A Complaint On the Pope's Angelus Yesterday On Judging!!

Whoa I am on rocky ground here I know. The official English version of the Pope's Angelus from yesterday has not come out. However this google translate version is pretty good.

Now everything the Pope said was great and we need to hear. Standing On My Head has some great thoughts on what the Pope was getting at Woman Taken in Adultery .

The problem though can be seen in the rather sensational headlines that the AP had almost right after the Pope finished speaking. See Pope amid abuse furor: Refrain from judging sinners which opening sentence says "Pope Benedict XVI on Sunday urged Catholics to refrain from judging sinners a day after he rebuked Irish bishops for their handling of a half-century of sexual abuse of minors by clergy."

Good Grief.

I have watched a lot of examinations of potential jurors in the South. What is called voir dire. Now among African Americans there is a problem that comes up a great deal. That is there is a black Juror you might want but they announce I am Christian I can't judge!!! Now this is not of course just limited to blacks but when you hear this you can bet 9 times out of 10 they are black. At least in my neck of the woods and it comes up often in every jury pool. It gets a tad frustrating and sometimes I just want to stand up and go where are you getting this theology. Seriously has someone done a study in this looking at Southern Black Protestants and objections to jury duty. I would love to see if there are differences between the AME and lets say black Baptists.

Still you see why there is confusion and to be fair the same logic I see among many blacks locally is found in that MSNBC article and in fact in every day life. So we see this is a wide spread problem that goes beyond demographics

So the Pope, who is much better than me at these things, is very correct in what he said. However I do wish you have put 'proper" judging in context because these verses are used to make a lot of mischief.

A Catholic Deacon hit on this in January . See his great post Judging that I think gives so mes balance.

Again the I am not the Pope and his remarks were great and true. However I do wish we could correct some errors that happen with these verses and in fact are used to undermine Church teaching.