Bless Me, Father!

A survey in 2005 showed that 42 % of Catholic adults, when asked how often they went to confes­sion, answered "Never."

The days of ritual visits to confes­sion on Saturday afternoons are over, at least for most Catholic families. In that same survey, 32 % of Catholics said they confess their sins to a priest less than “once a year"?  How did the church in America move in just a few decades from full, to empty confessionals? There is not one, but a confluence of factors.

- The first is a profound change in the sense of sin. On the one hand, we're not obsessed with sin any longer, but on the other hand, people don't think of themselves as sinners, which is a big problem. Many Christians  are not all that open to recognizing personal responsibility. Many feel that the psychologist, or spiritual director, fills the same needs that the confessors once did.

- The second is a shift in emphasis on the presentation of the sacrament. A.)After Vatican II, the Church started speaking more frequently about "social sins," like racism and sexism. B.) We were also made aware of the importance of the penitential rite at the beginning of the Mass: It is an important way to reconcile oneself with God and others. C.) The teaching of the Church emphases God's mercy more frequently than before. D.) As a result, some Catholics may have become confused about whether or not confession is still necessary.

- The third reason behind so many empty confessionals, is the publication of Humanae Vitae, in 1968 when Catholics began to doubt not only the need to confess sexual sins but also the moral authority of the church, whose representa­tives would absolve them from these sins.

- The fourth reason may be the simplest: because of busi­er lives, American Catholics are not as able to keep the Saturday afternoon ritual of going to confession with their family.

What can the church do about it?

While the sacrament is on the decline, some parishes are attracting many people to con­fession. How? Because people have understood that  Confession is not an obligation, but as an oppor­tunity. This sacrament is more about how good God is than how bad we are.

The Disappearance of Sin

Today we make mistakes, have addictions, get in with the wrong crowd, but we no longer sin.  There are many fairly obvious reasons for this “death of sin.”  Modern science has demonstrated that we are so socially and genetically determined that the scope of our liberty is much narrower than we had imagined.  There is also a reactions against a certain representation of God as a stern and exacting judge, as a celestial bookkeeper who expects that we conform exactly to a certain moral code-or else!

This has given way to the concept of a merciful God who” understands” us and sees our good intentions, however frustrated they often are.

But if we don’t sin anymore, others certainly do!  This is obviously true on a personal level, but even more so on a national level where we see ourselves as champions of liberty and human dignity entrusted by God to eradicate evil from this world, something Jesus didn’t succeed in doing. 

We rid ourselves of our darkest inclinations by projecting them on others and combating them there.  It is as if we compensate for minimizing our own sins by exaggerating the faults of others.

Yet whatever name we give it and whatever excuse we might invent for ignoring it. We know deep down that there is something in us that is terribly depraved, that we do not like, with which we do not want to be identified. We hate this, yet it had a hold on us, as an ultimate possibility perhaps, an ultimate” freedom” to be what we are.

The newly discovered biological and social determinisms can be indications of our solidarity is sin and can lead to a realization of our collective responsibility for and another.  And certainly the concept of a loving and merciful God is much closer to the essence of the Christian message than the vindictive and punishing judge. 

Much in the evolution of our notion of sinfulness is, I believe, from the Holy Spirit.

This leads to another problem and another tension.  The magisterium of the church, which possesses the charism of discernment, continues to proclaim that we are called to share in the very life of God, to be perfect as our Heavenly Father is perfect.  The church maintains and must maintain the sublimity of the Christian vocation, which surpasses all human capabilities. Were the church to reduce the exigencies of the Christian vocation to what is “possible.” It would betray its own vocation.  “Be perfect as your Heavenly Father is perfect” 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 generally abstracts from concrete historical and social contexts and considers a hypothetical “pure nature” that is faced with hypothetical clear-cut options.  Its perspective is idealistic, not historical. 

To classify certain acts “ in themselves” as mortal sins excluding their agents from Gods’ love is to forget that acts do not exist “in themselves” any more than human nature exists in itself.”  What exist are poor louts 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 choose a lesser evil. 

Practically speaking, 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 and are poor psychoanalysts.  We have a vague sense of failure and inadequacy yet a certain repugnance to measure our intimate acts against an abstract standard. 

Pastoral common sense usually takes this complexity into consideration, but 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.

No less an authority than St. Thomas Aquinas gives us the key to the answer, I believe. 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 and loving gratitude for our sublime vocation and compassion 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.  But if we are tending toward a more diffuse concept of particular sins, this could also be the occasion of a more acute awareness of sinfulness of individual and collective sinfulness.  Our best efforts are soiled and inadequate and, perhaps, our worst mistakes are rooted in bad judgment and stupid it rather than malice, but 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: rather than original sin; these are the seeps of physical and moral corruption that have been handed down to us and that we, in turn, with pass on.

Solidarity in sin

A striking and, I believe, underappreciated sign of this shift in our conception of sin took place on the First Sunday of Lent of the year 2000 when John Paul II, in a solemn penitential liturgy, asked forgiveness of God and the world for the past sins of the church as if we were all personally responsible for these sins.  In the official missalette used in the papal ceremony, there is a picture of one of the engravings on the “Holy Doors.”  It depicts Christ “turning and looking at Peter” after the betrayal.  Peter is shattered, humiliated, ashamed, hiking his face, unable to believe what he has done.  This is the church, confused and dismayed, accepting the judgment of Christ, hoping that its repentant love with be accepted by Jesus as was Peter’s on the shore of Lake Tiberius. 

This points to something crucial.

Each of shares the fate of his brothers and sisters; each of us is justified by the righteous and bears responsibility for the sins of sinners.  We have received a legacy of sin and will pass it on.  When we make pacts with the evil in us, we enter into agreement with evil itself and, in the measure we do so, we ratify evil as such and all its fruits.  We become responsibly for the blood of Abel and the apostasy of the last apostate, for the Inquisition and the Holocaust, for the hypocrisy of the hypocrites, for the abominations of the pedophile priests and stonewalling bishops.

To pretend that another’s sin belongs only to that other and that I am not responsible for it is in itself a sin against communion.  If, in trough, we bear the burdens of one another, we have much to be ashamed of, but it is only be assuming responsibility for the sins of all, with its humiliation and shame, that we can contribute to the collective pardon.

For the corollary of this solidarity in sin is solidarity in pardon. 

When forgiveness is accepted by one, mercy is extended to all and mercy upon mercy.  Pardon is never a strictly individual affair.  It is a participation in the Great Mercy that embraces all of humanity.  By becoming greatly pardoned, we shall obtain yet greater mercy and not just for ourselves but for all.

In St. John’s account of the woman caught in adultery, Jesus challenges those who were without sin to cast the first stone.  No one does, nor does Jesus, for he has assumed the sin of the adulteress.  Her sin has become his and is consumed.  Although we cannot fully assume the burdens of others because of our own burden of sin, we can still participate in the pardon offered to all in the measure of our compassion. 

This is the opposite movement from the shifting of evil to others to exonerate our own depravity.

This does not mean that we must fall into the morbid guilt complex and self deprecation. ” Where sin abounds, grace super abounds and the Holy Spirit is given so that, in all truth, we might enter into the life of the beatific Trinity. 

If the church sings the Miserere, it also sings the Magnificat.  It is only when we realize something of the depths of our sinfulness that we can measure the abyss of the Love with which we are loved.  This is the ultimate source of true Christian peace and it is in this peace that we learn to discern; in this peace an authentic humility and blessed realism can take root.