Sin and consequences

SEPTEMBER 28, 2007

My dear friends,

Those who wonder why Catholics confess their sins to a priest, rather than privately to God, need look no further than a recent newspaper article: “Sex scandal leaves unseen victims.”

The article told the story of a group of elderly nuns in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles who are being forced to move out of a home they have been living in for years because the archdiocese has put it on the market. The home is among many archdiocesan properties being sold to help pay for the archdiocese’s $660 million settlement with victims of sexual abuse.

Neighborhood residents are not happy and neither are the sisters, although they will not be homeless. They will simply be moving to their motherhouse a few miles away. But they have been doing a lot of good work in that neighborhood for many years and the residents are upset that they have to pay for the sins of others.

They are right to be upset. Then again, that is the nature of sin. The Lord himself said, “For there is nothing hidden that will not become visible, and nothing secret that will not be known and come to light” (Lk 8:17).

The church has always taught that sin is not private. Sin is social. Sin is public. Sin has ramifications. Every sin, even the most personal sin, is a breach of the common good, a breach of the order that God desires for the world.

Sin brings disorder into the world and it always has consequences. The sex scandals that have taken place in our church are certainly proof of that. They have had — and will continue to have — profound consequences not only for the church but for society in general.

Those social consequences apply to all types of sin. Murder is an obvious one, but something as seemingly innocuous as lying is just as bad. If others cannot trust that what you say is true, then contracts or promises mean nothing and trust disappears to the point that society as a whole ceases to function properly.

Look at what the lack of observance of the sixth commandment — “Thou shall not commit adultery” — has brought our society in terms of the spread of venereal diseases or the high incidence of divorce, broken families, psychological traumas to children and disregard for vows taken.

This suffering is not God’s will but man’s doing, the direct result of sin. That is why our confession of sin cannot remain strictly between ourselves and God. We must confess our sin through the sacrament to the church (God’s holy people) in order to restore order to our lives.

In the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, the sins of a few are causing innocent people to suffer. We are rightly angry at that. But those are the consequences of sin — the sins of a few who were consecrated to the Lord but did not take their vows seriously and who, perhaps, thought their transgressions would remain secret forever.

As we have seen, that belief is misguided. Their sin has wounded the church, and deeply.

Now that it is out in the open, the Lord will bring us through this. But let this be a lesson for all of us. Our anger should be directed not just at “those others” who sin. We should also look at our own sinfulness and what consequences it is having on those we love, on those with whom we work and on society as a whole.

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