In the past few years, I’ve heard some ideas about the sacrament of penance that continue to bother me. The latest resurfacing of the sex abuse scandals within the Church brings to mind these concerns.
When it comes to marital infidelities, many confessors recommend not telling the betrayed spouse. There might be some room for this advice if the spouse is somehow unwell or if the offense is a one-time lapse. But it begs the question of forgiveness and, perhaps more importantly, betrays the marital union with a flawed metaphysics of sin.
Typically, the reasoning goes something along the lines of not wanting to hurt the spouse. But if that were the primary concern, the sin never would have happened in the first place. Arguably, such reasoning simply provides a convenient excuse for impeding transparency.
Our notions of penance and sin have been greatly influenced by the modern notion of privacy. We talk of “private” and “public” sins. When the sin is the bookkeeping at Enron, we consider it public. When it’s sexual, we consider it private because it occurs in the figurative bedroom.
But as Catholics we believe that we are all one in the mystical body of Christ. This union means that all are affected by the actions of a part of the body. Just as an entire human body suffers when part of it is diseased or sick, so too the mystical body of Christ suffers when one member sins.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church (n. 1459) reinforces this, explaining that while absolution takes away sin, it does not remedy the disorders caused by the sin.
Sure, the members of the body of Christ may not know the individual sins of one another, but our individual sinfulness impedes our ability to be united in love with God. All sin subtracts from the common good and affects the entire Body of Christ. The sex scandals of the clergy bear this out all too well. Offences that were conducted in secrecy and later confessed in secrecy continue to assail the faithful and undermine the faith of many.
Similarly, marriage requires the mutual gift of self on the part of both spouses. While we certainly are not required to confess to our spouses, there’s an aspect of the union which requires transparency if we really want it to deepen and become more intimate like the marriage between Christ and his Church. None of us is perfect; so the mutual gift of self includes our weaknesses and vulnerabilities, another aspect of “for better or for worse.”
In the case of infidelity, God is offended and so is the spouse. The sacrament of penance covers the relationship between God and the penitent. God forgives in the confessional. But the spouse cannot forgive if never told. Similarly, in the case of sexual abuse, more than the sacrament is needed to right the wrong committed against the victim.
At a penitential liturgy last week, Vienna’s Cardinal Christoph Schönborn spoke to the harm done by the sex abuse scandals. Condemning the silence imposed by some members of the Church, he thanked the abuse victims for breaking the silence because they are speaking truth, the truth of the harm done to them. He went so far as to say, “When the victims talk, God speaks to us.” While it may be painful for the Church to hear this, the cardinal reminds us that the pain of the victims is far greater.
To my mind, the same flawed understanding of sin and penance that can violate the marital union paves the way for the climate of secrecy that has enabled the abusers of numerous victims of sex abuse within the Church. Simply because a sin occurs secretly and is confessed in private does not mean that it will not have extremely wounding public effects.
Just as a spouse can be publicly humiliated by the other spouse’s infidelity, so the Church continues to be humiliated by the infidelities of some, even a relative few, of her clerics and religious. In both situations, it would have been better to know about offenses sooner rather than later. Trust betrayed has a way of eventually being discovered.
Cardinal Ratzinger took the lead in handling the cases of sex abuse when he headed the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith, years before he became Pope Benedict. His hard line approach stemmed from his belief that there is no room for such abuse in the Church and that the victims deserve justice. In 2008, during his trip to the U.S., he met privately with a small group of victims. At the time, The Boston Globe, the paper that broke the story on the 2002 sex abuse scandals, described the meeting as “a dramatic move likely to alter forever the image of his pontificate.”
The challenge to the Church is not unlike the challenge to the repentant spouse: now that the sin has been acknowledged, do we honestly want to correct its effects and even strengthen our unity by admitting our flaws and weaknesses? Pope Benedict has given the Church an effective example to follow: one of justice and healing. While the Church in the United States has addressed this issue, the Church as a whole must now face the effects of these particular sins, no matter where and when they occurred.