When you talk with people about why they have been turned off by the Church one answer stands out: I did not want to feel judged. The experience of feeling judged created a sense of whose in and whose out, of who belongs and who doesn’t. Of course, in the Church everyone belongs, everyone is welcome. With that said, judging is the activity that separates humanity from the beasts. We have to judge between right and wrong, between good and evil. In the gospel Jesus tells us we have to make those judgments with humility since we have a wooden beam in our own eye. Whatever judgments we make echo back on ourselves since we, like everyone else, stand in need of God’s grace.
