23 rd Sunday 2020
Ezekiel 33:7-9; Romans 13:8-10; Matthew 18:15-20
Many many moons ago, a few years after I had left the Diocesan Youth Centre at Castlerigg, I returned as a chaplain accompanying a school group. The school in question shall be nameless: it WASN’T Our Lady’s, Lancaster.
With the group was a youth worker, who made something of a clot of himself at one stage, in a way which was not helpful to the young people. The priest director of the centre and I discussed the matter, and agreed that it needed to be addressed at the end-of-course evaluation. It was also agreed that it should be I who raised the point, so that the criticism came from within the school, rather than from Castlerigg, the outside agency.
Come the Friday morning, came the evaluation, and I delivered what I considered to be an honest, fair, and firm critique of what had occurred. No one was left in any doubt that the event had been unacceptable.
Afterwards, the director said to me, “You enjoyed that, didn’t you?” To my shame, I had to confess that I had. To rip someone apart, calmly but thoroughly, had been strangely satisfying, especially for someone like me, who am normally hopeless at delivering criticism.
At one level, it was a job well done: at another level, it was not good at all. Something needed to be said, but it should probably have been said to the individual first. I now feel too that the saying of it should have cost me something in the way of painful sympathy, rather than be a source of satisfaction. There was something amiss in what might be described as my fraternal correction.
There are times, as both Ezekiel and Our Lord make clear, when correction and criticism are needed. This, however, should be done to benefit the person being corrected, not to vent the spleen or satisfy the anger of the one doing the correcting. Those of us of a certain vintage will be familiar with the figure of the bullying schoolmaster, a figure which needs to be consigned to history, not imitated.
St. Paul sets out the criterion for fraternal or sororial (brotherly or sisterly) correction by effectively summarising Jesus’ own analysis of the commandments. Paul, in the footsteps of his Master, states in today’s extract from the Letter to the Romans that “love...is the answer to every one of the commandments.” Unfortunately, Paul, like most of us, did not always live up to his ideals: in his Letter to the Galatians, he brags of having humiliated Peter in front of everyone, in direct contradiction of the approach which Our Lord establishes in the Gospel.
Bizarrely, we can persuade ourselves that our very cruelty is based on love, something of which the Church has at times been guilty. The Inquisitors, who tortured and burned heretics, claimed to be acting out of love and a desire to save their victims’ souls; and many religious sisters and diocesan priests can recount horror stories of their treatment at the hands of sadistic superiors and tyrannical parish priests, who considered it their duty to break the spirit of those over whom they were given authority. This took place during what is sometimes viewed, through rose-tinted glasses, as a golden age of the Church when seminaries and religious houses were bursting at the seams.
All of us, at times, need to offer and accept correction. To do so in the spirit of Christ, the spirit of brotherly and sisterly love, is paramount, but it is not always easy to achieve. Too readily, our baser nature takes over, something which we must guard against by growing daily deeper in a genuine, self-surrendering love of God.
