Who am I to Judge?: Politics and the Problem of Moral Relativism

“Who am I to judge?”

From the moment Pope Francis uttered this line in a press conference during the return flight from a visit to Brazil in 2013, the media—and, in consequence, many people—have taken it as a kind of summary of Francis’s whole approach to Christianity. As The New Yorker recently put it, it has become a “totemic question,” the “mythic line” of his pontificate. That description is quite apt, for there are a lot of myths floating around about what the Pope was saying.

Pope Francis and Thomas Aquinas on Judging Others

In fact, the words that most people have read or heard from the Pope’s statement are incomplete and taken out of context: the Pope was expressly addressing the case of a person honestly trying to live according to the teachings of the Church; he was not calling into question that teaching. Nor has it mattered for the media or most people that the Vatican, and even Pope Francis himself, have repeatedly explained that he was only attempting to articulate what is found in the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

Indeed, generations of Catholics have long taught the same lesson about judging persons, although formulated in different words: “Love the sinner, and condemn the sin.” Here’s how the Holy Father explained this in his new book, The Name of God Is Mercy: “The Church condemns sin because it has to relay the truth, ‘This is a sin.’ But at the same time it embraces the sinner who recognizes himself as such, it welcomes him, it speaks to him of the infinite mercy of God” (50). These two elements are intrinsically connected: the Church must speak the truth about sin precisely out of love for sinners: Christ does not want them to remain trapped in their sins, since sin leads to death. Rather, Christ loves sinners and offers them the grace of repentance and forgiveness, so that, by grace, they can escape the slavery of sin and enter into life in the truth.

St. Thomas Aquinas is a good guide when it comes to the dynamic of speaking the truth without rash judgment. Aquinas teaches that, as human beings, we can only judge what we see—an exterior action, which may be a sin—but we should not presume to judge what we cannot see, the “interior movements of the heart” of our neighbor.² “Man sees what appears, but the Lord beholds the heart” (1 Kgs 16:7). “For to God alone is reserved the judgment of hidden things, among which especially are counted the thoughts of the heart. … And hence, if anyone would presume to judge of these things, it is a rash judgment.”³ Aquinas cautions us that, instead of judging our neighbor’s intentions harshly, we should presume the best of him; we should love him, and we should desire his good and, ultimately, his repentance and salvation.

Indeed, Aquinas goes even further than this when he speaks about judging persons, because there is a danger of dishonoring our neighbor if, absent clear indications of his intentions, we jump to a rash conclusion about his motives.

It must be said that it is one thing to judge about things, and another to judge about persons. For in making a judgment about things, we can do neither good nor evil to the thing about which we judge. … But when we make a judgment about persons, we can indeed do good or evil to the person we judge, because we will honor a person we judge to be good, and will consider a person we judge to be evil to be worthy of contempt. For this reason, we ought to aim at judging a person to be good, unless there is evident proof to the contrary.⁴

He continues: “It may happen that one who interprets doubtful matters for the best is more frequently deceived, but it is better to err frequently by having a good opinion of a bad person, than to err occasionally...