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| ESSAY: CONFESSION | |
 September 27, 2000 
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RICHARD RODRIGUEZ: His voice weak, but in no uncertain words, Pope John Paul II recently apologized for the role Catholicism has played in fostering anti-Semitism. (Speaking Latin) Several years ago, this same several years ago, this same Pope apologized to Latin American Indians for the colonial church's part in eradicating indigenous cultures. Curiously, at a time when the Pope makes such public confessions, fewer and fewer American Catholics are privately confessing their sins. For the last several decades since the second Vatican Council, when the Church admitted its need for widespread reforms, priests in the United States and western Europe especially have noticed declining numbers of Catholics going to confession. It could be that the moment a church starts admitting its failures, it looses a crucial aura of moral authority, thus loses the authority to judge and forgive. But might it also be possible that the reason fewer American Catholics are confessing their sins to a priest is because we are Americans? A recent study by Allan Wolfe of Boston College's Center for Religion in American Public Life found that a majority of Americans are disinclined to be strictly governed by moral teachers or teachings. We are more inclined to decide for ourselves what is good or bad. This same poll found that most Americans have an essentially sunny view of God. I remember as a child entering the dark confessional box. The panel window would be pulled back, and there, beyond the screen, would sit the priest in profile. I would begin the ritual cadence, "Bless me Father, for I have sinned." Everything said was whispered. Today we are accustomed to famous people confessing on TV. SPOKESMAN: I have brought disgrace and humiliation and embarrassment upon you. RICHARD RODRIGUEZ: Televangelists weep for their sins, the President confesses to sexual misbehavior, a baseball player says he is truly sorry for racist and anti-immigrant and anti-gay blabberings. It's unclear whether Americans want to hear so many public confessions, though clearly we are titillated. If you are willing to write about an incestuous affair with your father, a best-seller might result. In his elegant essay, "The Closing of the American Mind," the late Allan Bloom, the conservative philosopher, remarked that his students had almost no intimate sense of evil. The only reaction the students would give to that word was to speak of the Holocaust. Evil was something that happened overseas and to another generation. Though most Americans believe in their intrinsic goodness of their fellow human beings, the liberal theologian Rheinhold Neibuhr, in "Moral Man and Immoral Society," noted that when we are grouped together in vast social entities, we are willing to take actions like dropping a bomb on a village that we would never do as individuals. In recent years, Americans have demanded apology and penance from the federal government. Japanese Americans, for example, won reparations for their forced incarceration during World War II. And some African Americans want more than an apology for generations of slavery; they want financial compensation. In an earlier, more puritanical America, private sin was often accompanied by the public humiliation of the pillory. Today, Americans seem to expect from the public abstraction a kind of moral reckoning and pillory, but we are less sharply judgmental about our private lives. For myself, as a Catholic, I do not yearn for some pre-Vatican Council Church of my youth, boyhood lists of venial and mortal sins. But as an American, I sometimes wonder if there is not something too sunny about my conscience, and why it is that at a time when television is noisy with confessions, I so rarely say privately to people I know, least of all my God, "I'm sorry." I'm Richard Rodriguez. |
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