I have consistently found that the most intolerant people I meet are those who have the word “tolerance” on their lips all the time. We should not take this as hypocrisy. It is not what the Pharisees do, who blow a trumpet before them when they are giving alms. That is to turn charity into a stage-play, so that they can earn the praise of men, and if that is what they want, that is what they will get. “Fit retribution,” says Milton, “empty as their deeds.”
It is rather, I think, a condition most peculiar to our age, and it has to do with an urgent desire not to feel the prickling of the sins we approve. Those who regularly and honestly engage in examining their consciences will not like what they find there. That is because we are all sinners, and we all fall short of the glory of God.
The saint is more assured of God’s mercy than the ordinary sinner is, but he is also more careful not to offend, and more abashed when he does offend. He does not need a slogan from politicized arms of the Church to instruct him in tolerance. His own sins instruct him well enough.
I am speaking here of persons to be tolerated, not sins. We want physicians who love their patients and hate their cancers.
We must get it into our heads that sin is real just as diseases of the body are real. I walked about for nearly a month with a blood clot in my leg, not wanting to believe it was really there. But the clot was under no obligation to respect my wishes.
We Catholics believe that God has given the human soul a moral constitution: we thrive by what is objectively good, and we wither by what is objectively bad. Our moral diseases are under no obligation to respect our opinions about them.
Of course, when a man sins with full and clear awareness that what he is doing is wrong, he adds defiance or recklessness to the underlying sin. And in this sense, we may say that some measure of ignorance mitigates one’s guilt when the whole of the act and all its circumstances are judged. But the sin itself remains, and it works its harm.
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