Our People

The sense of sin and the ‘nonsense’ of forgiveness

Retreat to Clergy of the Military Ordinariate, Second Conference

By Most Rev. Anthony Fisher OP
Auxiliary Bishop of Sydney
28/11/2005

In 390 AD the Emperor Theodosius was excommunicated by St Ambrose, the bishop of Milan. As a result of his massacre of several thousands of Thessalonians at the Imperial order, Ambrose denied him Holy Communion, writing that if he came to Church he would not offer the sacrifice. Ambrose’s letter to Theodosius is a model of successful, if stern, pastoral care – invoking the example of King David’s repentance after his murder of Uriah the Hittite and his adultery with his wife Bathsheba. He cajoled, urged, entreated, exhorted and bullied. Using every trick in the rhetorical, and indeed political, book he managed – eventually – to woo Theodosius back to a serious engagement with the Gospel and its moral demands.

Popes Paul VI and John Paul II spoke of a loss of “the sense of sin”, not just as a moral and pastoral problem, but also as a deep theological one. There is much in what they said on this subject. It’s hard, for example, to see that a stern ancient bishop, like St Ambrose, would have fitted in especially well with the Church’s modern penitential practice, or rather lack of it. The controversies over the Third Rite of Reconciliation invented for war-time emergencies and the like but used most often in comfortable middle class suburbia betray not so much a lack of liturgical discipline as a failure to understand Repentance and Forgiveness and therefore the Redemption itself as integral to the Christian way of life. Christ’s first words of preaching in the Gospel of St Mark which we have just begun to read for a new liturgical year are “Repent! Convert! Change your hearts and believe the Good News”.

The ancient pattern of confession, extended and severe penance and then, and only then, sacramental absolution and restoration to Eucharistic communion was disrupted in the West by the pastoral improvisations of the Welsh and Irish monks re-evangelising Europe in the seventh century, for whom time was of the essence. Their Dave Allen-like lists of sins and corresponding penances are still a treasure trove of social history, of how different sins were regarded. It was not unique to them, though. Such works were written by Jewish Rabbis as well as Orthodox monks. A Russian penitential manual of the time of Peter the Great, a period of overt Westernisation, lays down a penance of six weeks of 150 prostrations a day for the sin of cross-dressing. Apparently, it was a military vice especially common among the officer classes.

The idea that sin was not just an offence against God and neighbour, but also against the Order of the Universe, and that some form of restitution has to be made, is a widespread one. What our New Age friends call Karma or “What goes around comes around” is pretty much what our grandparents taught about “Chickens coming home to roost”. Christian penance, founded as it is, in the Passion of Christ, is more personal. It does not have the same implacable, impersonal and vengeful quality – or at least oughtn’t to. It does teach, though, that something has to be made up in the life of the repentant sinner by way of restoring friendship with God and neighbour. Christians like everyone else have always looked for the easy way out, of course – trying to trick the chickens into roosting elsewhere, as it were.

The custom of martyrs and confessors in the ancient Church, having once become identified with Christ in bearing witness to Him in the face of death and consequently being able to forgive harsh penances (and indeed sin) in His name, was arguably the first step in the commodification of forgiveness that resulted in the scandal of the sale of indulgences in the sixteenth century (by, amongst others, my Dominican brother Johann Tetzel) that so incensed Martin Luther. It was also a driving force for medieval pilgrimages seeking forgiveness at the shrines of the martyrs and saints or of the Holy Land: a little more onerous than buying an indulgence or going the Third Rite way.

We are accustomed to viewing the age of the pre-Constantinian martyrs as a sort of golden age of the Faith. From what we can work out it was far from that. Both Tertullian and Cyprian condemned the abuses in the custom of confessors and martyrs forgiving sins. “No sooner has anyone put on bonds,” says Tertullian, “than adulterers beset him, fornicators gain access, prayers echo round him, pools of tears from polluted sinners soak him.” Cyprian in 250AD complained that the cells of martyrs were little better than taverns, or indeed worse. After their confession and with their death for Christ impending, the martyr-to-be was assured a quick passage to heaven – and not just for them but to their family and friends as well. It was not so much the gaol-house parties that upset Cyprian, as evidently disorderly as they were. It was the flood of letters by martyrs to bishops that willy-nilly forgave sin without the need of penance, by-passing the clergy and restoring apostates and adulterers to communion in a most irregular way. The loss of a sense of sin is not just a modern phenomenon!

This long and reasonably tortuous history should alert us to the likelihood that establishing a renewed “sense of sin” in the modern Church that does not simply revive the, often contradictory, abuses of the past would not be an easy task. Horror stories of clergy, religious and laity with an exaggerated, possibly even neo-Jansenist, concern for the reality of sin are too frequently heard to be entirely fictitious. The distortions that such an attitude begets are not to be lightly regarded. I heard of one, by then very old, priest whose sermons inevitably strayed towards an encouragement to the use of the discipline: “The Angels sing for joy when they hear the sound of the discipline on the back of the sinner,” was the usual climax to such performances – guaranteed to bring guffaws and sniggers from hyped-up 15 year olds primed for that line. I knew another who never failed to preach on the evils of contraception even after he had moved into a nursing home and his congregation consisted entirely of nuns and elderly people!

But while scrupulosity about sin and odd ideas about penance are a terrible affliction, I suspect these days, they are much less of a problem than their opposite. So avid are we to avoid being seen as the classic religious “disapprovers” of the media’s imagination that we adopt a mentality of automatic approval, often coded as “compassion”. Sin and Repentance, let alone fasting or other penance, are frequently seen as concepts from our unfortunate “fundamentalist” past that need to be thoroughly de-mythologised if we are to engage modern congregations and appear up-to-date. “We’re not like that any more”, is a constant refrain. The evangelical theologian and martyr Dietrich Bonhoffer identified this tendency in his own time and place, 1930s Nazi Germany, under the heading of “Cheap Grace”, which was for him the enemy of the “Free Grace” brought by Christ.

Still less do we talk about one of the key ideas of the New Testament: hell. Our Lord frequently speaks of hell, damnation and perdition, as often indeed as he speaks of heaven, yet the notion of eternal punishment for our sins is one that we hesitate ever to preach about. My Novice Master used to pride himself on “giving them hell” even when he preached his Christmas homilies. When other brethren remonstrated with him he would respond that for once-a-year Catholics it was best to warn them where they might be headed! But hell, like sin, is not an idea that is viewed sympathetically in our middle-class Australian culture and I’m not sure how popular it would be amongst our military forces, although they may well meet hell on earth at some time in their years of service. Classic Christian thought has other views. In the Divine Comedy, Dante has placed these verses over the door of the Inferno:

Justice moved my maker celestial; I was created by the divine power,
By the Supreme Wisdom, and by Love Primeval
Only eternal things are older than I; and I will forever endure.
Abandon every hope, you who enter. (Canto III).

He thus points out that hell is a consequence of justice, wisdom and love – a consequence of divine and human choice. We are not compelled to love God – we are able choose that which is not God. We are not robots that must choose God one way or another. He consents to allow us to go our own way, because what he desires is our freedom to return His love. Grace does not overpower us or violate our freedom. Heaven is our destiny, but not our only possibility. We do have a real choice.

The Incarnation of God’s Love in Christ brought the reality of hell into a new, sharp light – not just the netherworld of the pagans and Jews where the shades of the dead led a shadowy and imperfect existence, but the Hell of human rejection of God and His law. Christ has brought to a climax for the human race the drama of salvation: the possibility of the knowledge and love of God, as well as the possibility of the reunification of both. We can see both heaven and hell on the Cross – God’s desire for our love and the consequences of the rejection of that love.

It is a drama that artists, writers and musicians have drawn upon constantly. Some of the most important works of art, at least in the Western world, use this tension to immense effect. You can cite Milton, Dante, the anonymous medieval hymnodist of the Dies Irae, painters such as Hieronymus Bosch, Mozart’s Don Giovanni, his Requiem and that of every great composer down to Andrew Lloyd Webber and beyond, the whole corpus of Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene and Flannery O’Connor, not to mention the decorations of Churches and Cathedrals everywhere. In the East the figure of the Pantocrator, Christ the Terrible Judge, calling the elect and casting away the damned is the most visible icon in the Church towering above the sanctuary in the Dome or behind the Altar. In popular Catholic piety hell survived from Christ’s time to at least the 1960s. My mother recalls that ‘in her day’ they didn’t need horror films as the Redemptorist Missioners satisfied that particular lust as congregations quaked at the threats of hellfire. They were a Catholic version of the minister to the Church of the Quivering Brethren in Stella Gibbons’ Cold Comfort Farm who raised the brethren to paroxysms of intensely pleasurable terror through waving a poker at them and describing to them the colossal temperatures they would have to endure in hell. He would remind them of how when they were young and they burned their fingers their mothers would salve them with butter: unfortunately, the minister was quick to point out, there would be no butter in hell!

Is it then true to say that we have moved past all of that? Have modern Christians really come to understand something about our relationship with God in Christ that had eluded the Church for the first two thousand years? It seems to me that the odds are very much against the 1960s being such a profound turning point in human consciousness and divine revelation.

Many homilies today dwell on God’s love and exhort the people to disregard the fear of God and His vengeance. He is, after all, a God of Love or so the argument goes. In the bad old days all we knew was the vengeance of God and fear of Hell, now in these enlightened latter days, we know about unconditional love and forgiveness, though we’re unsure if there is anything about us to forgive. Extreme versions of this theology explicitly deny the reality of Original and Actual Sin – perhaps the only empirically demonstrable dogma of Christianity – and so implicitly deny the reality of the Redemption from sin, perhaps the harder thing to demonstrate. Despite the best efforts of some sociologists, historians, psychologists and New Age gurus to inoculate us to a sense of sin, evil remains the easy bit of Christianity to believe in. You just have to turn on the evening news to understand that there is something deeply wrong with human nature. The more you look the less convincing ideas of human perfection become. The United Nations, for example, used to be a white knight of human rights, humanitarian aid and peacekeeping. These days it is a rather corrupt-looking institution like any other: paedophile rings, kick-backs from oil-for-food programmes, craven capitulations to some dictators, genocides ignored, an obsession with condoms and abortion and more. Though the goals of our military forces are the positive ones of peace and security, we would not need them were human nature and community not so messed up. And no matter how non-judgmental we’ve become, most of us have a secret list of those for whom we’d like there to be a god of vengeance, as well as those friends for whom we want a god of mercy.

The solution to this problem of which gods for whom lies in God’s unity. The film 8 Millimetre is a parable of the honourable small town detective, played by Nicholas Cage, seeking to stop the truly evil – a snuff movie ring – and becoming evil in the process of exacting vengeance. Trying to sort out justice from vengeance in this life is no easy task, simply because we are finite creatures who do not view the whole of the universe in a single glance. In God, however, mercy and love and vengeance and justice and wisdom and power all reach a point of convergence – to deny one of him is to deny them all.

When grace heals nature it brings that divine unity to earth in the form of a forgiveness which only God’s power can achieve. There is a very poignant story that comes out of the centuries-old Balkans conflict. A Christian girl only escaped with her life after seeing her whole family tortured and killed by Muslim militia. She later became a nurse in a field hospital and found herself tending to one of the men she recognized as having killed her family and raped her. As he was recovering he also recognized her and said, “Why didn’t you take the opportunity to kill me when I was unconscious? Didn’t you recognize me? Don’t you know who I am?” “Yes,” she said in reply, “I recognised you. But I am a disciple of the one who said, ‘Love your enemies! Do good to those that hate you!’” We might think such an example of Christian forgiveness admirable but rarely possible, or else naïve and rarely desirable. Bruce Willis would certainly handle it differently. But the logic of the Cross proposes a very different response to evil, refusing to give evil the last word, refusing to use its tactics – but also refusing to ignore it.

Strangely, some aspects of popular culture have developed a fascination with things infernal, especially the conflict between Good and Evil. Following the old dictum that things only become fashionable after the Church has given them up, ghosts, devils, demons, vampires, black magic, possessions and exorcisms have exercised a terrible allure in recent years. If horror films represent anything more than a grosser sort of entertainment, then our culture could almost be said to be obsessed with the manifestations of evil. Quentin Tarrentino’s none-too-subtle films are an easily recognizable case-in-point.

Despite what we may sometimes think, modern audiences are receptive to the idea of sin and evil. This is not an invitation to wild discourses about vampires or even the more terrifying Redemptorist homiletics. To acknowledge the reality of sin and the evil that we do in our lives and the rôle of sacramental penance in dealing with that is a pressing necessity. If we give people to understand, either directly or by omission, that their actions have no present consequences in the kinds of persons they become and their relationship with their fellows, their Church and their God, or that what they do in this life has no eternal consequences, we sell them short, cheapen the Gospel, deny the significance of the Redemption itself and possibly cost them heaven.

That I suspect is a big part of the wisdom of helping people cultivate a sense of sin, as Paul VI and John Paul II asked us to do, and helping them receive the ‘nonsense’ of sacramental confession. Nonsense, I call it, because the ‘non-sense’ of reconciliation is the flipside of the ‘sense’ of sin. Nonsense, I say, because it is not the wisdom of this age to seek forgiveness of anyone, let alone God via the Church via a priest. Our Prime Minister regards saying sorry as weakness and ‘Reconciliation’ has become a name with which to cover over the cracks. Sacramental reconciliation is non—sense for another reason: because what this sacrament says is that the last thing we want from God is commonsense justice. We take notice of the old Jewish saying: “Never pray for Justice, you might get it”. Our Christian prayer, in every Mass, is for God to be unjust with  us: “Do not consider what we truly deserve, but grant us your forgiveness,” we pray. Every confession is like the pleas for clemency presently being made for Van Nuygen in Singapore.

The Sacrament of Confession, then, is subversive, like the Beatitudes with their upside down view of happiness. There we dare to forgive both what this world counts no sin at all and what this world counts an unforgivable sin. There we dare to mediate a divine perspective and a divine healing. And we bring all the Church with us to both sides of the confessional, confessing and absolving her faults, or the faults of her members and her ministers. In the process we hope to help people get the balance right: so that we can be sinner-saints, or rather sinners-becoming-saints, rather than scrupulous self-loathers or puffed up, self-righteous judges or smug, comfortable consumers. Semi-public shows of contrition, of tears, of trust and hope, with all the trimmings of confession, penance and absolution, with a military chaplain binding and losing, are essential pastoral ministries. Our ANZAC chaplains who went before us were great examples of this ministry. In The Cross of ANZAC it is recorded that the newly-commissioned Fr Geoff Mayne on his journey to Vietnam on HMAS Sydney was deeply moved by a public affirmation of Faith by the ship’s executive officer. He described how Commander Ron Brasch knelt near the altar before Mass, in full view of the ship’s company, asking the young Fr Mayne to hear his confession and give him absolution.

God-made-man in Jesus Christ knows our human nature inside-out: he knows we are either not much inclined ever to admit we’ve been wrong or too inclined to think we’re so wrong we can never be forgiven. Either way we need that Sacrament that brings us face to face with the mirror of the cross in which we can see who we really are and through Divine pity what we really can be. There we are confronted with the gap between the two and the possibility of more and better. We bishops priests and deacons must first be penitents ourselves if we are to mediate mercy to others, if we are to ‘give them heaven’. “Blessed are the merciful: they will have mercy shown them.”