Proper judgment is indispensable in the quest to see reality rightly

The New Meaning of “Cultural Competence”

by Steven Jonathan Rummelsburg

The absurdity of the mantra “don’t judge” is lost on the ideologues. Ideology is the worship of an idea and as such it is the worship of self because in deciding what ideas to worship, the ideologue makes himself the arbiter of truth and in doing so increases in his own sight.  We Catholics worship the absolute person, the author of life, the Logos, our Christ. He is the standard by which we must judge everything and in worshipping Him, we decrease.

Asking people to “not judge” is like asking them not to breathe.  Jesus himself commands us to judge when he says in John 7:24, “Do not judge by appearances, but judge with right judgment.” This is a reminder of the Mosaic Law in Leviticus 19:15,  “You shall do no injustice in judgment; you shall not be partial to the poor or defer to the great, but in righteousness shall you judge your neighbor.”  In our Lord’s Prayer, when we ask God to forgive us as we forgive others we are best able to forgive properly when we see reality rightly. Proper judgment is also indispensable in the quest to see reality rightly. Therefore, it is almost impossible to overstate the importance of judging rightly.

The oldest intellectual error on record is one of sophistry. To “make the worse argument the better” is to ape God’s omniscience. This is what the serpent did to great effect. The three battle fronts of our spiritual warfare—Satan, a world steeped in the Culture of Death and pervasive self-deceit—make righteous judgment an elusive skill to acquire and an arduous virtue to cultivate. In Genesis 3:17, God says to Adam “cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life.” Our fallen natures make this true of cultivating the inner landscape as well, which is so important and laborious that we have instituted universities to assist us.
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