Lent: A Time to say 'Sorry'

"Remember…you are dust and to dust you will return." And a smudge of ash is left on the forehead. Ash Wednesday is the day in the year when Catholics walk around branded and adults perhaps think about their mortality.

While ashes speak of mortality, they are really a sign of penance derived from our Jewish heritage. In the ancient Middle East, to express sorrow for sins you put on the poorest clothing available, "sackcloth", and disfigured your appearance by throwing heaps of ashes or dust over head and face (cf. Jonah 3: 6-10; Esther 14:2). Our Lord did not endorse this external display (Matthew 6: 16-18). He concentrated on inner conversion, the contrite heart. So that little smudge on Ash Wednesday calls us to be sorry for our sins.

That Small Word

Indigenous Australians rightly remind us that saying "sorry" is important. Catholics especially should be aware of the depth and potential of that small word. It is the key to the Act of Contrition, or prayer of sorrow for sins: "O my God, I am sorry that I have sinned against you…."

Each of us can say that prayer at any time. But the best moment and the normal means of saying "sorry" is the sacrament of Penance. Here we enter a dialogue with another sinner, who has been empowered to serve us by bringing God's healing into moments of honesty. In confession we strip off the masks and reveal ourselves to the Lord who wants to heal us.

In the Third Century, Origen applied our Lord's command to healed lepers, "Go and show yourselves to the priests." to the penitential discipline of his time. Private confession seems to have had a place within the bishop's public ministry to penitents. In the Fifth Century, Pope Leo the Great affirmed the place of private confession. This flatly contradicts the claim sometimes heard that Irish monks invented private confession. Certainly, it was developed as a system by Celtic monks, not long after the time of Pope Leo the Great, but these monks did not invent confession.

A Word of Freedom

In response to our confession of sins, the priest does not say "I forgive you". Only God, the One who is wronged, can forgive. Nor does the priest say "Christ forgives you…" rather he says "I absolve you."

As an ordained man he speaks in the Person of Christ the Priest, just as he speaks during the consecration at Mass. He uses the word "absolve" meaning "I cut you free." In effect he says, "The clinging guilt of your sins has gone You're free now." The baptismal grace of inner goodness, justification, is restored. No wonder the French used to call Penance the "second baptism".

After absolution a certain "debt" for sins remains: the effects, the harm, the repercussions. That must be worked out through penance, that is, in prayers or good deeds, made effective through the Holy Spirit working in us.The debt may also be wiped out through the Church's pardons or "indulgences". In this Holy Year of Jubilee the full pardon or "plenary indulgence" is offered to all penitent Catholics who in faith perform a specific action, such as walking through the symbolic "holy door" of our cathedral. Jesus is the door of the sheepfold, the one way to pardon and peace.

Person and Community

Absolution is personal. "I absolve you." It is a glorious proclamation of God's love for each individual person - as if no one else existed in the world.

Absolution thus focuses on a personal relationship with Jesus our Saviour. The modern spiritual movements all promote this relationship. Talking in these terms also has value in ecumenical relations with Evangelicals. However the Catholic approach to Jesus is not purely individualistic. Catholicism is both personal and communal. It is the religion with the strongest doctrine of human dignity in the world, hence our stand on human rights, abortion, euthanasia, etc.. At the same time Catholicism exalts the community of the Church with rich theologies of the living Body of Christ and the pilgrim People of God.

We hunger for personal value and self-esteem. But we need a community to rescue us from the selfish individualism of our age. At the same time our desire to belong to a community needs reverence for the individual to avoid the collectivism of the ant-heap, where the person vanishes in the crowd. This balance is expressed and celebrated in the Second Rite of Reconciliation, which our bishops are inviting us to explore more deeply. Here we see the sacrament of "being sorry" as both personal and communal.

Collective Guilt in the Church

Groups, communities or nations can share a sense of guilt or shame. The Church is no exception. She has passed through dark moments in her long history and it is no use glossing over certain shameful realities.

Recent local scandals in the Church are made more painful because sectors of the media relish these matters, with venom mysteriously reserved for one religious body and profession. But the hypocrisy or bigotry of others should not distract us from reflecting on how the moral failure of a few somehow permeates the whole Body of Christ. We are responsible for one another.

When Pope John Paul II says "sorry" for the past failings of the Church he is also implicitly inviting leaders of other Churches and especially the leaders of nations to confront their past. Most grave scandals in our Church lie in the distant past. But for many nations, there are more immediate shameful memories - and Australia is no exception.

We can candidly admit human failings within the Church and join our Pope in regretting the past. But we should also regret ways in which we may have harmed our own family, parish or religious community. Lent calls us to face our personal and communal responsibilities and simply say "I am sorry".