Tolerance, Love, and the Courage to Be Real

You could say tolerance is the wardrobe staple of our age: everyone has to wear it, at least in public, like a sweater labeled “I’m a Nice Person.” The well-meaning, the indifferent, the quietly furious, all zip into it. And mostly for good reason. We live cheek by jowl, and the pressure to avoid combusting over the breakfast table or the school board meeting or the comment section is constant. Tolerance, as we’ve stitched it, means letting the other guy be: your church, my church, their parade, her haircut. Live and let live. Surely, that’s the best we can do in a world as cracked and glorious as ours, right?

But Catholicism, with its holy fevers and stubborn surprises, keeps smuggling in tougher, perhaps stranger, questions. It gestures not at the patient clerk nodding silently at the counter visitor’s tirades, but at the wild, holy man who washed his enemies’ feet. The man who called us, again and again, not to “tolerate,” but to love.

Contemporary society, charged with the electricity of pluralism, often defines tolerance as non-interference—a studious shushing of judgment. Don’t disturb. Never disagree. Agree to disagree, preferably in lowercase. But in the Catholic tradition, this is at best a half-truth, and, at worst, a polite lie. Tolerance, the Catechism makes clear, is not a theological virtue. The great trio—faith, hope, and charity—are woven in golden thread through every Christian life (Catechism of the Catholic Church [CCC], 1993, §1813). Tolerance, though sometimes necessary, is more like a patch on your jeans: useful, even prudent, but not the fabric itself.

The moral tradition of the Church welcomes tolerance as a civic necessity. It is recognized, yes, sometimes as a strategic concession to peace: “If possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all” (Rom 12:18, New Revised Standard Version). But tolerance alone will not redeem us. The call is higher, heavier; St. Paul, that old rascal and poet, insists love must be the engine—love as a command, not a feeling, not mere patience (1 Cor 13:1-13).

Here is the twist: raised too high, tolerance mutates from social wisdom to spiritual cowardice. Evil, Archbishop Charles Chaput reminds us, “preaches tolerance until it is dominant, then it tries to silence good” (Chaput, 2017). What a line! It stings, not unlike an icy plunge into a river—shocking, clarifying. The danger is not in giving others living space, but in sanctifying non-judgment until it becomes moral neutrality, or worse, indifference to sin itself.

Too easily, tolerance becomes the mother of ambiguity, the rubber stamp for anything at all. To “tolerate” the wound without offering healing, to witness brokenness and shrink from honest speech—all in the name of not offending—this is not love. Dietrich Bonhoeffer called it “cheap grace”: the forgiveness without repentance, communion without cost (Bonhoeffer, 1995). The Church, friend, does not exist to ratify the status quo or merely to preserve quiet. She was born to wake the dead.

In Catholic teaching, the aim is never simply cohabitation. The command is to “will the good” of the other—to love, “even unto the cross” (John 15:13). Aquinas, magister of the stubbornly clear, reminds us that to love is “to will the good of another” (Summa Theologica, I-II, Q.26, Art.4). Charity is not tolerance. It seeks the wellbeing (including spiritual wellbeing) of every person, regardless of their choices or persuasions; it cannot, however, pretend that truth is negotiable.

So, love refuses to become mere affirmation. It is not neutral. It delights in the beloved’s goodness, but aches for their flourishing, strives for their rescue from lies and destruction (CCC, 1993, §1822–1829). In its reluctance to wound, tolerance too often colludes with the darkness it pretends to manage.

Stand in the doorway of the Gospels for a minute. Christ tolerates—oh, how he tolerates!—the fisherman who doubts, the taxman who betrays, the zealot forever spoiling for a fight. But never, not once, does he abandon the truth for peace. His love is always paired with truth, truth with generosity; “neither do I condemn you—go and sin no more” (John 8:11). He passes out mercy, always, but refuses to lie.

So how do we walk this needle’s eye? The task is neither harsh judgment nor hollow silence. It is the audacious thing—the one that makes saints sweat and sinners weep. It is to speak, gently, the truth, while serving, humbly, the other. To be, even in the face of mockery or loss, both courageous and kind.

Christians are called to “bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ” (Gal 6:2). One cannot bear a burden if one is not present, if one has vanished behind the thin veil of non-interference. The world begs for witnesses—witnesses to the possibility that goodness and truth are not enemies, that one can disagree but still adore, challenge but never crush, announce good news without arrogance. Such witness is not safe. Ask the saints. Ask Christ.

Let’s not, then, canonize mere “tolerance.” Let’s risk the greater virtue—charity. This is the astonishing Catholic adventure: that we can love, with our words and our lives, so fully that we offend the darkness while mending the wounded.

May we, as Chaput urged—eyes open, heart honest—watch for tolerance when it is one step from indifference, and remember that silence is not always peace. May we, with trembling but whole hearts, speak the truth in love, offend when necessary, but always for the sake of healing, never humiliation. May we, above all, witness by our lives that Christ is still the answer, and charity—costly, luminous, relentless—is still the only law that saves.

References

Bonhoeffer, D. (1995). The Cost of Discipleship (R. H. Fuller, Trans.). Touchstone.
Catechism of the Catholic Church (2nd ed.). (1993). United States Catholic Conference.
Chaput, C. J. (2017). Strangers in a Strange Land: Living the Catholic Faith in a Post-Christian World. Henry Holt and Co.
Holy Bible, New Revised Standard Version. (1989).
St. Thomas Aquinas. Summa Theologica.