Fraternal Correction

An essential part of living the Christian life is correcting the behavior of those who have gone astray.

Christians are not only called to be holy themselves but to help other people be holy and to prevent them from causing damage to themselves and the Church.

Correcting our fellow man is not only permitted, it is a duty and an obligation.

Far from being an act of self-righteousness, fraternal correction, or brotherly correction, is done out of love for the other person and a desire for them to embrace God’s way of doing things.

Christians should also welcome fraternal correction when their own limitations and defects put them at risk.

Being attentive to our brothers and sisters in Christ:

Correction is at the heart of the Gospel:

Called to be watchmen:

My brothers, if anyone among you should stray from the truth and someone bring him back, he should know that whoever brings back a sinner from the error of his way will save his soul from death and will cover a multitude of sins.
James 5: 19-20

Helping those who are struggling to live a better way:

Compelled by love to speak the truth:

Every evangelizer is expected to have a reverence for truth, especially since the truth that he studies and communicates is none other than revealed truth and hence, more than any other, a sharing in the first truth which is God Himself. The preacher of the Gospel will therefore be a person who even at the price of personal renunciation and suffering always seeks the truth that he must transmit to others. He never betrays or hides truth out of a desire to please men, in order to astonish or to shock, nor for the sake of originality or a desire to make an impression. He does not refuse truth. He does not obscure revealed truth by being too idle to search for it, or for the sake of his own comfort, or out of fear. He does not neglect to study it. He serves it generously, without making it serve him.
Pope Paul VI, Evangelii Nuntiandi, December 8, 1975

Christians are obligated to correct each other:

A failure to correct is a failure of charity:

The fruits of charity are joy, peace, and mercy; charity demands beneficence and fraternal correction; it is benevolence; it fosters reciprocity and remains disinterested and generous; it is friendship and communion: Love is itself the fulfillment of all our works. There is the goal; that is why we run: we run toward it, and once we reach it, in it we shall find rest.
Catechism of the Catholic Church 1829

Reaching out to our neighbors in prayer: