On the verse most often produced to end an argument, and the half of it that never gets produced.
There is a verse of scripture that it seems everyone knows — whether they attend church or not. This verse is kept handy in their back pocket as a sort of “weapon of mass destruction.” It is produced in friend & family arguments or in comments online, often used by someone who is not otherwise in the habit of quoting Our Lord, and it is produced as a full stop: “Judge not, that you may not be judged” (Matthew 7:1).
The quotation is accurate. The use made of it is not. Whatever Our Lord was forbidding in that sentence, He cannot have been forbidding every assessment of how a man lives, because within twenty verses of saying it He commands His disciples to make several such assessments, in plain terms. Either the Sermon on the Mount contradicts itself inside a single chapter, or “judge not” means something narrower and harder than the thing it is usually made to mean.
It means something narrower and harder. And the narrower meaning asks more of us, not less — which may be why the broader one is preferred.
The sermon does not stop at verse one
Read to the end of the passage. “And why seest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye; and seest not the beam that is in thy own eye?” Christ asks, and then: “Thou hypocrite, cast out first the beam in thy own eye, and then shalt thou see to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye” (Matthew 7:3, 5).
This does not condemn judging a brother, it is a condemnation of hypocrisy. There is a second clause in verse two that binds the man who isn’t a hypocrite as well, and we’ll come back to it. But neither clause cancels the mote. The passage ends by telling you to take it out.
The next verse asks more than that. “Give not that which is holy to dogs; neither cast ye your pearls before swine, lest perhaps they trample them under their feet, and turning upon you, they tear you” (Matthew 7:6). You can’t obey that without some judgment about your hearers. The Didache, which the common estimate places in the first century, within the lifetime of some of the Apostles, read it of the Eucharist and drew the obvious conclusion: “But let no one eat or drink of your Thanksgiving, but they who have been baptized into the name of the Lord; for concerning this also the Lord has said, Give not that which is holy to the dogs” (ch. 9). That is a judgment about persons, made at the altar, by the earliest Christians.
Later in the same chapter: “Beware of false prophets, who come to you in the clothing of sheep, but inwardly they are ravening wolves. By their fruits you shall know them” (Matthew 7:15–16). He says it twice, and closes the passage with it: “Wherefore by their fruits you shall know them” (7:20). A man who may not judge conduct cannot identify a wolf, and the sheep he was supposed to warn get eaten.
Christ commanded the thing He is supposed to have forbidden
If the chapter left any doubt, He removes it elsewhere in a single sentence: “Judge not according to the appearance, but judge just judgment” (John 7:24). It is worth knowing where He says it. He is in the temple at Tabernacles, answering men who were angry that He had healed on the sabbath, and the judgment He rebukes is theirs: a verdict on His act, formed from how it looked against the letter of the law. The principle is general, and the tradition has read it so; St. Thomas opens his defence of judging with it, citing Deuteronomy 16:18, “that they may judge the people with just judgment” (Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 60, a. 2, sed contra). But the setting is not decoration. The verse is a rebuke of judging badly, issued to men who thought they were judging by the book.
The Law had said both things in one breath, and it said them to judges. Leviticus 19 forbids judging unjustly: “Thou shalt not do that which is unjust, nor judge unjustly. Respect not the person of the poor, nor honour the countenance of the mighty”, and then, in the same verse, “But judge thy neighbour according to justice” (19:15). The setting is a court. The standard doesn’t stay in one, and the next three verses prove it: whispering, hatred, and the love of neighbor are nobody’s courtroom, and Christ states the same principle, with no courtroom in sight, at John 7:24.
Two verses on, the Law forbids hatred and commands correction in the same sentence: “Thou shalt not hate thy brother in thy heart, but reprove him openly, lest thou incur sin through him” (19:17). A note on “openly,” since the post turns on reading verses whole. The Vulgate reads publice argue eum, reprove him publicly, and that is St. Jerome’s reading of the Hebrew rather than a second witness to it: the Hebrew has an emphatic doubling, thou shalt surely reprove thy neighbour, and says nothing about where. The Greek of the Septuagint does the same. What every version agrees on is the command and its alternative. The thing set against reproving your brother is not discretion. It is hatred in the heart.
And the last clause of that verse does something to the comfortable reading. Failing to reprove is not offered as humility. It is offered as a way of incurring sin yourself. St. Augustine says the same of Christ’s own command to rebuke a brother: “You become worse than the sinner if you fail to correct him” (De verbis Domini xvi, 4, quoted at Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 33, a. 2, sed contra).
Augustine draws the line: manifest and concealed
The distinction the whole question turns on is not a modern rescue of an awkward verse. It is in Augustine’s commentary on the Sermon on the Mount, and he builds it out of the same texts this post has been using.
On Matthew 7:1 he writes that “we are taught nothing else, but that in the case of those actions respecting which it is doubtful with what intention they are done, we are to put the better construction on them.” Then, in the next sentence, he takes up “by their fruits you shall know them” and says it “has reference to things which manifestly cannot be done with a good intention; such as debaucheries, or blasphemies, or thefts, or drunkenness, and all such things, of which we are permitted to judge”, and his proof text is St. Paul at Corinth: “For what have I to do to judge them also that are without? Do not ye judge them that are within?” (De sermone Domini in monte II.18.59).
That is the line, and he draws it in one sentence: “Let us judge, therefore, with respect to those which are manifest; but respecting those which are concealed, let us leave the judgment to God” (II.18.60). He grounds it on a verse of St. Paul that almost nobody quotes: “Some men’s sins are manifest, going before to judgment: and some men they follow after” (1 Timothy 5:24). Augustine’s gloss is exact. Manifest sins are those “with regard to which it is clear with what intention they are done; these go before to judgment, because if a judgment shall follow, it is not rash.”
So the forbidden judgment and the commanded one are not two moods. They are two different objects. The concealed is God’s. The manifest is ours, and refusing it is not reverence.
Augustine then names a second trap, and it is the one a post like this leaves wide open. “There are two things, moreover, in which we ought to beware of rash judgment; when it is uncertain with what intention anything is done; or when it is uncertain what sort of a person he is going to be, who at present is manifestly either good or bad.” Then the application: if you know a man’s drunkenness as manifest, “and were so to administer reproof as if the man could never be amended and changed, you would nevertheless judge rashly” (II.18.61). The sin can be plain and the verdict on the sinner still premature, because the sinner is not finished.
What St. Paul did from across the Aegean
The clearest case in the New Testament is a judgment passed in public, on a named sin, by an Apostle writing from another city on the strength of a report. The sin was notorious: “It is absolutely heard, that there is fornication among you, and such fornication as the like is not among the heathens; that one should have his father’s wife” (1 Corinthians 5:1). St. Paul had founded that church and lived in it a year and six months (Acts 18:11), so he was no stranger to it. He was simply not in it.
His complaint is not only against the man. It is against a congregation that had absorbed the thing without discomfort: “And you are puffed up; and have not rather mourned, that he might be taken away from among you, that hath done this deed.” Then: “I indeed, absent in body, but present in spirit, have already judged, as though I were present, him that hath so done” (5:2–3).
He tells them whom not to eat with: “not to keep company, if any man that is named a brother, be a fornicator, or covetous, or a server of idols, or a railer, or a drunkard, or an extortioner: with such a one, not so much as to eat” (5:11). And he is careful about whom he does not mean: “I mean not with the fornicators of this world, or with the covetous, or the extortioners, or the servers of idols; otherwise you must needs go out of this world” (5:10). The discipline is domestic. It is for the household, and he says so: “For what have I to do to judge them that are without? Do not you judge them that are within? For them that are without, God will judge. Put away the evil one from among yourselves” (5:12–13).
Two things in that case get missed. The first is that the judgment is of a way of living, stated plainly and fixed on a particular man, which is the very thing we are told Christians may never do. The second is the purpose St. Paul gives for the severity: that the offender be delivered “to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that the spirit may be saved in the day of our Lord Jesus Christ” (5:5). And the sentence did not stand. Writing again to the same church — of a man whom St. John Chrysostom and most of the Fathers took to be this one, though some modern commentators read 2 Corinthians 2 of a different offender — he says “this rebuke is sufficient,” that they “should rather forgive him and comfort him, lest perhaps such a one be swallowed up with overmuch sorrow,” and begs them to “confirm your charity towards him” (2 Corinthians 2:6–8). Augustine’s second trap was one St. Paul did not fall into. He judged the act and left the man a door.
And if anyone still wants a case of naming a name, there is one, and it is the most uncomfortable in Scripture: “But when Cephas was come to Antioch, I withstood him to the face, because he was to be blamed” (Galatians 2:11). St. Paul reproved the first Pope, publicly, by name. St. Thomas asks directly whether a subject may correct his prelate, answers that he may, and then fixes the manner: it must be done “not with impudence and harshness, but with gentleness and respect,” citing “An ancient man rebuke not, but entreat him as a father” (1 Timothy 5:1; II-II, q. 33, a. 4). And he allows the public case where it is grave: “if the faith were endangered, a subject ought to rebuke his prelate even publicly. Hence Paul, who was Peter’s subject, rebuked him in public, on account of the imminent danger of scandal concerning faith” (ad 2). Those who quote Galatians 2 at bishops get the licence and the manner in the same article, and the manner is the half usually left behind.
The strongest form of the objection
The best case against all this is not that nothing may be judged. It is that “judge not” names a disposition rather than a rule of evidence, and its credentials are good. In St. Luke the same words sit inside a series about mercy: “Be ye therefore merciful, as your Father also is merciful. Judge not, and you shall not be judged. Condemn not, and you shall not be condemned. Forgive, and you shall be forgiven” (Luke 6:36–37). In the very letter where he judges the man at Corinth, St. Paul had written one chapter earlier: “Therefore judge not before the time; until the Lord come, who both will bring to light the hidden things of darkness, and will make manifest the counsels of the hearts” (1 Corinthians 4:5). And in Romans he is blunter than anything in the Sermon: “Wherefore thou art inexcusable, O man, whosoever thou art that judgest. For wherein thou judgest another, thou condemnest thyself. For thou dost the same things which thou judgest” (Romans 2:1).
Two texts press harder still. The parable of the cockle is the premier argument against sorting anybody: the servants ask leave to pull the weeds and are refused, “lest perhaps gathering up the cockle, you root up the wheat also together with it. Suffer both to grow until the harvest” (Matthew 13:29–30). And the woman taken in adultery ends with Christ declining to condemn a person whose sin was manifest and undenied: “Neither will I condemn thee. Go, and now sin no more” (John 8:11).
Those are real, and three of them answer themselves once read whole. Christ interprets the parable Himself later in the same chapter, and the interpretation is about the end of the world rather than about this afternoon: “And the field, is the world… But the harvest is the end of the world. And the reapers are the angels” (13:38–39). What the parable refuses is an uprooting: a servant’s attempt to produce a clean field by pulling, where the pulling would tear out wheat with the cockle. Augustine used it against the Donatists, who wanted a church with no cockle in it now, and he read it as forbidding exactly that premature uprooting (On Baptism, Against the Donatists IV). He is also the man who wrote that manifest sins are “of which we are permitted to judge.” The two hold together: the cockle is not uprooted, it is reproved. Which is why St. Paul can both judge the man at Corinth and deliver him up “that the spirit may be saved” — a sentence aimed at recovery, and lifted when it has done its work. St. Paul’s “before the time” is about “the counsels of the hearts,” which is the concealed, not the act. Romans 2 specifies its own target in its third clause: “for thou dost the same things which thou judgest.” That is the beam, from Paul.
John 8 is the strongest of them and it does not go the way it is usually quoted. Christ refuses the stoning, refuses the condemnation of the woman, and then names her life as sin in four words: now sin no more. He does both in one breath, and the second is not softer than the first. If declining to condemn a person required declining to call the act a sin, He left the sentence unfinished. And the line that actually clears the court is not “judge not,” it is “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her” (John 8:7). That disqualifies these accusers on these facts, which is the mote-and-beam rule enforced rather than suspended. St. Thomas reads it the same way: a previous sin “renders a man unworthy to rebuke another,” and he is especially unworthy “to correct another for a lesser sin, if he himself has committed a greater” (II-II, q. 33, a. 5, citing St. Jerome on Matthew 7:3). It disqualifies the judge. It does not abolish the judgment, and four verses later Christ passes it Himself.
St. Luke supplies the narrowing himself: the clause after “judge not” is “condemn not.” And the Fathers are not on the broad side either. St. Thomas records three ancient readings of “judge not,” none of them the modern one: Augustine takes it of rash judgment about inward intention or other uncertain things; Hilary, of judgment about divine things, which are above us; and a homily on Matthew long attributed to St. John Chrysostom, from the Opus Imperfectum that the editors note is not in fact his, takes it of the judgment “which proceeds not from benevolence but from bitterness of heart” (II-II, q. 60, a. 2 ad 1). Look at what gets ruled out across the three: bitterness and contempt in the manner; the hidden heart, the uncertain, and things above us in the matter. Not one of them forbids judging a man’s conduct as such.
And the real St. John Chrysostom, in a homily that is certainly his, asks the question this post began with and answers it the same way. “What then? Ought we not to blame them that sin?” he writes on Matthew 7:1, and he presses it: if men may not judge, “they will be without authority in any matter, and in vain have they received the power to bind and to loose”; and “except the master judge the servant, and the mistress the maid, and the father the son, and friends one another, there will be an increase of all wickedness.” His conclusion is the distinction exactly: Christ “does not simply command us not to judge any of men’s sins, neither does He simply forbid the doing of such a thing, but to them that are full of innumerable ills, and are trampling upon other men for trifles” (Homilies on Matthew 23).
Three judgments, and only one of them is fully ours
Break the word “judge” into the three different things it carries, and the confusion goes.
The eternal verdict. Whether this soul is saved or lost is not ours. “Who art thou that judgest another man’s servant? To his own lord he standeth or falleth” (Romans 14:4). Romans 14 presses harder than that one verse, and the whole of 14:13 is worth having, because it turns in the middle: “Let us not therefore judge one another any more. But judge this rather, that you put not a stumblingblock or a scandal in your brother’s way.” One judgment forbidden and another commanded, in a single sentence. Note also what that chapter is about: meat and holy days, “disputes about thoughts” (14:1), matters indifferent in themselves. St. James is the same: “There is one lawgiver, and judge, that is able to destroy and to deliver. But who art thou that judgest thy neighbour?” (James 4:12–13), written to men who were detracting one another (4:11). The Church says it of the gravest sin she knows: although “we can judge that an act is in itself a grave offense, we must entrust judgment of persons to the justice and mercy of God” (Catechism, n. 1861). She names souls in heaven, by canonization, and she has never, in her formal teaching, declared of any man that he is lost.
The interior state. What a man knew, what he intended, how freely he chose: this is partly closed to us, and is never to be taken as settled without sufficient foundation. To take it as settled on thin evidence is what the Catechism calls rash judgment, which “assumes as true, without sufficient foundation, the moral fault of a neighbor” (n. 2477). Don’t skip that qualifier, it is the hinge of the whole question. What is forbidden is the assumption without sufficient foundation, not the conclusion itself. St. Thomas grades the fault by how thin the evidence is and how certain the verdict: to begin to doubt another’s goodness “from slight indications” is a light sin; from slight indications to hold “another man’s wickedness as certain” is mortal in a grave matter; and for a judge to condemn on suspicion “pertains directly to injustice” (II-II, q. 60, a. 3).
The manifest act, against a standard. Manifest in Augustine’s sense: the kind of act whose intention is not in doubt. Here abstention is not automatically the safer course. This is the judgment Leviticus commands, that John 7:24 calls just, that Matthew 7:6 and 7:15 presuppose, that Augustine says we are permitted to make, and that St. Paul exercises at Corinth. Adultery is adultery whoever commits it, and to be unable to say so is not humility. St. Thomas keeps the duty from hardening into a licence: correction “is a matter of precept, in so far as it is necessary for” the brother’s amendment, “but not so as we have to correct our erring brother at all places and times” (II-II, q. 33, a. 2). One caution before the next section: that this judgment is open to anyone is not to say that passing sentence on a man is. St. Thomas treats the private estimate and the public sentence as two different acts, and the difference turns out to matter more than anything else here.
What “judge not” is doing when it only runs one way
Favorable verdicts on persons are delivered constantly and nobody reaches for Matthew 7:1. She is a wonderful mother. He is a man of his word. She is a saint—I mean it, an actual saint. Each of those is a conclusion about a person, inferred from outside, stated with confidence, often about someone the speaker knows slightly. The objection shows up when the verdict runs the other way.
That asymmetry is not hypocrisy, and it is worth saying so plainly, because the answer is Catholic and it is better than the complaint. St. Thomas gives the reason: “it is better to err frequently through thinking well of a wicked man, than to err less frequently through having an evil opinion of a good man, because in the latter case an injury is inflicted, but not in the former” (II-II, q. 60, a. 4 ad 1). Praise cannot do the man himself the injustice that blame can. The asymmetry is reasoned, and it is a duty.
But look at what the duty actually governs. It governs where to rest when a thing is doubtful: aim at judging a man good “unless there is evident proof of the contrary” (a. 4 ad 2). That is a rule about the concealed, and Augustine’s line falls in the same place. It is not the rule that no unfavorable conclusion may ever be stated however manifest the matter, and that second rule is the one doing service in the back pocket. Nor is praise costless in Catholic moral theology, which is a thing the slogan’s users never have to answer for: the Church forbids “every word or attitude” which “by flattery, adulation, or complaisance encourages and confirms another in malicious acts and perverse conduct,” and calls adulation a grave fault when it makes a man an accomplice in another’s vices (Catechism, n. 2480).
And there is one thing to notice about the sentence itself, which needs no guess at anybody’s motives. “You shouldn’t judge” is a judgment: that you judged, that you were wrong to, and commonly that you did it from pride. It can be reached as fast as the judgment it rebukes, and on no better evidence. A rule that exempts the person stating it isn’t a rule yet, it’s a move. Which tells us nothing about his sincerity and everything about the argument: the verse can’t carry it, and the argument still has to be had. If the criticism is false, show that it is false. That answer is available to anyone, and it is the only one that settles anything.
Where we really do have to stop
The abuse runs both ways, and the second kind is ours more often than we like. Having established that the manifest may be judged, a Catholic can go on to do several things the same Scripture forbids.
The beam comes first, and it is not a formality. The word in the Sermon for the man who takes them in the wrong order is not “mistaken,” it is “hypocrite,” so the sequence is part of what is commanded. St. Thomas puts teeth in it: those “guilty of grievous sins should not judge those who are guilty of the same or lesser sins… Above all does this hold when such sins are public, because there would be an occasion of scandal arising in the hearts of others” (II-II, q. 60, a. 2 ad 3). St. Paul says it as a condition of the whole business: “if a man be overtaken in any fault, you, who are spiritual, instruct such a one in the spirit of meekness, considering thyself, lest thou also be tempted” (Galatians 6:1). The bar is not absolute, and a scrupulous reader should not take it for one: St. Thomas holds that “if a sinner reprove a wrongdoer with humility, he does not sin, nor does he bring a further condemnation on himself” (q. 33, a. 5). What is forbidden is correcting another man’s sins as though you were yourself just.
The brother comes before the audience, when the fault is his alone. “But if thy brother shall offend against thee, go, and rebuke him between thee and him alone”, then two or three witnesses, then the Church, and only at the end is he to be “as the heathen and publican” (Matthew 18:15–17). St. Thomas reads that sequence as governing secret sin and private injury, and distinguishes the public case, where others already know and may be scandalized: “such like sins should be denounced in public,” citing “Them that sin reprove before all: that the rest also may have fear” (1 Timothy 5:20; II-II, q. 33, a. 7). Read together, that is how “reprove him openly” and “between thee and him alone” stop contradicting each other, and Augustine had already staged the same collision in the sermon quoted earlier — “Rebuke him between him and you alone” against “Them that sin rebuke before all” — resolving it the same way: “both precepts are true; but we must make a distinction, that sometimes the one, sometimes the other must be done” (De verbis Domini xvi, 9). Note too what stands one verse before the licence: “Against a priest receive not an accusation, but under two or three witnesses” (5:19). The evidentiary guard and the public reproof arrive together.
Judgment and correction are not the same office. For judgment properly so called St. Thomas requires that it “come from one who is in authority”; a man who judges about matters in which he has no authority commits what St. Thomas himself calls judgment by usurpation, and gives a whole article to it (II-II, q. 60, a. 2 and a. 6). What belongs to everyone is something else: correction “which seeks in a special way the recovery of an erring brother by means of a simple warning: such like correction belongs to anyone who has charity, be he subject or prelate” (q. 33, a. 3). St. Paul at Corinth is doing the first and he held the office for it. Most of us only ever have the second: a warning, offered in charity, with no sentence attached. That isn’t a technicality, it’s the difference between telling a man the truth and passing sentence on him.
Detraction binds even when the charge is true. This is the one most often missed, because we assume accuracy is a defense. It isn’t. Detraction is committed by him “who, without objectively valid reason, discloses another’s faults and failings to persons who did not know them” (Catechism, n. 2477). Truth is not the test, reason is. A true fault told to people with no need to know it, for no sufficient end, is detraction however accurate it is. St. James couples the two words deliberately: “He that detracteth his brother, or he that judgeth his brother, detracteth the law” (James 4:11), and the pairing is a clue to what kind of judging he has in view.
Doubt is read in his favor. St. Thomas distinguishes judging things from judging men: with men “the good and evil in our judgment is considered chiefly on the part of the person about whom judgment is being formed,” so “we ought, in this kind of judgment, to aim at judging a man good, unless there is evident proof of the contrary” (q. 60, a. 4 ad 2). The Catechism gives it in St. Ignatius’s form: “Every good Christian ought to be more ready to give a favorable interpretation to another’s statement than to condemn it” (n. 2478). Its root is older than both: charity “beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things” (1 Corinthians 13:7).
The man is not finished. Even where the fault is manifest and the reproof is owed, Augustine counts it rash judgment to administer reproof “as if the man could never be amended and changed” (II.18.61). The sentence passed at Corinth was lifted, on the reading the Fathers took, within a letter or two. Whether any particular sentence is lifted is not ours to date.
And silence can be the right answer. Not the comfortable silence that pretends there was nothing to see, but a judged one. St. Thomas says fraternal correction may be omitted “meritoriously, when out of charity one omits to correct someone,” quoting Augustine on the man who holds back because he awaits a better time or fears the wrongdoer will be made worse by it (q. 33, a. 2 ad 3). Prudence has a great deal to do here. What it may not do is pretend the question never arose.
The verse, whole
“Judge not, that you may not be judged. For with what judgment you judge, you shall be judged: and with what measure you mete, it shall be measured to you again” (Matthew 7:1–2).
That is not an unqualified prohibition on judging. It is the standard by which the judge will be judged, which is a warning to a man who is going to judge anyway, as Christ plainly expected him to by verse five, with the mote and his brother’s eye. Augustine saw how the second clause works, and it is not arithmetic: God does not measure back with an unjust measure, but “that very same rashness wherewith you punish another must necessarily punish yourself” (II.18.62). The measure isn’t a penalty attached from outside. It is the habit, coming home.
So the verse does not spare us the work. It hands us a standard, tells us we will be held to it, and leaves us to pick it. That is a good deal heavier than never judging at all, and heavier still than saying so and walking away.
References
- Scripture from the Douay-Rheims Bible, drbo.org: Matthew 7:1–6, 7:15–16, 7:20; Matthew 13:29–30, 13:38–39; Matthew 18:15–17; Luke 6:36–37; John 7:24, 8:11; Acts 18:11; Leviticus 19:15–17 (with the Vulgate, publice argue eum); Romans 2:1, 14:1, 14:4, 14:13; 1 Corinthians 4:5, 5:1–13, 13:7; 2 Corinthians 2:6–8; Galatians 2:11, 6:1; 1 Timothy 5:1, 5:19–20, 5:24; James 4:11–13. Hebrew and Greek of Leviticus 19:17 from the Masoretic text and the Septuagint.
- Augustine, De sermone Domini in monte II.18.59–62 (manifest and concealed; the two species of rash judgment; Matthew 7:2); On Baptism, Against the Donatists IV (the cockle not to be uprooted before the harvest), Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers translation; and De verbis Domini xvi, 4 (“You become worse than the sinner if you fail to correct him”) as quoted by St. Thomas at II-II, q. 33, a. 2.
- Didache, ch. 9, on Matthew 7:6 and the unbaptized; for the dating, the Catholic Encyclopedia, “The Didache.” John Chrysostom, Homilies on Matthew 23, on Matthew 7:1.
- Catechism of the Catholic Church, n. 1735 (imputability diminished by ignorance, duress, fear, habit and other factors); n. 1861 (judgment of persons entrusted to God); nn. 2477–2478 (rash judgment; detraction “without objectively valid reason”; St. Ignatius of Loyola, Spiritual Exercises 22, on the favorable interpretation) and n. 2480 (flattery and adulation).
- Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 60, a. 2 (the conditions of judgment, including authority, and at ad 3 those in grievous sin judging others; judgment by usurpation; the Augustine, Hilary and Opus Imperfectum readings of Matthew 7:1 at ad 1; just judgment and Deuteronomy 16:18 in the sed contra), a. 3 (the three degrees of suspicion; at ad 3, those in grievous sin judging others), a. 4 (judging persons; the favorable reading of doubt, ad 1–2) and a. 6 (usurped judgment); and II-II, q. 33, a. 2 (correction a precept, but “not… at all places and times”; omitted meritoriously, ad 3), a. 3 (correction of charity belongs to anyone; correction of justice to prelates), a. 4 (correcting a prelate, with Galatians 2:11, the manner-condition, and at ad 2 the public case where faith is endangered), a. 5 (whether a sinner may reprove a wrongdoer) and a. 7 (secret versus public sin). English Dominican translation.