Room for Redemption

Recently I found myself working most of the day at a Church Food Pantry, which is always an eye opening experience. It reminds me of how lucky I am, and also how so many “ordinary” people lack some of the basic necessities of life. I see in the workers too the truth of the words of Christ, that it is more blessed to give than to receive. People are there for all sorts of reasons, and many I have found like working in a Church setting because of the peace and sense of community they find.

Everybody has a story. One of the men working today had a son who was murdered, and he himself spent time in jail. He started volunteering for the Church, and this gave him a sense of atonement and also a way to healthfully honor his dead son. In the line, I hear everything from recipes for sweetbread to complaints about noisy neighbors. What struck me the most today, however, was the contingent coming from Community Service. Most of those people are there by court order to make reparation for minor offenses: I have seen nurses, lawyers, insurance brokers, clinical researchers, and even a Monsignor.

The state tells us that we really should refrain from speaking to these men and women, that they are really supposed to be serving as a punishment. But in the context of working together for a common charitable goal, friendly conversation is inevitable. What strikes me the most is that so many of these men and women are truly decent, loving and hard working. How easy it is in our penal system to see people who are technically criminal as belonging to some separate class of humanity. In reality, the only thing that separates the lawless from the law abiding is the distance of their thoughts and actions. In prison ministry, which I also take part in, this is also the same. What I find to be most amazing about repentant criminals, however, is a trait I encounter all too rarely among the “righteous” out in the world: humility.

Today I witnessed a 40 year old woman say how much she liked a man’s shirt, which read simply “Attitude: Thankful”. The man literally took the shirt off his back and gave it to her (fortunately he had another nearby), which was such a disarming and heartwarming gesture of kindness.

To be perfectly honest, charity is how I turn off the cacophony of the constant, critical news cycle. It’s how I remain in contact with flesh and blood human beings. It’s also how I remember that while it is by justice that the world’s order is maintained, it is by mercy and charity that we have an order worth maintaining at all. With so much going wrong right now in both the secular and sacred worlds, with so many accusations true and false, with the deluge of news about people’s alleged misdeeds going back sometimes decades, I have to ask myself if whether in some cases, the solution is not the judge’s gavel, but the olive branch.

After the Spanish Civil War, when so many atrocities were committed, and after the death of El Caudillo, General Francisco Franco, the Spanish people decided to establish what they still call the Ley del Olvido, (Law of Forgetting) or the Ley de Amnistía (Law of Amnesty, 46/1977). It was decided that the only way to assure the common good and the stability of the future government was simply not to prosecute the vast majority of crimes committed during those difficult years, simply due to their volume and savagery.

As more and more people emerge in the public forum as having sinned or committed crimes, the picture that comes into focus is a society deeply impacted by evil choices, and just as there are perhaps quite a few “good people” behind prison bars, there are conversely many “evil people” out and about. I wonder whether we as a society, in our almost mob-like demands for complete justice, are really prepared for the horrors that would be uncovered. I also marvel at the hypocrisy of a culture that mocks chastity and justice with licentiousness and litigiousness, and yet demands that their regular citizens, from whom our leaders arise, be something resembling either a Vestal Virgin or a Mormon Missionary. I understand and believe some sins and crimes demand a resolution. Yet what I also believe, based on my experience in the Confessional, in Prison, and on the streets, is that most people have a “black box”. In it are all the thoughts, words and actions that many people sincerely regret. Do these people have a right to walk away and live their lives? Are they entitled to a second or even third chance? If not, why not? And if one person is entitled to that, why not another?

Certain actions I think are of a certain violence and depravity that they must be considered crimes and punished as such. Yet many cases exist which I think are genuine grey areas. At what point do we decide we must take action, legally or otherwise?

I think a few markers may help us rationally adjudicate this: the subjective state of the offender, the nature of the offending act, the contumacy or obstinacy of the offender, and what I would call the depth of their “corruptive footprint”; that is, whether the offender has sufficiently damaged the common good by entangling vices which abet their actions, principally among them silence, intimidation, or the promotion of persons or policies that will create an environment in which the crime or sin can fester.

I know many people who have suffered tremendously from the sins of others. I have as well. Yet what makes something like the cases of McCarrick or Weinstein so egregious and abhorrent may not be the acts themselves, but their corruptive footprint, the networks of power which protect and abet their “lifestyle”. It is not the type of sin alone which makes it impossible to walk away, but the corruption which offends the average person the most.

Like many of my essays, I intend to ask more questions than I have answers, and I even deliberately end in Platonic aporia. Yet in the current climate, what I think people need to ask is how certain sins stop being “just personal” and end up being systemic. What is the difference between the man who sins, and the man who corrupts? When does a man cross that line? And how should we act as a Church or as a society along the spectrum of penal approaches, from rehabilitation to punishment? In our desire to reform our public and private morals, do we leave room for redemption?