Some Talking – and Listening – Points
Written by Robert Royal
Saturday, October 5, 2024
Sin, corporate sin, was abundantly confessed this past week during an opening penitential rite for the synod in Rome. And before the whirligig of the news cycle carries off those confessions along with everything else in the coming week – I feel the need to confess myself to a personal temptation to sin in the form of weariness and annoyance with grand gestures that aim at the concrete and spiritual – and result in the abstract and bureaucratic. And pose no little danger. Please bear with me.
The penitential spectacle before the opening of the Synod needs to be viewed through lenses other than pious wishes and all due respect for the doubtless good intentions of the Holy Father. Let us describe it for what it was: Cardinals and others officially confessing sins that they have in all likelihood never personally committed, on behalf of others in the Church, who may themselves be quite personally innocent. (How many people in the Church have in any normal sense of the term sinned against “peace” or women’s contributions or the environment? Repentance on that score is better recommended to the attention of specific criminals, miscreants, terrorists who are not in short supply.)
One might, of course, also start quibbling over why these sins and not others. For instance, how widespread is the “sin” of “using church teaching as weapons to hurl at others.” Particularly as opposed to how frequently this sin is: ignoring Church teaching to please myself. You don’t need a Pew survey to have a fairly good idea of the relative proportions, which now as always tips heavily towards the latter. The Pharisees are a small cohort – the self-willed, especially in our Age of Identity, legion.