Dear friends,

We continue our conversation on the sacrament of Reconciliation and how difficult is it to understand it correctly. We wrote two previous articles on this subject and what follows is a continuation.

The official teaching of the church continues to proclaim that we are called to share in the very life of God, to be perfect as our Heavenly Father is perfect. This command by Jesus cannot be compromised or watered down.  It is precisely the magnificence of this calling that founds human dignity.

But the traditional moral theology of the church is generally abstracts  and idealistic more than historical.

What exist are poor human beings who, at their best, try to do what they think is right and are constantly humiliated by their stupidity and inconsistency.

We recognize, more and more, that, in reality, a person is terribly conditioned by a multitude of biological and social factors where ambiguities abound. 

Very often we find ourselves in “damned it you do damned if you don’t “situations where the best one can do is to choose a lesser evil.

We are always “sinning” against something or other, and constantly in need of mercy.  This might be one of the reasons we find it so difficult to go to confession.

We don’t see ourselves clearly.  We have a vague sense of failure and inadequacy yet a certain repugnance to measure our intimate acts against an abstract standard.

While Pastoral common sense takes this complexity into consideration, the official teachings of the church continue to define good and evil in terms of black and white, often times without nuance or compassion, thus alienating many from the sacramental sources of grace and even driving them to discouragement and despair.

St. Thomas Aquinas gives us the key to the answer. When commentating on the great precept: “Be perfect as your Heavenly Father is perfect.”  St. Thomas tells us that we fulfill the precept by tending toward this perfection. 

With our baggage of individual and collective sin, we can only tend toward perfection in a very imperfect way.

It is a question of searching for a balance between respect for our sublime vocation and understanding for one’s self and others as regards the difficulties of attaining even a semblance of the perfection to which we are destined.

Sin remains a mystery hidden in the complexity of the human heart. Our best efforts are soiled and inadequate and, perhaps, our worst mistakes are rooted in bad judgment rather than malice. Beneath all that is our basic depravity and our complicity with it that seeps into all we do and vitiates into a greater or lesser extent.

The “Eastern Church” speaks of “the ancestral curse” whereas the “Latin Church” of the West speaks of original sin. It stands for the physical and moral corruption that have been handed down to us and that we, in turn, will pass on. Original sin is to be understood as a deep-set distortion.

In modern terminology: The program that runs our lives is wrong giving us the most absurd results: divisions, hatred, poverty, wars etc. We need to change this program and run a new one which is called: “the mind of Christ” which will help us to act according to our deep nature which has been created in the likeness of God. To get this mind we need the conversion that the sacrament of reconciliation brings about.