To cross over the fine line that separates discerning from outright judging. To judge that my woofy friend Studly McGruff is worse than me because he sleeps around. To judge that my friends Mr and Mrs Propriety Toyota are, because straight, boring. In the Church, to judge that Father Cleancut Broadcasting is political, Sister Frigida Guiltward blinkered, the Reverend Martin-Luther Protestant heretical, and Brother Flopworth Sackcloth a spoilsport.
Okay, I know, I know: I really was too hard some pages ago on Father N.N.
The truth about Father N.N., as far as I can make it out—of course, I don’t have more than a few of the facts, but I think things through as well as I can—is that he is a prisoner of the institutional Church. If you are a simple priest, of limited energy and talent, your life is hard in various well known ways. You mediate, as it might be, and are rather universally resented for your mediating, between two difficult parish officers who feud over a single reserved parking space. Or you find that because your predecessor lacked an empathy for plumbing, lacked an affinity for pipes, lacked the charism of pastoral concern for hard-water scale, there will very shortly be an eight-thousand-dollar emergency in the downstairs kitchen. But your life is harder if, like Father N.N., you are vigorous and brilliant. Now the institutional Church becomes a most refined torturer, dangling before you first this glittering promotion, then that one. Develop this series of columns (as it were), produce that television show, and we’ll get you (as it were) an academic semester at Louvain, a posting to Rome. Be cheerfully firm with this Monsignor, respectfully independent-minded in the hearing of that Auxiliary Bishop, and your ministry will fructify in surprising ways. What I am saying here is that institutions deform people, pressing them, perhaps temporarily, into unnatural shapes.
Bearhood and judging don’t mix, much as bearhood and lying don’t. Unfortunately, inside a bear (I know this from my own case) there can be a limp-wristed, mincing, weak, judgemental rat. We have to kind of get in touch with our Inner Rat and tell him, firmly, that in this space we’re bears, not rats, thanks buddy.