In last Sunday’s First Reading, God tells the prophet Ezekiel that he is to be “watchman” of Israel. He is to watch and warn Israel of moral dangers: “If I tell the wicked, ‘O wicked one, you shall surely die’ and you do not speak out to dissuade the wicked from his way, the wicked shall die for his guilt, but I will hold you responsible for his death.”

God’s warning in the Old Testament is reinforced in the Gospel, where Jesus commits the Church — the New Israel — to the task of moral correction. The Lord progressively ramps up moral warning, from the smallest community of two speaking eye-to-eye, to a few witnesses, to the whole community.

In both instances, the operative task is one of moral correction, not “accompaniment.” Indeed, when the one who is warned declines moral correction, God affirms his guilt and Jesus says to “treat him as you would a Gentile or a tax collector.”

In the Gospel, this element of fraternal correction is tied up with Jesus’ mention of the keys of Peter, the power of binding and loosing, which the Church has understood to mean its authoritative Divine mandate to teach on moral questions in a binding way. “Whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven” does not sound like a suggestion for consideration.

We seem to have drifted in the Church from speaking with moral clarity to some amorphous notion of deferring to individual decision-making that, somehow, we are supposed to “accompany” even when we know what the accompanied person wants to do is morally wrong. It’s even branded “mercy.”

It’s not mercy. It’s false mercy. It’s moral cowardice dressed up with wanting to be “nice,” but not wanting to speak the truth.

It’s not what Jesus tells His disciples. He escalates the defense of moral truth eventually to the level of excommunication. And God tells Ezekiel that those who are supposed to be His representatives — like a prophet — who out of respect or cowardice or mealy-mouthed-ness refuse to speak God’s truth share in the sinner’s guilt. In the old moral theology manuals, silence was one of the ways one could be an accessory to another’s sin. As one can see, the roots of that idea do not lie in post-Tridentine manuals but go back to a book preceding that Council by about two millennia.

Far from being “judgmental” or, horror of horrors, “rigid,” the old moral theology also spoke of correcting the wicked and counseling the doubtful as spiritual works of mercy. Mercy does not, however, pretend that evil is good. And we are our brother’s keepers — for their good.

The abovementioned readings are here.