On a recent thread regarding the SSPX Pedophile, I advised that we Catholics should also have compassion and charity for the perpetrator. I mentioned that we don't know everything that led to these sins and we don't know whether we ourselves would not have gone down the same path had we been in his shoes. I referred to the famous statement from St. Augustine, "There but for the grace of God go I."
For this I was mocked with "Who am I to judge?" images of Francis in that thread.
In point of fact, there's a very Catholic sense in which "Who am I to judge?" is absolutely true.
Judge not, that you may not be judged, For with what judgment you judge, you shall be judged: and with what measure you mete, it shall be measured to you again.
In fact, even the Church has always considered herself incompetent to judge matters of the internal forum, according to the maxim
De internis Ecclesia non judicat. ("About internal matters the Church does not judge.")
Only God can see into the depths of souls and judge the degree of guilt that any individual has in the commission of various sins. Yet the Church does indeed judge and make presumptions of judgment based on external forum indicators.
What has happened since Vatican II is that the Concilar Prelates have decided that internal forum subjectivism OVERRIDES these external forum judgments of the Church, that subjectivist intent actually represents the true objective reality of the matter, whereas the objective action means nothing, is purely accidental to what's going on, and in the eyes of God is completely trumped by the internal forum. For them, internal forum is to external forum what substance is to accidents.
At first Vatican II did this with dogmatic theology. If someone is sincerely seeking God, then that in itself constitutes supernatural faith and charity, whether or not a person objectively has the Catholic faith. This is what has created the new subjectivist "subsistence" ecclesiology of Vatican II.
Now, in the moral order, they're doing exactly the same thing, with this
Relatio from the Synod against the Family. Despite the fact that the Church judges it objectively in the external forum to be a grave sin to cohabitate adulterously after divorce, if one has concluded in their own introspection of the internal forum that they do not have "full culpability" in the matter, then they are permitted to approach the Sacraments. So here too, in the moral order, the subjectivist dispositions of the internal forum override the objective reality of the external forum. That's clearly where Francis has been pushing his own "Who am I to judge?" agenda. Unfortunately, not even we ourselves are competent to decide our own culpability in the internal forum. But none of that trumps the judgment of the Church regarding the external forum. Can I receive Holy Communion after committing a mortal sin and before Confession simply because I am morally certain that I had made a perfect act of contrition? Absolutely not.
So let us make the proper distinctions between a true understanding of "Who am I to judge?" which Our Lord Himself and the Church after Him have taught and the modernist subjectivist version of the phrase. Bishop Williamson absolutely nails it on stating that all the errors of Vatican II are rooted in this subjectivism, a mindset that has grown over the years from Descartes to the Phenomenologists and gradually infected Catholicism with its rot. John Paul II and Benedict XVI were both leading phenomenologists.