Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone

“Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone” is invoked by Raymond O’Malley as a principle of restraint when Jacopo Baldassare Lomeli questions whether he should expose colleagues’ past failings. The line does not settle the question of accountability: Lomeli’s concern about Cardinal Tremblay involves a recent meeting with the late Pope, and O’Malley asks him to distinguish that matter from older sins and institutional failures.

The Expression in Context

Lomeli considers several kinds of wrongdoing. He recalls the Church’s failure to take victims’ complaints of sexual abuse seriously, including the practice of moving responsible priests to other parishes, and admits that he might not have acted more firmly had he been involved. He also alludes to intimate friendships that ended in sin and heartbreak, and to Tutino’s preoccupation with status and protocol. These examples lead Lomeli to ask whether his role requires him to search like a “witchfinder general” for colleagues’ lapses from more than thirty years earlier.

O’Malley’s Reply and Its Limit

O’Malley answers by quoting the expression, aligning it with the danger of condemning others while remaining conscious of one’s own fallibility. His reply is not an argument that every allegation should be ignored. He immediately contrasts Lomeli’s concern about old failures with the more recent meeting between Cardinal Tremblay and the late Pope, which took place the previous month. The exchange therefore makes the saying a caution against indiscriminate judgment, not a resolution of the specific question Lomeli is investigating.

Narrative Significance

The expression links personal humility to the problem of institutional accountability. Lomeli recognizes that failures to confront abuse were often enabled by ignorance of its scale and by a preference for a quiet life; the line gives moral weight to restraint without erasing the consequences of that inaction. By turning from decades-old lapses to a recent meeting, O’Malley also keeps the conversation focused on what may still demand scrutiny. The saying’s force lies in that tension: judgment requires humility, but humility does not make every matter safely past.