Replies

If you can respond to post #6 as well, I’d appreciate it.

I’ll take a piece of that action. It means that IF you judge to do so righteously and in the same measure you would wish to be judged yourself. People judge all the time. We have to for survival. I don’t go to the wrong part of town at 2:00 AM in the morning. I may be called upon to do jury duty. I will judge according to what I would wish the jury would accord me if I were a defendant. Jesus judged the Pharisees and so rightly. We can claim that same power to decry sin as long as we are not guilty of the same/worse.

I think what the Holy Father is merely expounding upon the concept of removing the log in your own eye before commenting on the speck in another person's eye. But the amount of red font that is necessary to fully explain that is very troubling. And I don't know that it's so troubling for the words that Francis, himself, uses...but because we all *know* how those words are going to be twisted....

....If you can respond to post #6 as well, I’d appreciate it.

The amount of spin control that FRoman Catholics and Catholic bloggers are engaging in to make this pope more/less palatable to themselves and outsiders has become quite the event. Have Catholics always been this malcontent with their own leaders' words? Can popes not speak for themselves? Is every layperson their own pope, rendering their own Personal Interpretation Of The Catholic Magisterium / Canon Law / Catechism / Scripture? But that's not what you asked for.

Let me address the "beam in your eye" verse you asked about. In my own mind, the issue of Christians and judgment centers around three concepts and three (other) verses. Those concepts are:

Wait And See, i.e. refusing to render a subjective short-term judgment about a person (or their salvation) until more time has passed and more information is gathered/known,
Temporal judgment, i.e. making a subjective short-term judgment about a person (or their salvation) based on externally observed behaviors, and
Eternal judgment, i.e. making an objective final judgment about a person's salvation based on lifetime behaviors and internal "heart condition"

And the three verses are:

"Judge not, that you be not judged.
For with the judgment you pronounce you will be judged, and with the measure you use it will be measured to you."
-- Matthew 7:1-2
...do you not know that the saints will judge the world? And if the world is to be judged by you, are you incompetent to try trivial cases?
Do you not know that we are to judge angels? How much more, then, matters pertaining to this life! 4 So if you have such cases, why do you lay them before those who have no standing in the church? 5 I say this to your shame. Can it be that there is no one among you wise enough to settle a dispute between the brothers, 6 but brother goes to law against brother, and that before unbelievers?
-- 1 Corinthians 6:2-3
"I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment; whoever insults his brother will be liable to the council; and whoever says, ‘You fool!’ will be liable to the hell of fire."
-- Matthew 5:22

FWIW, I myself think that your pope is taking a pastoral approach and using Wait And See when he says "Who am I to judge?" On the other hand, a large number of FRoman Catholics have rendered (Temporal ? Eternal?) judgment over Francis' spiritual state and of the Catholic church's spiritual state in response to their own interpretation of his words. IMO they have done so because they have always placed themselves in judgment over everyone else that intolerance of others has become their natural state of mind, and now it has been extended to the new pope.

Me? I'm just enjoying the show. Pass the popcorn.