Apology Tours

RULE 4: “Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.”

Saul Alinky, Rules for Radicals

One of the torments of living in a culture that denies the concept of personal sin is having to grapple with the havoc created by the vacuum. Human beings seemingly, even when they deny sin, have an innate need to assign responsibility, as well as blame. From the Old Testament scapegoat to the Nuremberg Trials, there is something very fundamental in the human conscience that pines for a rectification of injustice.

Unfortunately, one of the hard experiences of life, often learned all too painfully by the young, is that perfect justice is impossible to find in this world. Middle age thus sometimes becomes the age of disillusion, of assessment, of reorientation: wisdom and grace emerge when a person decides, in the midst of a fallen world, to continue to strive for the beautiful and good ideals which inspired him, while not remaining blind to the evils in the world. This requires a sort of personal moral humility: that we are, individually and socially, incapable of creating that ultimately eschatological healing which we long for. It seems like an imperfect truce with evil, and it is. But the alternative in the here and now, unfortunately, is bitterness and rage.

Our age is as bereft of humility as it is bereft of hope, and so lacks the resources to seek true justice and to cope when its perfect realization is unachievable. This deep moral and emotional bitterness I think will become ultimately unhinged. As many commentators have noted, so much of ‘social justice’ activism has the psychological attributes of a religious movement, with a dogma of creation, original sin, eschatology and fall. But it is a social and mental religious impulse completely devoid of grace. There is for them no omnipotent, benevolent God who will come to establish perfect peace, who will soothe the wounds of our deepest betrayals and restore the broken order in the world. All we can do is throw imperfect people and solutions at an imperfect system as a sort of moral meatgrinder. But at the end there is no peace, no joy in that moral universe. Our Lord promised that those who hunger and thirst for righteousness would be satisfied, because they would seek that righteousness in Him. Postmodernity turns that beatitude into a curse, because fallen humanity only has salt water to offer the thirsty soul and the offended conscience. “He who drinks of this water will be thirsty again.”

Ever since the Second Vatican Council, it feels like the Church has never ceased apologizing for herself. Starting with Paul VI and John Paul II especially, it always seems like there is something over which we must make amends: treatment of the Jews, the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, Sexual Abuse, and most recently, the ‘Cultural Genocide’ of the indigenous peoples of Canada. The media tends to behave as if we have serenely existed without ever addressing these problems. Yet find it difficult to find a sincere Catholic, who tries to live a prayerful life, and frequents the Sacrament of Penance, who would not also readily admit that the Church on earth also has her sins, because we as individuals readily admit that we are sinners. But we confessors also know that there are some serious spiritual (and psychological) neuroses, for lack of a better term, that can emerge in a person’s soul if all they do is beat their breast in penitence, without accepting the grace of reconciliation. It reminds me of the stories of the flagellants of old, who would whip themselves, and in so doing, suffer from the infected wounds. Some would even die. The Catholic understanding of justice and reconciliation is so powerful that the world simply cannot grasp it. When God establishes justice, he also heals. When he heals, he brings harmony. We can only see these things, accomplish these things in part. God creates them in toto.

With Pope Francis’ recent penitential pilgrimage to Canada, I have been thinking more and more about how we are no longer convicting and converting the world, but are being browbeaten into submission because of our failures. Let me be clear again: I do not deny that the Church historically has done things antithetical to the Gospel and the principles she professes. Yet there are two problems with the current approach to apologies. One is on the side of the one aggrieved, the other is more on the ‘long view’ of what these apologies are meant to achieve.

When people are gravely and personally wounded by someone or some traumatic event, a personal apology can be very helpful to facilitate the process of healing. On the other hand, none of us would advise the people we counsel to ‘hold their breath’ while they await that outcome, because that day may never come. Instead, Priest Counselors often attempt to help the victim find comfort in the loving, suffering Savior, to find inspiration in the lives of Saints who underwent similar struggles, and to ultimately find with God’s help some sense of peace, and hopefully even the grace to pardon the offender.

The difficulties of helping individuals heal are complicated greatly when they feel they have been hurt by an institution. Institutions are amalgamations of individuals, and are not monolithic: they are made of good and bad people, who made good and bad choices. An institution can issue an apology perhaps through a figurehead or leader, but that is very different on an emotional level for the person(s) trying to heal, as well as for society at large trying to grapple with the demands of justice.

This brings me to what I call the ‘long view’. A person of many years carries the burdens of many (hopefully forgiven) sins, but also the treasure of good works. The same is true of institutions. But God does not deal with humanity in the aggregate before he deals with us as individuals: hence, there are countless personal judgments, but only one Final, General Judgment at the end of the world. I understand why truly victimized people seek apologies. But I think it is crucial that we understand both what that can achieve, and what it never can. At the same time, I believe the Church continues to play defense against an Alinskyite Tactic, which I quoted at the beginning of this essay: if you hold an institution to its own rules, and don’t let up, you can cause its collapse. “If you kept a record of our sins, O Lord, who could stand?” Declares the Psalmist. The same is true of the Church at large. Many Priests have experienced the sad case of the scrupulous penitent, who cannot seem, even after sometimes years of repeated Confessions, to rid themselves of the psychological burden of guilt for their sins. This causes a sad and perverse warping of the person’s sense of sin, conscience, God, and even themselves. Could this not be true also on a larger scale? Is the Church becoming less a true penitent, and more a scrupulous self-flagellant, unable to proclaim the mercy of Christ to the world, because it refuses to believe the Good News regarding herself?

I can see at this juncture that some would accuse me of advocating that the Church wash her hands of her past and simply move on, unapologetic. But I am not. What I do suggest, and what I do know, is that healing does not often occur in the midst of grand theatrics, in front of television cameras and carefully prepared public statements. It happens in chapels, at bedside prayer, in the embrace of a friend, on the telephone and over coffee. I criticize ‘Apology Tours’ because they accomplish too little, because they can make us feel like we “did something” when we didn’t actually do anything. None of us can turn back the clock and undo the past. But we can be a friend and a support to the people who hurt, and we can accompany them, in the most authentic sense of that word, to the Savior who heals the brokenhearted.