Dear CathPhilosopher,
I think one must be extremely careful and possibly avoid all together making judgments about people’s motivations.
…
I hope that God is more merciful with you than you appear to be with some of your brothers and sisters and neighbors who are doing the best they can…
Please. The very first point I made is that we need to try to understand where people are coming from. The feeling I get from the tone of your response is that you are responding to what you think I am saying, without reading carefully as to whether I actually say it. You seem to suggest that I am making judgments about people’s motivations. Please show me a single sentence in which I express a judgment about the motivation of any person or any class of people.
I say “the feeling I get” and “the tone of your response” because you don’t actually express any judgment about me. Probably you deliberately avoid doing so. But is it any better to insinuate that I made a rash (and false) judgment about people, rather than to say it outright? Reading your first and last sentence together, I feel just as badly as if you said “you have made a harsh judgment about your brothers and sisters, and I hope that God does not judge you so harshly.”
I don’t know your intention in responding the way you did, but I’m sure, and it is evident even in your response, that you desire truth and charity for everyone. Truth and charity requires that we try to understand people such as those mentioned by Bataar, who “criticize a person for being selfish”, that you and I try to understand each other, and so on.
Here are my
exact words about motivation: “
as long as it is purely negative, that is, as long as they are single simply because they don’t want to marry, and don’t positively intend to use the freedom offered by the single life to love God and their neighbor… they are being selfish.”
If we refrain from marrying because we “for varying reasons sincerely believe that marriage is beyond our ability to handle”, this is not a purely negative reason. It would be irresponsible and harmful to one’s potential spouse and family to get married if one is incapable of handling it. So this is not a negative reason for not marrying, but a positive one–e.g., because one appreciates the importance and value of family life, one doesn’t marry if one can’t handle it well.
My point concerned
only where charity is more
evident. You and I both know that eating a chocolate bar can be done out of charity, and that going out of one’s way to do something good for someone who offended you can also be done out of charity. We also know that charity is more evident in the latter case–even though a particular holy person might in fact eat the chocolate bar with a greater love than someone else did the so-called “charitable” deed.
This seems a silly example, and in a way it is. But I would say that in a similar manner charity is more immediately visible in the person who devotes his or her life to God as a priest or religious, than in the single person who does not. And people who criticize those who remain single are in some cases reacting to this difference in the visibility of charity. I think it’s important to understand this. We have to know where they are coming from. If we don’t, we may simply react to those people by accusing them of making rash judgments, and have no common ground for dialog with them.
I hope that I make my position clearer and more understandable than it seems to have been in my first post. I am sorry if I worded in a way that could lead to misunderstanding.
God bless you.
