This essay first appeared in our weekly Scripture reflection newsletter on March 1, 2025.
We Jesuits have a tradition called “fraternal correction.” The idea is that if someone in your community (or, more broadly, any fellow Jesuit) is doing something problematic, it may fall to you to help him “correct” himself, for his own good and the good of the community. (Many women’s religious orders have the same tradition.) Fraternal correction is not as formalized as the old “Chapter of Faults,” where in some religious orders, including the Jesuits, the offending person would be required to profess his sins or failings before the superior and the entire community, sometimes kneeling. “I accuse myself (or proclaim myself) of being lazy in washing up the dishes,” one community member might say.
These days it’s more informal. Let’s say that someone continually leaves dishes in the sink, forgets to do his house chores, or is always late for Mass. You might approach your brother and say, “May I talk to you? I have something of a fraternal correction.” Especially from a close friend, these interventions can be extremely helpful. A few times over the years, someone has raised something I was doing that offended people, which I was entirely unaware of.
The rueful joke in the Jesuits, however, is that fraternal corrections often have unintended consequences. Sometimes the person being “corrected” will grit their teeth, listen and nod, and then say, “Okay, now let me tell you something that you do that bothers me!” Which is not exactly the point.
We often have a hard time being corrected, because we tend to see the other person’s faults first.
We often have a hard time being corrected, because we tend, as in that jokey example above, to see the other person’s faults first. And seeing the other person’s faults first is a defense mechanism that prevents us from seeing our own, usually because of a lack of humility.
In today’s Gospel, Jesus reminds us that before we correct someone else, we should correct ourselves. And he uses, according to the New Testament scholar Gerhard Lohfink, an image not found anywhere before Jesus: a splinter in the other person’s eye, and a log in your own. In his book The Most Important Words of Jesus, Lohfink suggests that Jesus’s saying could have easily come from Jesus’s carpenter’s background; he would have spent a lot of time around both logs and splinters in Nazareth.
This simple command is crucial for Catholics, who, especially in the past decade, have an increasing tendency to correct, correct, correct, all in the name of being “good Catholics.” “It’s my duty as a good Catholic to tell you that you are wrong,” you’ll often read online. Unfortunately, this kind of correction is usually connected with no little amount of judging, that is, “You’re a bad Catholic (or sinner or heretic or apostate) and so it’s my duty to correct you.” Admonishing the sinner, as many point out, is one of the spiritual works of mercy. So I have to do it, many say. But Jesus pointedly asks us not to judge.
The question here is whether the fraternal correction is accompanied by any self-correction.
Fraternal corrections are supposed to help build up the reign of God, with the corrections helping to form and mold the individual disciples, and eventually the community. But the question here is whether the fraternal correction is accompanied by any self-correction. These days, the interventions are often less a charitable correction (which should usually be done privately) than a public shaming. This is not what Jesus had in mind.
“Mutual correction is indeed urgently needed,” writes Lohfink, “but those who do it first must be sure they are conscious of the log in their own eye and are prepared to let it be removed.”
