people today simply “assume” that, with Pope Francis, the Church has now accepted “modernity.” Implicitly, she admits that her famous prohibitions were wrong.

The similar passage in Acts concerned the salvation of Gentiles. The immediate issue was eating meat of animals designated as “unclean” by the Old Law. Peter has a vision, guided by the Holy Spirit, no less. He sees that all animals, tame and wild, are clean. All of these are good. (I often cite this passage to my vegetarian friends). Peter had just insisted that he would not violate the Law. He is corrected. He is to distinguish what is essential from what is not. He is not to “withstand” (judge) God.

Peter is thus free to eat, or not eat, whatever he wants. He just cannot say to someone who enjoys quail or pork chops that it is “wrong” to eat them. Such a principle, of course, cannot be used to recommend sugar, a good, to a diabetic. We are still to use our brains.

Peter was not only corrected about food, but also about who can be included in the new community. At first, Peter thought only Jews were to be included. But suddenly he is confronted by Cornelius, a Roman soldier. (Acts 10) He has had a vision. He is to go to Joppa and find Peter. Peter realizes that this man must be accepted.

Peter finally says: “I begin to see how true it is that God shows no partiality. Rather the man of any nation who fears God and acts uprightly is acceptable to him.” (11:34-35) Peter does not say that anyone who leads a life that is not “upright” is “acceptable” to God. To “fear” God obviously means that God stands for something, not just anything.

The glorious run of “Who am I to judge?” has often become a tool to reverse the moral order. It can confuse the liberation that comes from acting rationally within metaphysical and moral order with acting “freely,” wherein nothing exists but what “I judge,” whatever I choose.

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James V. Schall, S.J. (1928-2019), who served as a professor at Georgetown University for thirty-five years, was one of the most prolific Catholic writers in America. Among his many books are The Mind That Is Catholic , The Modern Age , Political Philosophy and Revelation: A Catholic Reading , Reasonable Pleasures , Docilitas: On Teaching and Being Taught , Catholicism and Intelligence , and, most recently, On Islam: A Chronological Record, 2002-2018 .

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• “Cantare, Amantis Est” - Tuesday, March 26, 2019
• On the Divine “Plan” - Tuesday, March 12, 2019
• On Hell - Monday, February 25, 2019
• “Why Do I Exist?” Revisited - Tuesday, February 12, 2019
• On Plato - Tuesday, January 29, 2019
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On Gay Priests, Pope Francis Asks, ‘Who Am I to Judge?’

By Rachel Donadio

• July 29, 2013

ROME — For generations, homosexuality has largely been a taboo topic for the Vatican, ignored altogether or treated as “an intrinsic moral evil,” in the words of the previous pope.

In that context, brief remarks by Pope Francis suggesting that he would not judge priests for their sexual orientation, made aboard the papal airplane on the way back from his first foreign trip, to Brazil, resonated through the church. Never veering from church doctrine opposing homosexuality, Francis did strike a more compassionate tone than that of his predecessors, some of whom had largely avoided even saying the more colloquial “gay.”

“If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge?” Francis told reporters, speaking in Italian but using the English word “gay.”

Francis’s words could not have been more different from those of Benedict XVI, who in 2005 wrote that homosexuality was “a strong tendency ordered toward an intrinsic moral evil,” and an “objective disorder.” The church document said men with “deep-seated homosexual tendencies” should not become priests.

Vatican experts were quick to point out that Francis was not suggesting that the priests or anyone else should act on their homosexual tendencies, which the church considers a sin. But the fact that he made such comments — and used the word “gay” — was nevertheless revolutionary, and likely to generate significant discussion in local dioceses, where bishops are divided over whether to accept priests who are gay but celibate.

“It’s not a great opening in terms of contents, but the fact that he talked about it that way is a great novelty,” said Paolo Rodari, a Vatican expert at the Italian daily La Repubblica. Francis would probably agree with Benedict’s writings on homosexuality, he added, “but it doesn’t interest him.”

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BLOG // LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS

Who am i to judge.

I thought it would be fun.

And, as a volunteer judge for this year’s National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Award (given to an “outstanding first book in any genre”), I did have fun. At least, I had fun doing the reading.

But as the clock ticked toward the 5 p.m. voting deadline on a January afternoon, I sat in my local public library branch clicking and unclicking boxes on the Google form that served as our ballot. I was confronting a crisis of critical confidence, wrestling with those perennial questions of authority, standards, and taste, as well as the unsettlingly arbitrary nature of literary production and prize-giving. I liked almost all of these books. Voting for just one seemed wrong.

It was 4:45.

In her 2001 book The Forest for the Trees , Betsy Lerner, agent-turned-editor-turned-agent-again, describes one of her first tasks in publishing: writing a reader’s report on an unsolicited manuscript for her superior at the literary agency she’d just joined as an editorial assistant. Lerner labored over a long weekend, teasing apart the themes of the not-very-good book like the diligent grad student she was. Her boss rejected the four-page single-spaced report, asking instead “Did you like it?”

Lerner didn’t. She wrote a simple rejection for the boss to sign.

But the thing that had driven her to spend a couple thousand words and a three-day weekend qualifying and hedging her blunt dislike was the question of authority. Did she have any?

“Who was I, after all, to judge this writer?” Lerner asks, anticipating Pope Francis by a dozen years or so. “Who was I to pass judgment on this Joe Shmo who couldn’t draw a convincing character or punctuate to save his life but who had, after all, written an entire novel?”

Lerner says she lost her “publishing virginity” that day, her first confrontation with the fact that book publishing is something less than a meritocratic enterprise. While prepared to say the book was bad, she hadn’t been prepared to unilaterally snuff out a writer’s dreams — not, at least, without having a superior sign off on the kill.

This year’s Leonard finalists were hardly Lerner’s Shmos. Each had achieved some measure of success: publication, critical acclaim, other awards. But that actually makes the job that much harder. As a paid-up member of the NBCC willing to read each of the six finalists, I was, by the organization’s lights, qualified to cast a ballot. But my month-long, breathless tour of these debuts had me wondering, pace Lerner and the Pope, “who am I to judge?”

As a 39-year-old English professor — white, straight, married with children — who has not yet published a book of his own, I am, demographically, the very model of a modern literary gatekeeper. As such, I tried to be attentive to the various political, gendered, socioeconomic, racial, and ethnic perspectives on offer.

This is not to say I intended an affirmative action program. Rather, that in a prize where the lone criterion — “outstanding” where? Standing out from what? — is fungible, and as such is subject to whim, caprice, mood, and even appetite, I wanted to be mindful of the ways I might be letting familiarity of set, setting, or perspective lead me to favor one writer’s work over another.

Most major prizes are helpfully bounded by genre, giving a judge at least some broad outlines and a canon against which the works in question might be considered. But how does one stack Layli Long Soldier’s book-length poetic interrogation of the United States’ toothless apology to America’s indigenous people up against Carmen Maria Machado’s or Lesley Nneka Arimah’s short stories steeped in magic realism? How do we consider those against Zinzi Clemmons’s autobiographical novel of being a third-culture kid against Julie Buntin’s compelling tragedy of white working class teenagers adrift on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, or Gabriel Tallent’s disturbing yet beautifully-written tale of violence and incest in Mendocino County?

I couldn’t vote for Tallent’s My Absolute Darling , even though I couldn’t stop reading it. This psychological portrait of a 14-year-old incest victim offered a compelling answer to the question “why not just leave?” (answer: she loves her father, she is in his thrall), but the scenes of rape and physical abuse crossed some ineffable line from “provocative” to “too disturbing to choose.”

It’s 4:50. The NBCC board member in charge of Leonard Prize voting emails with a reminder that there are 10 minutes until the polls close. Other judges must be in the same boat.

With your more prestigious prizes — your Pulitzers, your National Book Awards, even the “main” NBCC awards themselves — there’s a smaller group of judges, usually past winners or otherwise well-regarded writers, who confer over the selection and arrive at some sort of consensus. In this case, each judge decided in isolation. As one vote among several dozen, I wielded a tiny amount of power in the literary-industrial complex, but it was enough to make me break into a sweat at the prospect of the “wrong” decision.

I may have made that wrong decision in dinging Zinzi Clemmons’s What We Lose — the story of a 20-something African-American woman’s loss of her South African-born mother and the navigation of her own early adulthood. I’m a would-be memoirist with a predilection for nonfiction, and when I realized that Clemmons’s book was largely autobiographical, I felt miffed on behalf of memoir. This was just enough for me to drop it below the remaining four candidates.

Unfair? Totally. Critics are inveterate “on-the-other-hand”ers, able to make our own case while acknowledging the validity of other perspectives. Were I to write a review of Clemmons’s book, I’d register my question — why fictionalize? — even as I admired her use of some collage effects (other documents, photographs) to tell a moving story.

But with under 10 minutes to go in this zero-sum game, I have to start making some distinctions, even arbitrary ones.

I click the box for Buntin. Her Marlena provided a truer portrait of white working class anxiety and precariousness than a thousand elegies for the hillbilly. It’s the best novel I’ve read this year.

I click Machado. Her Body and Other Parties was a National Book Award finalist. She’s in residence at the University of Pennsylvania’s Kelly Writers House, where I spent a chunk of my undergraduate career.  I’m aware of the possibility that the hype and the tenuous connection to my old school might be weighing too heavily, even as I unclick.

My cursor hovers near Arimah. Her What it Means When a Man Falls From the Sky dazzled. There were stories that taught me about the Nigerian diaspora in America and some others with a fantasy/sci-fi tinge that hit with the force of a fable. But I read it first (alphabetical order!), and I can’t help but feel that distance has dulled the shine.

I click on Long Soldier. I read Whereas last. This collection faces the ongoing trauma of Native American loss. I’d had a sneaking suspicion that it would appeal to the English professor in me, with its extended interrogation of the text of the United States’ apology to the native population — especially the codicil declaring that nothing in the policy should be construed as having legal force. Long Soldier’s anger is constrained by the form of the resolution, but her words dance all over the extra-wide pages, (re)claiming territory. I read it one sitting, and then again in another sitting.

Am I succumbing to recency bias? Possibly. I click submit.

In an essay published around the same time as Lerner’s book, the writer Tom Bissell describes his own encounter with wielding power in publishing. He “cannot help but imagine that literature is an airplane.” However, instead of “pilots of skill and accomplishment […] the cockpit is empty” and “the controls are abandoned.” To know this, Bissell says, you need “only to touch them to know how mutable our course.”

Everyone who follows contemporary literature knows the feeling of seeing a previously unknown writer start to pop up everywhere. Prizes attract attention, and sometimes more prizes. Success snowballs into success. I wanted to be part of the literary-industrial machinery, but I quailed when it came time to execute my small mission. I was afraid of somehow making the wrong choice. The odds in publishing are so long, the odds of finding yourself in the running for a major award even longer.

My willingness to vote for any of four other books doesn’t really matter to the writers who would remain finalists. If I’d been in a room with my fellow judges, I’m sure I could have been persuaded to vote for Arimah, Buntin, Clemmons, or Machado — who, in the end, won. It would have felt like cover, if we’d all come to a decision together.

Instead, alone, I’d mashed the key for Long Soldier (who did win the NBCC Award for Poetry), staring directly into the maw of the myth of meritocracy. Each book bore merit. Each was “outstanding” in some fashion. Some confluence of taste, interest, and politics led me to vote for Whereas .

The moral? The next time you come across a shiny sticker on a book’s cover boasting some award or other, look up the finalists, too.

Who Am I to Judge?

Who Am I to Judge? Dr. Edward Sri offers insights into the beauty of the Catholic moral worldview, and shows why this view is superior to relativism.

Questions Covered:

• 17:03 - I see how there’s a problem with “same-sex marriage” and the Bible speaks against it, but many just don’t listen to us. How do we talk to others about this without being hurtful?
• 20:30 - My sister was recently married in the Church, after a civil marriage. My brother-in-law is going through RCIA. The priest did not require him to go to confession before receiving communion at the wedding. I was not comfortable with this, but don’t want to be judgmental. Is this a real concern, or something to be decided within a diocese? 
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• 52:25 - How did Moral Relativism become so mainstream? Was it a slow process?
• Who Am I to Judge? Responding to Relativism with Logic and Love by Edward Sri
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Who Am I To Judge?

A t noon I have to be at the local Catholic school—let’s call it St. Dismas—to train altar servers. I will arrive a few minutes early, and by 12:05 most of the kids will have trickled in. We are in Southern California, so most of the boys at St. Dismas wear short pants year-round. Students are required to attend one Mass per month with the school, but it has never occurred to anyone, not their parents, not the pastor, not the teachers, and certainly not the students, that they should wear pants to Mass. The girls wear skirts that in 1966 would have been described as “micro-minis.” When I told the boys’ parents that I expected them to wear their uniform pants to Mass when they become servers, the school principal—a genial thirty-something man who insists on the rigorous use of the title “Dr.” but often wears sweatpants and flip-flops to work—cornered me outside his office for a talk. He warned me that I might get some pushback from parents on the pants requirement. “We are only a medium -Catholic school,” he informed me. “We’re not really that Catholic.”

When we walk as a group into the nave (the church itself is almost barren of Catholic art or iconography), none of the kids bow or genuflect before the tabernacle. They are unaware that this is something they should do. They don’t know, because none of these children attend Mass on Sunday. When they do become altar servers, they will be dropped off moments before Mass begins and picked up by an idling SUV before the organ has finished the recessional. From time to time, the parents of altar servers can be seen standing outside the church, hunched over a smart phone, killing time while they wait for Mass to finish.

At this point in the school year, the first-time altar servers have developed a rudimentary understanding of what is expected of them during Mass, but when they began their training in September they needed quite a lot of attention. As I said, they attend Mass once a month with their class, but never on Sunday. Therefore, none of them are aware of the Gloria, the Credo, or the Second Reading. On the first day of training, several kids made the Sign of the Cross in the eastern fashion, and I had to take several minutes to correct them. I brought this up with a member of the school administration, and she was somewhat surprised. The kids say a morning prayer each day, she said, and they begin with the Sign of the Cross. It’s possible that no one ever corrected them. I have never seen any of the teachers at Holy Mass, so it seems likely that this sort of attention to detail isn’t a priority for them either.

The children know nothing of vestments, sacramentals, the prayers of the Church other than the Hail Mary and the Our Father, feast days, or the concept of Sanctifying Grace. None has been to confession since the first one, but all receive communion without any thought. If their parents are forced into Mass, they too will line up for communion and receive it happily and without qualm. The teachers aren’t practicing Catholics, the parents aren’t practicing Catholics, and the parish priest would never dare suggest to the congregation that they go to confession. He correctly understands that there would be outrage among his flock.

T he pastor at St. Dismas is a gay man. It is quite possible that this priest—let’s call him Fr. Dave—lives a life of celibacy. I have no reason to doubt that he does. He presents himself, however, as a traditional, American “queen.” He is a kind and gentle priest, and I think the kids genuinely like him. He does everything he can to take part in the life of the school, and he always has a warm word for parishioners, students, and parents. Fr. Dave has been my primary confessor for about six years. His style in the confessional is orthodox. He makes no attempt to psychoanalyze me, and he levies a serious penance when I deserve it. He is also quite reverent as a presider at Holy Mass. He does not improvise, and he makes it plain that he considers Mass to be a grave and solemn occasion.

Fr. Dave knows better than to suggest to his flock how to live as Catholics. He does not speak of sin. Ever. He does not discuss the saints, devotions, the rosary or prayer of any kind, marriage, death, the sacraments, Catholic family life, the Devil, the poor, the sick, the elderly, the young, mercy, forgiveness, or any other aspect of the Catholic faith that might be useful to a layperson. His homilies are the worst sort of lukewarm application of the day’s Gospel reading—shopworn sermons that sound very much like they were copied word for word from a book of Gospel reflections published in 1975. No one in the pews ever discusses his homilies as far as I can tell.

The pews are not full. The most crowded Mass is at ten-thirty on Sunday morning, when the church is usually about two-thirds full. Holy days of obligation draw almost no one. I attended the Easter Vigil last year and the Church was half empty. The crowd at a typical Sunday Mass is mixed. There are quite a few elderly parishioners who sit together and ignore the rubrics of the Mass. They refuse to kneel after Communion, they hold hands during the Our Father, they chat loudly before and after Mass, and they roam the Church greeting their friends, seemingly unaware that others might want to pray in silence. The most prayerful and reverent congregants are the handful of Filipino families. The other Mass-goers are a smattering of middle class families, stray Catholic singles, and a few Latin American die-hards. After Mass, the older people hang around and shake hands with the pastor. Everyone else drives away. I know only a small handful of my fellow parishioners, and I hesitate to bring any of this up with them. It doesn’t seem worth it.

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How to Respond When People Say, ‘Who Am I to Judge?’

I am a watchman, a lover of souls, a guardian and one who has been commanded by Christ to speak to a brother who sins.

A few years ago a certain famous Catholic posed the following rhetorical question: “Who am I to judge?” It was a question heard ’round the world. Although the remark was taken out of context (he was speaking of a person with sinful and disordered tendencies who was living uprightly nonetheless), the world didn’t care. For a sinful, slothful world to hear a clergyman say, “Who am I to judge” was a cathartic victory. “Yes!” a jubilant but jaded world acclaimed. “The mean, hateful, judgmental Church has been tamed. All is well. Everything is just opinion. No one has the right to judge me!” Never mind that the very ones who are telling us not to judge are enacting a moral law in their very act of banishing moral law; they are making a judgment in the very act of forbidding judgment. Logic and rational consistency do not seem to be necessary in times like these.

The question “Who am I to judge?” is not really a rhetorical question, though. It actually has an answer—in fact many answers. Let’s look at some of them, especially in the this past Sunday’s ( 23 rd Sunday of the Year ) focus on fraternal correction.

Who am I to Judge? I am a watchman. Scripture says, Son of man, I have made you a watchman for the house of Israel; whenever you hear a word from my mouth, you shall give them warning from me. If I say to the wicked, “You shall surely die,” and you give him no warning, nor speak to warn the wicked from his wicked way, in order to save his life, that wicked man shall die in his iniquity; but his blood I will require at your hand (Ez 3:17).

Thus I am commanded, under pain of the loss of my own soul, to correct the sinner. This requires that I judge, according to the Lord’s teachings, what is right from what is wrong, and that I must warn those who persist in sin unrepentantly or who celebrate sin. If I fail to do so, I become part of the problem and will share in the penalty.

Who am I to Judge? I am a lover of souls, called to concern for the salvation of all. Scripture says, You shall not hate your brother in your heart: rather, you shall rebuke your neighbor, and not suffer sin upon him (Lev 19:17).

Notice how this text equates a failure to correct the sinner with hating him. This is precisely the opposite of what many people say when they equate any rebuking of sinful behavior with “hate speech.” However, it is those who wink at sins who are acting hatefully and promoting trouble for souls (see Proverbs 10:10).

St. Thomas sets forth fraternal correction as an act of charity, for to love is to will the good of the other. Being free of sin and on the road to salvation is good for the other.

This Levitical text above reminds us that if we love others we cannot suffer sin to be upon them because sin promotes suffering and endangers salvation.

Scripture also says, Whoever turns a sinner from the error of his way will save him from death and cover over a multitude of sins (James 5:19).

In judging what is right from what is wrong, I am acting as a lover of souls who does not want to see others die in their sins.

St. Paul goes so far to command the community of Corinth in regard to a certain sinner: You are to deliver this man to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus (1 Cor 5:1). In other words, Paul instructed the Corinthians to excommunicate him, thus exposing him to the full effects of his sin. Note that this was not done for vengeance; it was a loving, last effort to save the man’s soul before the last judgment.

Who am I to Judge? I am a guardian, called to protect the Church, my family, and the world from wrongdoing. St. Paul warns that Bad company corrupts good morals (1 Cor 15:33) and that a little leaven (i.e., evil) leavens the whole lump (Gal 5:8).

Thus, in correcting the sinner, we are concerned not only for him or her, but for the community and the common good as well. Sinful and disordered behavior is harmful to community. Not only does it bring suffering to the sinner and others affected by the sin, but it also gives scandal and may incite unhealthy responses such as vengeance or hateful anger.

There are times when, after repeated correction of the sinner fails, we must purge the sinful influence for the sake of the community. St. Paul says, We instruct you, brethren, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, to shun any brother who walks in a disorderly way and not according to the tradition they received from us (2 Thess 3:6). Here, St. Paul seeks to preserve the community from disorder and heresy. He also declares, I wrote to you not to associate with anyone who bears the name of brother if he is guilty of sexual immorality or greed, or is an idolater, reviler, drunkard, or robber—not even to eat with such a one. Is it not those inside the church whom you are to judge ? (1 Cor 5:11)

These more severe methods are sometimes necessary to reach a hardened sinner as well as to protect the community. Once again, this requires judgment.

Who am I to Judge? I am one who has been commanded by Jesus to do so. Jesus sayid, If your brother sins, go and point out his fault, just between the two of you. If he listens to you, you have won him over (Mat 18:15).

The clear mandate of the Lord to set others right. This is not possible without first judging what is right from what is wrong based on the Lord’s teaching. Then, having observed wrongdoing or error, we must seek to correct it.

The Lord expects us to correct people we know and who are in sin. We ought to do it in humility and with love, but we are to do it. This is especially true if we are in a role of leadership or prominence: a pastor, teacher, parent, or elder.

In all of these senses, who are you not to judge?

There are certain judgments that we cannot make. For example, I cannot judge that I am holier than you, or that you are more holy than I. Scripture says, Man sees the appearance, but God looks into the heart (1 Sam 16:7). I cannot tell you if someone is in Hell; only God can make that judgment. I am also forbidden the “judgment of condemnation,” wherein I am unnecessarily harsh in punishments or conclusions. In this regard, Jesus, using the poetry of couplets, says, Do not judge and you will not be judged; do not condemn and you will not be condemned (Luke 6:37). Indeed, the Lord further issues this warning regarding unnecessarily harsh judgments: For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured back to you (Mat 7:2).

None of this is a mandate for silence in the face of sin or wrongdoing. We must judge between good and evil; we cannot shirk our duties to correct error and to rebuke sin in others. Who am I to judge in this regard? I am a watchman, a lover of souls, a guardian, and one who has been commanded by Christ to speak to a brother who sins. And just we are called to correct, we must also be open to correction ourselves.

Here is a final word from Paul, reminding us of our need to judge what is right from what is wrong and compassionately call to those lost in error and sin:

Brethren, if a man is overtaken in any sin, you who are spiritual should recall him in a spirit of gentleness. Look to yourself, lest you too be tempted. Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ (Gal 6:1).

Msgr. Charles Pope Msgr. Charles Pope is currently a dean and pastor in the Archdiocese of Washington, DC, where he has served on the Priest Council, the College of Consultors, and the Priest Personnel Board. Along with publishing a daily blog at the Archdiocese of Washington website, he has written in pastoral journals, conducted numerous retreats for priests and lay faithful, and has also conducted weekly Bible studies in the U.S. Congress and the White House. He was named a Monsignor in 2005.

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“Who Am I to Judge?”

An Overview of the Context and the Themes of the Contributions

From the book “Who Am I to Judge?”

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Who Am I Essay: Writing Tips and Sample

Your “Who am I?” essay is a paper where you describe yourself as a person. Mention what inspires and motivates you, what you love and don’t love, your goals and wishes, etc.

In this article, you’ll learn how to write this personal essay. (And please don’t miss a ready-made example to understand what to describe in your work!)

How to Write a “Who Am I” Essay

You’re that person who knows you best, but writing about yourself is still challenging:

You read a writing prompt for a college application or scholarship , and you aren’t sure if you understand it in detail. How do you know what exactly to mention in your essay? You can’t find words to describe your nature and skills. How do you know if that particular accomplishment or story from your life is worth including?

Stick with us here for practical tips on writing a “Who Am I” essay, with a free template to follow.

How to start?

Ask any writer, and they will tell you that the hardest part of the writing process is to start it. It’s a kind of writer’s block when you stare at a blank screen and don’t know what to write. Below are several ideas that can help you craft a compelling essay about yourself:

• Think about one sentence that would describe you best. (A technique some authors use for inspiration: Answer the question, “What would friends write on your grave?” or “What do you want the world to remember about you?” You can start an essay with that phrase.
• In the introduction, describe yourself in general . (Be truthful and honest.)
• Discuss one or two of your hobbies. (Choose those you’re most passionate about, those influencing your mood — and maybe your skills — most.)
•   Highlight your achievements but don’t boast. ( Be reflective by analyzing and evaluating what you’ve achieved.)
• Add some personality to the essay. (Tell anecdotes, include examples, and be creative to keep readers engaged with your story.)

Short Essay About “Who I Am” Sample

You’re welcome to use the below template from our professional writer for crafting your future “Who am I” essays. Here it goes:

Actionable Tips to Improve Your Paper

Ready to start writing? Consider these helpful tips on crafting a person essay about who I am:

1) Understand your audience

Who will read your essay? Is it a college admission officer who knows nothing about you? Or, maybe it’s your school teacher with some background of who you are? Do you plan to publish your reflection for your social media followers or blog readers?

Depending on the audience, your story may change. Add details about what interests your readers: What would they want to know? Understanding your readers will make your essay more compelling (1). It will be easier for you to engage them and make them emotionally connected to your story.

2) Don’t be afraid to look vulnerable

Allow the readers to see your inner feelings. Sincerity and reflection are the new black, you know. It’s okay to speak about your strengths, weaknesses, or worries to the audience. That’s what differentiates you from other people, thus making you an individual.

Here’s the big secret:

Admission committees appreciate students’ understanding of their weaknesses and areas to grow. Communicate the willingness to change and grow. You’re just a human, after all.

Write about what you want to develop in yourself. Or, tell about life experiences that have changed or influenced you most.

3) Proofread and edit your essay

Once your essay is ready, it’s time to proofread and edit it. Here’s a short checklist of the details to fix if any:

• Grammar and punctuation mistakes (verb tenses, sentence structure)
• Spelling errors and inconsistencies in names or terms
• Incorrect capitalization
• No logical flow or transitions between paragraphs
• Excessive wordiness and repetition
• Biased language
• Too much passive voice and redundant adverbs
• Too sophisticated words and phrases that have simpler alternatives

That’s It: Your “Who Am I” Essay Is Ready

In this blog post, we tried to cover all the core details of personal essay writing. Now you know how to start it, what elements to include, and how to craft it for better readability and emotional connection with the audience.

We hope our 500-word essay example will help you write your perfect story about yourself. If you still have any questions, don’t hesitate to ask our professional writers for help.

References:

• https://summer.harvard.edu/blog/12-strategies-to-writing-the-perfect-college-essay/
• Essay samples
• Essay writing
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Thank you for featuring three op-eds on climate change. Now everyone needs to answer Michelle Obama’s question: What are you going to do? There are simple and effective actions people can take. Volunteer for the Environmental Voter Project, which works to have people who are concerned about the environment become regular voters. Volunteer for Citizens’ Climate Lobby, the most effective organization in the country at helping Congress to pass meaningful climate legislation. It’s election season, ask candidates what they are going to do about climate change and remind them you are a climate voter. Joan Baez said “action is the antidote to despair.”  We are grateful the Union-Tribune gave so much space to this critical issue. Now it’s up to the rest of us to get to work.

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