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Father Hugh Barbour explains what Jesus meant when he said the measure with which we measure will be measured back to us. Is he really going to judge us the way that we judge others? If so, its time to get to work on all that judgment, gossip, and resentment.
Cy Kellett:
Are you telling me I can never judge somebody? Father Hugh Barber, next.
Cy Kellett:
Hello and welcome to Focus, the Catholic Answers podcast for living, understanding and defending your Catholic faith. I’m Cy Kellett, your host, and are you judgmental? Are you resentful of other people because of the judgments you make about them? Well, Jesus has some teachings about that and we can often think that the teachings of Jesus, that we are not to judge others, are for their benefit, that he’s telling us that so that we’ll give the gift of our lack of judgment to other people. But actually, by teaching that, He’s giving a gift to us.
Cy Kellett:
Father Hugh Barbour is our guest today and we discussed that. And one of the great things to remember about Jesus’s teaching on judgment is it includes this little nugget: that you’ll be judged as you judge. So the judgment that Jesus will pass on you can be a very, very easy one. You just have to do that for other people. Here’s what Father Hugh had to say.
Cy Kellett:
Father Hugh Barbour, Thank you for being with us again.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
Happy to be here.
Cy Kellett:
I find that other people, not me, end up judging others and having resentment.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
Yeah, I’ve noticed people have that problem too.
Cy Kellett:
But not you either.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
No, no, no.
Cy Kellett:
I’m glad to hear it. So let’s talk about those poor souls who do end up judgmental and resentful.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
Yeah. I’m glad we can talk about a problem that I’ve never had, but I do have a lot experience with people that I judge are that way.
Cy Kellett:
So you can draw on that.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
[crosstalk 00:01:38] Yeah, I can draw on that. Even though I’m not a judgmental person and the people that annoy me who are resentful, but I won’t be resentful myself. Yes. There you go. That’s enough of the humor. Now we can stop. Okay. In any case, so you’ve got it set up. It’s all set up.
Cy Kellett:
First of all, this is a very, very kind of interior problem to have. This is like getting right to the core of us when the Lord talks about judgment and that kind of thing. So maybe refresh us on what he says and what it means.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
Well, our Lord, in the Sermon on the Mount, He tells us, “Judge not that you not be judged, for with the judgment you pronounce, you will be judged, and the measure you give will be the measure you get,” and so on. And we know the rest of it, “Why do you take the speck out of your brother’s eye when there’s a beam in your own,” all of that. And I think the first thing is our Lord takes it personally. He’s a very competent man, the most competent of men, a man who is God.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
Now His principle function after being the Savior of the human race as a man is to judge the living and the dead when He comes again in glory. Those are his two offices. When we judge our neighbor in an absolute sense, in a moral sense, then we are arrogating to ourselves something that belongs to Jesus.
Cy Kellett:
Belongs to him, yes.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
We normally wouldn’t say, “I will save you from your sins.”
Cy Kellett:
No, right!
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
No, we wouldn’t. Because we’ve been taught at least by the Baptists that you can’t say that kind of thing.
Cy Kellett:
No, and thank God for Baptist teaching.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
Right. Thank heavens. All right. No, no, we get, that’s a little joke too, but anyways. We know we’re not anybody’s savior. Now we know as Catholics that we can aid in their salvation and we can merit and pray for them and all that. But when we judge other people, we really, and truly pretend in that British sense of the term, make the pretense of being able to judge someone else’s interior dispositions.
Cy Kellett:
So would you say, pushing him out, elbowing him out of his…
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
Pushing him out of the way.
Cy Kellett:
His proper job.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
And you know, the thing is, we’re quick to object and I’ve heard so many good Christians, but kind of frazzled by modern culture or their life experiences who will say, “Judge not judge not.” That’s what they always say. But you know you have to judge things. Some things are wrong and they say, Yes, actions are wrong. Behavior can be wrong. It can be gravely wrong. It can be devastatingly wrong, but you can judge the actions, but the origin of the action that is the original intention or moral state of the actor, you cannot reliably judge with anything close to infallibility.
Cy Kellett:
No. Right.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
Only Jesus knows man fully through and through. John Paul II used to say that “He alone knows what is in man. He alone.”
Cy Kellett:
So, the difference would be like, okay, somebody let’s say someone cuts me off in traffic. This is one of my pet peeves, because I spent a lot of time on the road. Okay.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
You probably thought ill of me, because I’m so clueless, because I cut people off all the time. But I don’t even know what that means. You could explain to me what cut people off means. I think I’m probably doing it. Go ahead.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. Right. Well, I’m a terrible driver, which is another reason why I don’t like people to cut me off because I will kill somebody. So the person cuts me off. Now, here, I can say, “Well, that was rude.” Or I can say “What a jerk.” It seems to me that those are two different kinds of judgements. That one of them is the judgment of the action. That was a rude action what that person did. And the other is a judgment of the person who did that action. Is that what you’re getting at?
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
Yeah, that’s exactly in that regard.
Cy Kellett:
Well, I always do the second one. So I got to stop that. I’m always like, “What a jerk”.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
Well, part of it is the culture and it’s kind of the standup comic culture where it seems funnier or more satisfying to say “What a jerk” then “How rude.” “How rude” sounds a little bit sissy. But the fact is that if you think about it, that with very few exceptions, people’s traffic bloopers are not intentional. They don’t want other drivers angry at them, and they’re not trying to offend anyone. There are people that do, you know, road rage and all that, but the fact is we can evaluate an action. We have to, but the internal intention we’re incapable of evaluating. We can’t know that because the will of a person, the state of their choice, their imputability we call it; how much blame they bear. It’s impossible to know that. It really and truly is. And we cannot, we cannot form a judgment about it.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
And yet we want to go there, because we’re like little gods in our own world. And we not only want to not like what someone did, but we take it all the way to the cause. And that’s part of our human nature. You know, we see the effect. We want to be able to know the cause. And so we think we know the cause when we see someone’s defective behavior and we don’t see what underlies it. And St. Thomas has really clearly in The Summa, and it goes along with what’s in scripture. I can share with you some other nice passages in St. Paul, the epistle of the Romans. St. Thomas says that we should, when we have a doubt about someone, we should always, always, he says, always choose the better judgment.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
That you will do less evil by being deceived and judging well of someone who is evil
Cy Kellett:
Yeah.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
Many times then you will do by judging badly someone who is innocent, even once. He says, “Because when you judge the innocent unjustly, you actually cause an injury.” but when you attribute to a wicked man, a goodness he does not possess, you have done him no wrong.
Cy Kellett:
No. Right.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
And so he’s very clear about that. He says, “Always.” Now, St. Thomas is pretty, he’s checked out. He uses language very, very precisely. And he says “”always, and he says, “The only time that you can make a judgment which presumes ill will,” and that’s all you can do is presume it “is when it’s manifest, when the person announces it.”
Cy Kellett:
Oh yeah. “I hate you.”
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
He practically says, “I hate you and I’m going to get you. And here’s the knife.” Even then though, you don’t know if the person is psychologically skewed, you just don’t know.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
And even civil law admits that some horrible crimes are not entirely imputable. So, what we do this continually, and we do it as though someone contradicting my preferences to how things should turn out is somehow something evil.
Cy Kellett:
Right? Because…
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
Someone, yeah.
Cy Kellett:
Because my preferences are so good and so important that you have done evil to get in my way or choose that when I thought we should choose this.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
And this goes even to the other side of just that it’s not only seeing really bad behavior and then judging harshly and unjustly the person who has the bad behavior, it’s calling things evil which aren’t. Like, you’re at work and you have a coworker and you’re kind of in competition. And you think you know how to do things better than that other person. But the boss sometimes takes his side or her side rather than yours.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
And you begin to resent this person because “Oh, he’s just kissing up. Oh, he’s just manipulating. Oh.” You know, and never considering that the person has perfectly good will and wants to do the best job possible and is very happy to the boss, took his advice and you’re not. And why? Because you think that your will is a standard of goodness. And it’s not a standard of goodness. It’s only a standard of what you want. And as St. Thomas says brilliantly in one place, “It does not pertain to my perfection what you want or you choose. All that pertains to my perfection is truth.”
Cy Kellett:
Just one little sidetrack before we move on then, because you started to mention resentment and I want to talk about resentment and its relationship to judgmentalness. But there is a certain kind of judgment about another person’s character that you have to make. For example, the parent who just doesn’t feel right with the kids around somebody, or you see what I’m saying? So sometimes you have to judge persons in a sense.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
Right. And this is an area which requires great prudence, and that’s largely what the virtue of prudence has to do with social arrangement, especially when you’re dealing with your children about who they can associate with. Who they should go with or not, or whose house they can go to and all that kind of thing.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
Basically is that there’s judgment and judgment of evil of someone else without sufficient evidence, especially without manifest evidence, is called “rash judgment”.
Cy Kellett:
Okay.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
Now that’s always wrong to judge evil of someone when there’s no evidence or a little. Or hardly. But there’s the there’s the case of suspicion. Suspicion is based on experience, and so it moves a little more in the direction of certainty or of a standard of judgment, which would be fair, especially if you have the care of other people. And so a legitimate suspicion based upon your knowledge of such situations or your knowledge of that category of people. You’re not going to send your 16 year old daughter to a frat house party. You know, you’re just not. You’re not saying that that all the guys there are drunken fornicators,
Cy Kellett:
But they are.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
But the chances of her meeting up with one is very, very, [crosstalk 00:11:22]
Cy Kellett:
Sorry. I got judgmental there for a second, but I know exactly what you mean. Yes, there’s a kind of prudence then, and having that suspicion…
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
And so based on suspicion, you can say “No, you can’t go over there and no you can’t date one of them, you have to visit with someone your own age, within our eyesight.” So suspicion legitimizes to a certain degree, but only when you have the necessary concern for someone else’s welfare. Just because you look at someone and go, “He looks like the kind of person that would do X, Y, and Z,” or “What on earth does she think she’s doing?” You know, when you see someone walk across the parking lot just these attitudes we have towards people, we form all these judgements because someone fits a certain stereotype that we’ve gotten from the media, or maybe our own past experience, but it’s vain, it’s frivolous. It has nothing to do with that person’s good or you’re good.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
Why not, if you see someone who looks odd or like the kind of person that wouldn’t be a good person, why don’t you pray for their eternal salvation? Why do we get into it and go to this like, “Gosh, look at that one.” Because we entertain ourselves. It’s that standup comic mentality that we think we should translate into day-to-day life. And I’m nothing that stand up comics. But I mean, the fact is that’s an understood genre of communication where people can laugh. It kind of lets the steam out from certain difficult human situations. And so it would be boring of you to say, “Well, that’s really uncharitable,” because you can caricature behaviors, but not persons whom you know. So the rash judgment is something to be avoided at all cost, but sometimes we are allowed to make judgements based upon our suspicions, but that’s only when we are responsible for the care of certain persons or a community. Or also if we are all by ourselves and we’re trying to avoid a possible danger or injury.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
So it’s not rash judgment to get it to the other side of the street when you know, a…
Cy Kellett:
The Hell’s Angels are walking out the other side?
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
The Hell’s Angels are probably pretty nice nowadays,
Cy Kellett:
Are they?
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
Comparatively.
Cy Kellett:
Well good. I’m sorry. I apologize to all the Hell’s Angels.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
I don’t know. That’s okay. I don’t know. I mean our old abbey site where, we just moved to a brand new abbey, but the old one was right…By our driveway going up was this old biker dive, which is still there. Biker dive. And I saw a lot of those folks, the real ones that are there on the weekdays not just the doctors and lawyers that dress up as, you know, “vroom, vroom”.
Cy Kellett:
The pretenders.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
The real ones. And they always seem most polite and reasonable, very respectful of clergy.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
So as far as I can tell, they were [crosstalk 00:14:03].
Cy Kellett:
Well, I’m glad to hear that.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
But the point is that a reasonable judgment or a suspicion, and of course, obviously there are certain situations which are positively hostile like warfare or police work, where you are not there to assume the best of everyone. So St. Thomas says “In your private life, regarding private individuals, without your issue with concern for the common good, you are not allowed to make a negative judgment about someone. You are always to try to choose the better side of the judgment,” but, and this is the other side. It’s like the, what’s his name? The, the FBI guy, “The facts, ma’am, just the facts.” What’s his name?
Cy Kellett:
Oh, not FBI. He was in the LAPD.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
Ironsides?
Cy Kellett:
No, that wasn’t Ironsides.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
Anyway, one of those guys.
Cy Kellett:
Friday.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
Friday. So “The facts ma’am, just the facts.” So Thomas distinguishes. You are not permitted to judge the malice of someone else.
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
But regarding things, as he says, [foreign language 00:15:03] as they are, that you can judge. So even an FBI detective, he judges on what he sees happening. He doesn’t pretend to judge the intentions of the heart of the criminal that he’s looking for. And in fact, if he does that too much, he’ll get too passionate about his work, and he won’t view the criminal with enough sympathy in order to have some insight.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah, so he’ll ruin his own ability to do his job.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
He has a painful life where he’s always been trying to prove to his mother that he amount to something, you know? And so he commits these crimes in order to buy her a nice presents so that she thinks he’s rich. Something like that, where he begins to see the poor guy, that sort of thing. So, but it is true, if you were investigating evil actions and trying to prevent them, you can look into the facts. You’re not supposed to just avoid, put your head in the sand and pretend that nobody does anything wrong, but you’re never allowed to judge their internal disposition because that’s the real judgment.
Cy Kellett:
All right. If we can move then from this. The instance of judgment, but if judgment becomes a habit, it seems to me that that’s resentment. That when I’ve got to the point of like, I don’t give you a break about anything. I don’t give you the benefit of the doubt. Like certain people who make comments on the YouTube version of this very video.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
Right?
Cy Kellett:
So, yeah, I’m talking to you. There’s a certain kind of “You’re a jerk. I’ve decided you’re a jerk and everything is going to be…”
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
And they’re suspicious of everything.
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
And that’s really true in the Catholic sphere nowadays. A priest can barely give an opinion that sounds in the least bit mild about someone in difficulty without someone saying “There he goes,” because the people are so nasty about the current state of affairs that they just decide that you’re a horrible modernist because you gave a merciful answer to something.
Cy Kellett:
We’re kind of policing everybody else to see if you’re on our team or not on our team. And you give the slightest evidence that you’re not on the team then the harsh judgment comes down on you.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
Well, they’re what therapists would call “hypervigilant”.
Cy Kellett:
Yes. But there is a hyper vigilance, which comes from the instability of our society, probably.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
Right. Exactly. And they end up not trusting anybody, not the Pope, not the Bishop is not the priest. If you’re one of those they’d almost rather not trust you. You need to be a layman on a podcast, basically in order to get an answer. Otherwise, otherwise be viewed with suspicion. But anyway, here I am. So resentment.
Cy Kellett:
Yes.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
When someone wrongs you,
Cy Kellett:
Yes.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
Let’s say really, and truly objectively wrongs you, not just the example I gave from work, where you’re just upset that they’re not doing what you want. But no sin is being committed by contradicting your will. That’s very important. But some people you’d almost think you were sinning by disagreeing with them. But say someone genuinely wrongs you, treats you unjustly and ought to repent, ought to say sorry, ought to amend or whatever, but that has not happened yet.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
All right. So the thing is, when you’ve been wronged, what is there? You know something about that person. You something bad about that person.
Cy Kellett:
Right. You have certain knowledge of something bad that person has done.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
So, and you would like to have justice restored. Hopefully all you want is an apology or just for the person to stop doing what he was doing. But anyway something bad and it’s not resolved yet. So one way of struggling to re-establish justice called “the virtue of vengeance”. I mean, it’s actually a virtuous act in St. Thomas. Vengeance as restoring justice, like Superman and Batman. They have vengeance, but that’s to restorative justice. And so your way of getting justice is your pound of flesh. You tell everybody what a horrible thing that person did to you.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah, you never let it die.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
You make sure that people know it. And you say to maybe 10 different people, “I’m just venting”.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
You know, “venting”, friends is for one person. If you’re venting to a lot of people, you are gossiping, and you are committing the sin of detraction. You do not need to tell everybody what someone did to you and much less what someone did to somebody else.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
Now, granted, if the person’s applying for job as a cashier and that person’s still $200 cash out of your wallet, well there you have an interest in letting the person know that this might not be the person to employ. That’s not detraction again. That’s just due diligence for the sake of somebody else. That’s different. But say you just go around telling everyone what a jerk this person is and what he did to me and blah, blah, blah, blah. That’s detraction. It’s a sin. It’s a grave sin because you take away the person’s good name.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
And believe me, even people that do bad things have the right to their good name. They have the right to their good name. No one can say, “Because you’ve done bad things, I can tell everyone what you’ve done.” That is not right. If your bad deeds come out, say juridically in a court, or because other people find out, okay. But you yourself do not have the obligation or the right to ruin someone who otherwise has a good reputation because you happen to know some things about that person that other people don’t know that are bad. And this, our culture will not understand.
Cy Kellett:
Or accept.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
And it’s misunderstood or from the extreme right, to the extreme left and everywhere in between.
Cy Kellett:
No, you’ve got to tell because this is how we’re going to perfect our society. Everybody tells on everybody.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
Right. Now, I’m not talking about investigative journalism.But that’s a delicate matter, but it’s still for the common good, certain evils, especially deeply entrenched ones need to be revealed.
Cy Kellett:
And you’re also not talking about accusing someone of a crime to the police officer, for example, “so-and-so assaulted me.”
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
No, no, absolutely. If you have to, because you’re also protecting other people buy that. I’m talking about just letting everybody know.
Cy Kellett:
The destruction of reputations.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
Right, and that’s destroying someone’s reputation. And that is that’s simply wrong. Everyone has the right to his good name. And if you think about your past sins and realize that even though your worst sins are not crimes in the civil sense, still you know very well if they were put on film and sent out to everybody on WhatsApp, your reputation would be destroyed. And say, you have a friend that knows those things about you and just reveals it to everyone. This is a terrible sin.
Cy Kellett:
It’s horrible.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
And it happens now in schools with all this communication apparatus that we have now, just the little goofy habits of other people that are embarrassing. That’s called mockery.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
Mockery is to cause someone embarrassment. Just like murmuring is to ruin the friendships of the person, detractions to ruin the reputation. And a lot of that goes on in the same sort of context. We’re mad at the person. They’ve offended us, and now it’s free game now to try to just wreck reputation, friendships and also make them feel shamed in public. That’s all right there. And, we do it, and our media is so full of it that we don’t even notice it. In fact, we revel in it. If you get into the political sphere, you get down to the dirty little details of the foibles of the other side. And you just really enjoying, making fun of everything.
Cy Kellett:
It’s schadenfreude.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
Luckily, there’s still a little reservation that you do not go after people’s children. So usually that’s not cool. You can’t make fun of someone’s children,
Cy Kellett:
Although eventually that’ll break down because you can’t break down every norm and just leave one standing. I don’t think that’s how that works.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
It hasn’t worked that way. But we have a culture, which is… and don’t go on like “Well, they’re not pro-life and we are,” but if you’re a bitter pro-lifer who won’t even listen to the most careful reasonings regarding the different possibilities of overcoming the horrible, horrible crime of abortion, I’m not saying it’s not. But just like if you can’t handle someone, having a slightly different point of view about how it’s to be dealt with. Like say, someone says, “Well, I think we should support anything that limits the number. Even if the law is not perfect.” Well, there’s some people that would say “You’re cooperating with evil and it’s all or nothing.” Luckily they’re not too many people like that. They just want to save lives, and so they try to chip away at this evil system. But say you can demonize people easily for all these things.
Cy Kellett:
Of course.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
And you can also like saying that pair say in and of itself, or even better just circumstantially, voting for X or Y political party is a mortal sin. To promote the platform of that party as you’re running for office that could be a mortal sin. This is right there it’s written there and whatnot, but people have so many crazy motivations for what they do. And our culture is so over the top and the confused number of voices and the lack of principles and the lack of clarity that you can hardly saddle an entire congregation with such a specific moral judgment. You can’t do it. You can say if you promote these things in society deliberately as such. “I believe in free access to abortion until nine months or out,” that kind of thing.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
Or “I believe in free,” well you believe in it at all? But I mean, the point is that you have the most radical views possible, if that’s part of your platform, well then of course, that’s something you can openly oppose and judge. But again, even then the intentions of people, sometimes that voting because they’re a member of a certain union, or because their grandfather has voted a certain way, and human moral life is very, very ambiguous sometimes. Not the principles, not the things that are evil, but the fact why people do what they do is sometimes very, very hard to fathom.
Cy Kellett:
Right? And so to judge a whole category of people as bad Catholics, because they made a moral choice that you would not make.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
Right, exactly.
Cy Kellett:
Is rash judgment.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
And I don’t mean a moral choice in contradiction to the teaching of the church.
Cy Kellett:
No.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
I mean that they could be misled by clergy that teach them the wrong way, or they could make a prudential judgment that there are a number of issues that need to be decided here. I personally think that to me, it goes way beyond the realm of possibility to vote for a candidate who promotes abortion in any way. For me, I could not possibly do that. And I don’t think Catholics, if they think about it could ever possibly do that. But I don’t think it’s a good idea to demonize people who are confused about who to vote for. I think it’s better to make sure they’re properly instructed. And so because you demonize them, and I’m sure that some people were really unhappy with what I’m saying right now, but I mean, it’s quite possible. But the fact is that if you deal with souls, you realize that people are very weak.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
They’re very confused. They’re conflicting voices. And they’re like sheep without a shepherd very often. And you just can’t make those generalizations. And that goes for everyone. I mean, look at the gender ideology we have nowadays. These people, what they are undergoing, what they’re being subjected to is evil. There’s no doubt about it, but they are not necessarily evil.
Cy Kellett:
No.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
I mean, when you live in a culture where your parents are trained to ask you whether you really want to be a boy or a girl, and where your public school teacher, or even your expensive private school teacher is checking to make sure that you know you can wear girl’s clothes if you want.
Cy Kellett:
You’re comfortable. Yeah, there’s this option.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
And you’re raised that way. You may not be fully responsible for why you turned out so confused and also angry and troubled and everything else. St.Thomas says that it’s possible for someone to be invincibly ignorant, not just of the Catholic faith, but of the natural law if they’re raised that way from the very beginning. So at that point, then the attitude should be mercy, not judgment. Like “Lord have mercy on the world,” and, “Please Jesus have pity upon these poor sinners. Protect us from the evil one,” and continue to announce the truth, but not in a way which claims to judge hearts, because we hold out hope for everyone because the grace of God is a very powerful thing. And “the more the sin abounds,” so St. Paul says, “does grace abound.”
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
And if we don’t believe that about our world, then we’re not paying attention to the good news. That is that our Lord has triumphed over sin, death and the devil. And when they appear to triumph, it means that we can expect that the works of his grace hidden in human hearts, beyond the grasp of the devil.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
He can’t even see for sure whether anyone is, even not even the devil. That’s the irony. The devil is the accuser of the brethren. He can’t even know whether or not you’ve really committed a moral sin, not until you’re in hell unrepentant. Then he knows. That’s why they’re so desperate, always trying to reassure himself that he’s succeeding. And we don’t want to take that role of judging another person’s interior life, because we don’t want people to be eternally lost. We don’t want them to be condemned. We want them to be converted and attain pardon. But that’s [crosstalk 00:28:31]
Cy Kellett:
So how can I develop the habit within myself of not judging other hearts? That it is not elbowing Jesus out of His job as the judge and taking that on myself, and overcome the habit of resentment of others?
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
It can be a real spiritual struggle. But it needs to come about in the following way. That we have to reflect. First of all, we need to be saying our prayers every day. One of the prayers we always should say every day and more than once is the “Our Father”. And what do we say at the heart of the “Our Father” is so much at the heart of it that in Mark’s gospel, that’s all there is of it. “Forgive us, our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” We have to be deeply aware of our need for pardon. Of our need for being forgiven. That we have offended God and our neighbor. Which we rarely sin against God without offending our neighbor. And that we want to be forgiven, but we will only be forgiven in the measure in which we forgive our neighbor.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
Our Lord says that right away. It says right there “Judge not,” did you not be judged, for the judgment you pronounce you will be judge with that judgment and the measure you give will be measured back to you. So if you want pardon, you’ve got to pardon. You can’t be saying “I go to confession once a week. And I say my rosary every day. But I won’t talk to cousin so-and-so and I absolutely have nothing to do with my neighbor, who’s a horrible, nasty infidel, abortion,
Cy Kellett:
Toxic person.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
feminists, toxic, toxic person. Well, that’s what the other side likes to say, “toxic”. That’s a horrible expression there. A person that’s toxic? Good heavens. I mean, that’s toxic saying that about someone. And that we have to begin there, that we have to recognize our status as sinners, and that we do not want to undergo judgment.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
We want to get before the throne of God and of His judgment, which we’re going to have to stand before and we’re want to be able to say, “Lord, I did not take to myself.
Cy Kellett:
Your job.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
your throne, your job. I stand before you not having judged or having repented of judging anyone. And I did as you said, ‘Judge not.’ And so I trust and I received back the measure that I myself measured out.” That’s what he wants us to do. He tells us to pray that every day, “Forgive us, our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” We have to be sincere Christians, right? That’s it? That is the “Our Father” is as big a dogma as any specifically, really Catholic sounding teaching. Right? You know that you have to forgive your enemies and not hold grudges. Is this true? Is that our Lord is present, body, blood, soul and divinity in the blessed sacrament.
Cy Kellett:
Amen.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
It’s as true as that you should genuflect before that. It’s just true that mass facing east in my opinion is better than you know that. I mean, it’s, [crosstalk 00:31:21] But I mean, the point is we have a lot of things that we like about our religion and that we wish were a certain way, but the fact is those are the things our Lord, when He chose to teach officially as the Christ, the Messiah of the Jews and the Savior of the human race, He sat down on the Mount of the Beatitudes and he preached a Sermon on the Mount, which is all about forgiveness, mercy, avoiding judgment, of being pure of heart, all of those things. That’s what it’s about, right? He did not hand us a penny catechism. Now I love the penny catechism. And I believe in it, I believe every word in it. Promise. But you know,
Cy Kellett:
The core of it is something deeper in you than that.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
but these, these are dogmas.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
And we will not be saved if we do not judge justly. And that’s why in the apocalypse, it says “The accuser of the brethren is cast out, who night and day accused them before God,” that’s the devil he’s talking about. Because Christ is not the accuser. Christ is the consoler, the advocate who pleads for sinners, who makes excuses for them, who did it from the cross. And our Lord was crucified by people who were truly malicious. So malicious St. Thomas says that some of them knew what they were doing.
Cy Kellett:
Really? I didn’t know Thomas said that.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
Some of them knew because when he deals with that passage, he says, it doesn’t mean that none of them knew, but I was praying for them. You know. But the point is, is that real malice and in the face of that, He had a forgiving heart. You know, we would tend to be someone malicious hurts us. And then the people that help them, we at least regard them as stupid fools, but we don’t actually plead for mercy and see that in the goodness.
Cy Kellett:
Beautiful. Well, Father, may I have your blessing before we go? Thank you.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
Certainly.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
[foreign language 00:33:15]
Cy Kellett:
Without question, the teaching of Jesus that we should not judge others is often abused, especially by those who kind of want to point the wagging finger at Christians and say, “Why are you judging about this and that” when we get involved in moral conversations or conversations about what the law should be or that kind of thing. And so that scolding finger can make us be a little bit defensive about what Jesus taught, but we shouldn’t get so defensive that we forget that this is actually a really important teaching. Jesus wants us to change our hearts from judgemental hearts to hearts that are loving and open and forgiving and embracing and not resentful and not judgmental. And that’s a great opportunity that He has given us. Hey, thanks for being with us. If you want to get in touch with us, focus@catholic.com is our email address.
Cy Kellett:
And we love to get emails, focus@catholic.com. We also love to get money. Well, we need it in order to do what we do. And if you want to support us financially, you can go to givecatholic.com. We’ll leave a little note there that says this is for Focus and it’ll get to us. If you’re watching on YouTube, don’t forget to like, and subscribe. If you’re listening on Apple, Spotify, Stitcher or one of the other podcasting apps, then don’t forget to give us that five star review and maybe a few nice words to help us grow the podcast. We really appreciate it. I’m Cy Kellett, your host. See you next time right here, God willing, on Catholic Answers Focus.