03/19/00

The Sins of the Church: God’s forgiveness and human memories

Last year, when I joined the congregation of Temple Shalom, the historic synagogue on Lake Shore Drive, for Sabbath prayer, we prayed together for “this holy congregation”. As I looked out at the faces of hundreds of Jews and their friends, I was looking, I knew, at people who had sinned. I knew that because that’s what I see when I look at myself. How, then, could we call the congregation “holy”, especially in praying to an all-holy God.

Then came the marvelous moment in the service when the Torah is lifted from its shrine at the front of the synagogue auditorium and carried joyously among the people. Here is the Law which links the people to God; here is the covenant which makes the Jews God’s holy people. No matter what individuals or groups among them do, a people shaped by God’s gifts of covenant and law is holy.

And so it is with the Church. The Church comes into being when the gifts of God which are made visible and mediated for us through his only-begotten Son, Jesus Christ, are shared: the Gospel, the seven sacraments, apostolic governance, the charisms of religious communities, the institutional charity which loves and cares for the poor. No matter what individuals or groups of the baptized do, a people shaped by Christ’s holy gifts is holy.

The Church is the Body of Christ, and, as Christ’s body, she is holy. But holy Mother the Church, in her sons and daughters and in her own name as well, has committed many sins in the course of two thousand years; and in those actions, the Church is also sinful.

“While Christ, holy, innocent and undefiled, knew nothing of sin, but came to expiate only the sins of the people, the Church, embracing in her bosom sinners, at the same time holy and always in need of being purified, always follows the way of penance and renewal” (Second Vatican Council, Lumen Gentium, #8). The way of penance and renewal this Lent brought the visible head of the universal Church, Pope John Paul II, to ask God for forgiveness for the sins of the Church committed during the two thousand years since the birth of Jesus. He could do that because we are visibly one now in our communion with the Holy Father, and there is a moral continuity of the Church through ages past. The community of the baptized, acting in history, is united always by the action of the Holy Spirit. A disciple of Christ and a member of his body, who enjoys the benefits of Christ’s merits and those of the saints, suffers also from the sins of those who have gone before us in the Church (I Cor. 12:26-27). Without allowing “collective guilt,” we recognize in faith that there is no private sin, just as there is no holiness that does not profit everyone.

In asking God to forgive the sins of the Church on the first Sunday of Lent, 2000, the Holy Father also opened up the possibility of reconciliation with individuals and groups who have been injured by our sins. Expressing faults and sins to God is not exactly the same as asking others to forgive us. Such a request would put a burden on them they might not want to accept, at least at this time. A confession is not an apology. Nevertheless, publicly recalling past sins is a step toward purifying the common memory of the human race and is a movement, therefore, toward jubilee liberation for all of us. The Jubilee is a time to set relationships right so that, always remembering our sinfulness, we can move forward to a genuinely new era, no longer trapped in the sins of the past. Confessing our own sins and asking God’s forgiveness is possible, of course, only if we are also willing to forgive those who have persecuted the Church through the centuries, whether forgiveness is requested or not.

What sins of the Church were publicly proclaimed by the Holy Father? He spoke in categories as much as in incidents or acts. Sins have been committed by the Church in the service of truth—sins of intolerance and wars of religion. The Church has also sinned against the Jewish people, first of all, in teaching that God’s covenant with Israel is no longer valid for them and then through acts of disdain and hostility which sometimes resulted in violence against Jews. Similar faults can be counted against other peoples and ethnic groups. Women have not always been treated with equality and fairness and have often been taken for granted. The Church has not always stood with “the downtrodden, the poor, the unborn.”

Most of these have been sins which reflected the spirit of their respective age. It is easy for us to look back and see the Inquisition as a violation of religious freedom and a crime against human dignity; but hardly anyone living during its activities, Catholic or not, would have made that judgment, for its procedures were normal. As we look now for those in Nazi Germany who resisted the holocaust of the Jews, we see too many citizens, proud of their country, unwilling to question actions taken with full legal approval by authorities who called upon experts of all sorts to give credibility to their plans. When Catholics are too closely conformed to the spirit of their age, any age, the Gospel is compromised. We are supposed to be different.

When I look at the sins of the Archdiocese of Chicago, I see the same pattern. For generations, Catholics, including priests and archbishops, took for granted the racist presuppositions of the general culture. The bishops of Illinois have just completed a short pastoral letter on racism which will be released on April 4, the anniversary of the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. It will remind us that we still have much to do to move beyond racism, in our Church and in our society. For too long, mutual suspicion and ignorance also marked Catholic relations with other faiths and groups. We can see that now, looking back and judging our own history.

Looking at ourselves as sinners, we must see also the sins of those few priests, perhaps too influenced by the sexual mores or the mind set of the age, who abused the trust people placed in them. In their sins we see, as well, the betrayal of the Church herself. None of this would surprise the saints. St. Thomas More wrote his last book, “The Sadness of Christ,” while awaiting execution for treason because he could not accept King Henry VIII as head of the Church in England. Most English bishops went with the spirit of the age and made their oath to the King. More reflected on Jesus’ reaction to his impending death, his being “sad unto death” (Mt. 26:38), and wrote that “the story of that time when the apostles were sleeping as the Son of Man was being betrayed...is a mysterious image of future ages.” St. Thomas More believed that the apostles fell asleep in the Garden of Gethsemane, as the bishops of England had fallen asleep in his day, because they had not acquired the habit of constant prayer. A saint has the right to make that judgment, and perhaps that is the greatest sin of the Church in every age: the neglect of confident and obedient prayer.

When we ask what people of faith a thousand years from now will see when they look back at our age, what might we guess? I would suspect that those who follow us in the faith will wonder about our too easy acceptance of political corruption because “it’s the way things get done.” They will try to figure out how the creation of great wealth went hand in hand with the general acceptance of growing economic disparity. They will question our lack of solidarity with the peoples of poor countries. They will look with dismay that so many, even Catholics, began to take for granted the killing of unborn children and then, very likely, of the dying and the deformed. Our successors in the Church will wonder why we did not learn from the horrors of Nazi Germany, where respected doctors and lawyers, encouraged by the German eugenics movement, systematically destroyed first the crippled, the insane and the chronically ill before the authorities turned on the Jews. They will ask how it developed that so many among us seem incapable of marrying for life, how we came to take for granted the violence of the young, what in our culture contributed to the fashion for escaping through drugs. They will ask why we regarded the sexual degradation of women as a sign of freedom and how we came to judge even things of eternal importance by “the bottom line.”

The Holy Father hopes that the confession of historical sins will purify our collective memory and free us for a new evangelization in this new millennium. What makes us free? Over the entrance to a Nazi concentration camp was written: Arbeit macht frei, Work makes free. Work, in the Nazi camps, was a way of deferring death but was obviously not a path to freedom; the cynicism of those proclaiming that message was demonic. If not work, does revolutionary violence make us free? Many in modern times have preached that message of liberating violence, even as they enslaved those who fought for the revolution as well as those who fought against it. If not work or violence, then what sets us free? Service to the poor, if it is selfless, sets free both the poor who are served and their servants.

When the Church is faithful to her Lord who calls her to serve the poor, she works steadily to transform society and becomes a place of freedom in the world, the freedom made possible by Christ’s self-sacrifice. Christ emptied himself for our sake (Phil. 2:7). The Pope, servant of servants, is not afraid to name the sins of the Church. He is not concerned about defending the Church so much as defending human dignity through the Church and through the truth Christ has confided to her. The truth, Jesus promised, sets us free (John 8:32). The first virtue of the baptized is not loyalty to the Church but obedience to Christ. When the Church is faithful to Christ, however, it is clear that obedience to the Church is obedience to her Lord, who forgives all our sins: personal, ecclesial and social. Let us accept Christ’s forgiveness this Lent, repent of our sins and begin anew. God bless you.

Sincerely yours in Christ,

Francis Cardinal George, OMI
Archbishop of Chicago

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