When people attack a teaching by criticizing the behavior of the messenger, they fail to distinguish between truth and authority. Truth does not depend on the person preaching it because truth is objective. If objective truths did not exist, then any discussion on moral codes is meaningless because two persons could have opposing views on the acceptability of murder and both would be correct from their subjective standpoint. Murder being right and wrong at the same time is absurd. Thus, though humans may err in interpreting truth, truth itself is objective and outside of humans.
I’ve always been a touch uneasy with the charge of hypocrisy — both leveling it and having it leveled at me. It’s a bit too…easy. Online, it’s a get-out-of-jail-free deflection, a charge you can throw at someone to put them back on their heel and thus distract from your own inevitable failings.
I found this article particularly interesting given it’s a Catholic publication and, well, need I say any more? But in our cultural slide toward relativism, I find myself with strange bedfellows yet again.