Confessing Other People's Sins

Last July I was spending the summer in South Dakota, where I have been involved in pastoral ministry with Lakota Catholics for over a decade. My memories—from rushing to a hospital to baptize a sick child to hawking nachos at bingo in church basements—are precious and, by now, innumerable. While I was at my adopted parish in Rapid City, Pope Francis visited Canada to apologize “for the ways in which many members of the Church and of religious communities co-operated” in the Canadian government’s policy of forced assimilation. In particular, the pope mentioned Canada’s residential schools.

The papal visit made international headlines. During the month and a half I was in Rapid City, there were multiple homicides in the apartment complexes on either side of my parish. Later, I had trouble finding information about these killings online because other murders previously committed in the same buildings kept confusing my searches. In the end, little was written about any of these lives lost.

The murders were drug-related. Both perpetrators and victims were Native, so they did not easily fit into culture war narratives. I was happy to see a papal visit put Native Catholics in the spotlight, yet I could not help but wonder whether the attention of the media and world leaders was directed to the right place. Often I’ve found that battles over historical crimes end up distracting from improving anybody’s life today. In any case, the apology produced barely a ripple of interest among my Native parishioners.

The papal apologies in Canada were not the first that year; in April, Francis issued initial apologies in Rome. He had already apologized in 2015 for “grave sins” committed against “the native peoples of America.” These followed similar statements from Benedict XVI and John Paul II.

Saying “I’m sorry” can mean many things—from something as banal as “I didn’t hear you” to empathy for someone else’s pain (“I’m sorry for your loss”) to an admission of guilt and acceptance of responsibility (“I’m sorry for my sins”). Common to all of these is the desire to better a relationship where something had gone wrong. This desire for “a future of justice, healing and reconciliation” was the fundamental reason for the Holy Father’s penitential journey to Canada.

To that desire, of course, I can only add, “Amen.” But the profusion of papal apologies raises doubts about their effectiveness. Indeed, like stock characters in a play, some activists used the papal trip as an opportunity to call for yet more apologies.

Public apologies for historical wrongs have multiplied in recent years. In 2018, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau issued so many official apologies that a skeptical B.B.C. labeled him “Canada’s most apologetic leader.” Yet we do not seem to have become a more reconciled and understanding society. If anything, we have become more contentious. Though such events are often described as “historic,” by now they seem rather familiar. Do public apologies for historical wrongs really work? Do they make sense?

Of course, the specifics of the Canadian case matter. In the early part of the twentieth century, the Canadian government imposed a system of mandatory residential schools on its Native population. By that time, Catholic churches already had a well-established presence in Native lands, so Church institutions were enlisted to run them. Conditions in these schools were frequently appalling. Abuse and disease were more common than among the general population. The government policy of assimilation that drove the creation of the schools was sometimes animated by contempt for Native culture.

My time in South Dakota had familiarized me with a very different history of boarding schools. State-run schools existed south of the border too, though the examples I knew were Jesuit-run. These had been opened at the behest of the Lakota chiefs Red Cloud and Spotted Tail. They knew Jesuits to be good educators and wanted their children to learn English and other skills needed to function in a world bewilderingly different from the one they knew. Insisting that English be spoken in the schools—a practice still used in language schools today—did not necessarily imply contempt for Lakota language or culture. In fact, Father Eugene Buechel and others made efforts to preserve the Lakota language, giving it written form and compiling its first dictionary.

Not all of the effects of boarding schools were good—being away from parents is inevitably hard on children and may have contributed to family breakdown—but blanket charges of cultural annihilation are inaccurate and unjust. One alumna of Holy Rosary Mission remembers the school as a refuge where kids felt safe because, as she puts it, home life was “chaotic.” Unfortunately, I have frequently found that alumni with positive experiences of the schools are too intimidated by critics to speak openly.

The papal trip to Canada, however, was prompted by a horrific set of allegations. In May 2021, the New York Times ran a headline announcing the discovery of a “Mass Graves of Indigenous Children.” Repeating the claims, Trudeau said they demonstrated the need to “transform all of Canada and all Canadians.” A papal apology was not enough, Trudeau declared; only a papal apology on Canadian soil would do. A photo of Trudeau holding a teddy bear while kneeling at one of the gravesites captured the whole story in one iconic image.

But the prime minister’s photo-op was not staged at a mass grave. It was at a church cemetery. Other parts of the story also turned out to be misleading or false. After a year of investigation, Terry Glavin, a journalist based in Toronto, reported that “not a single mass grave was discovered in Canada last year.” Glavin, who has spent his career investigating Canada’s residential schools, can by no means be accused of covering up abuses. “Things were bad enough,” he told the American writer Bari Weiss in an interview. “You don’t have to make things up.”

So was the pope apologizing for what happened or what didn’t? His words in Canada necessarily remained rather generic—“many Christians supported the colonizing mentality.” He included a call for further investigation. But the fact that the allegations that provoked the trip turned out to be false should make us uncomfortable. Shouldn’t investigations come before attributions of guilt? Do apologies have to be accurate in order for them to work? Do the specifics matter at all? More memorable than any of the trip’s speeches was probably the image of an elderly pontiff praying alone in a wheelchair on the shore of a Canadian lake. Perhaps the Holy Father’s presence was what was most important. Still, he had to say something, and by now there seems to be a script for such events. But that is what troubles me—the script we are all reading from seems flawed.

Most confessors have had the frustrating experience of penitents who arrive in the confessional and proceed to give a detailed list of faults—but not of their own sins. They enumerate the faults of their mother-in-law, spouse, boss, or bishop. For a priest, it is a tricky situation; such folks often need to get something off their chest and are desperate for a willing listener. But cataloguing other people’s sins is not exactly the sacrament’s purpose. Occasionally one starts to feel sorry for the absent mother-in-law.

Sometimes the person confessing has suffered serious harm, and acknowledging an injustice suffered can be an important step toward healing. But lavishing attention on other people’s sins is fraught with spiritual peril. In the Gospels, Jesus’s intense focus on avoiding self-righteousness is unmistakable. Sometimes when one of those penitents comes in with a long list of someone else’s misdeeds, what he is really angling for, even if he doesn’t quite realize it himself, is for you, the confessor, to take his side and say, “Yeah, the guy sounds like a real jerk.”

That response might feel satisfying, but it also means that there will be no healed relationship, no real apology—only condemnation joined. Here the pretense of apology is used to shift the power dynamics of a relationship. “Confession” is just a veneer.

The problem with historical apologies is that they never involve taking responsibility for one’s own actions but necessarily mean confessing sins committed by others. This serves various interests, some political. The more heinous the crimes of others, the more venial our own offenses seem. We can get off the hook for our smaller sins by spotlighting the graver sins of others. Trudeau’s penchant for blackface pales in comparison with genocide.

One of the weaker points of the pope’s trip was when he slipped into an us-against-the-past paradigm in his speech to Canada’s civil leaders, contrasting the “dark pages of history” with the enlightened consensus of Canada’s contemporary leaders. This kind of narrative seems inherent to the genre of historical apology. While such a storyline might seem harmless—after all, its villains are long dead—the dubious satisfaction of considering ourselves more enlightened than our forebears is not entirely benign.

Just as the effects of gossip can be hard to control once unleashed, so too the effects of historical wrongs dredged up and amplified can multiply like briars. Present-day political violence is often justified by an appeal to historical grievances. They did it to us, so we can do it to them. Indeed, violence did result from the media firestorm surrounding the false claims of mass graves in Canada.

In the summer of 2021 that firestorm took on an all-too-literal character as dozens of churches, many serving reservations, were vandalized or burned down. While expressing his disapproval of the destruction of property, Trudeau was quick to add that the anger against the Church is “fully understandable.” It seems strange that it is necessary to say this, but burning down churches is a hate crime. The destruction of sacred places—where families of Native Catholics mourned their loved ones, celebrated marriages, found solace and joy worshiping God—is no more understandable than any other form of mob violence.

The millions of dollars the Canadian government has promised for further investigations into the previous century’s residential schools makes its investigation into present-day church burnings seem lackluster in comparison. One of the principal reasons to study historical crimes—that we can learn from them—seems not to obtain when the very act of doing so makes contemporary hate crimes “understandable.” Yet outrage over violence in the present day was muted compared to outrage over the (alleged) crimes of the past. The reason, I think, does not do us credit. The script that we have been reading from, that of public apologies, is based upon a presupposition that invites revenge violence—the assumption of collective guilt.

Among the most important accomplishments of the Second Vatican Council was the declaration Nostra aetate’s repudiation of the belief that the Jews bear collective responsibility for the death of Jesus. It would be obtuse to imagine that the Church rejects the principle of collective guilt for Jews while continuing to apply it to other groups. Yet apologizing means accepting responsibility for wrongs committed. And if we apologize for crimes committed a century ago, we seem tacitly to have accepted at least some notion of collective guilt—our own.

Collective guilt opens the door to collective punishment, but collective punishment quickly becomes incoherent and unjust. Today it is Native Catholics—whose churches have been burned down and who are often the target of disparagement from other Natives—who seem to bear the brunt of the punishment for sins past. Are Native Catholics guilty because they are Catholic? Or victims because they are Native? I feel compelled to raise these questions because of the Native Catholics I know who have faced disparagement for their faith yet have clung tenaciously to it.

Collective guilt, however, is not an easy notion to shake. Even the Bible seems to waffle on the issue. Exodus warns that God will visit the iniquity of fathers upon the third and fourth generation. Yet Deuteronomy repudiates this idea of generational consequences: “The fathers shall not be put to death for the children, neither shall the children be put to death for the fathers; every man shall be put to death for his own sin.” The biblical notion of children punished for the sins of their fathers is best conceived of not as a guide for our actions but, rather, as a description of sin’s destructive ramifications. Punishment for the sins of one’s forebears is the Old Testament’s way of expressing the modern-day sociological fact that children raised in dysfunctional homes are statistically more likely to repeat dysfunctional behaviors. None of us, after all, is really a “self-made man.” History shapes who we are before we even begin to make choices. We are shaped by our ancestors and all they left behind. We often take pride in their accomplishments—so shouldn’t we, then, also share their guilt?

True, there is something to the idea that our history partially defines us. But Deuteronomy’s warning against divvying up punishment on the basis of these echoes of identity is the better guide for making decisions in the present. We can never figure out how to assign historical guilt and grievance in a way that is fair. Trying to do so seems destined to make things worse—for example, by further marginalizing minorities within minorities or providing fodder for future demagogues.

Here I think we are getting close to the reason historical apologies tend to multiply without ever satisfying. Just as no one alive bears the direct responsibility to make these apologies, so no one has the full right to accept these apologies either. The descendants of the victims of past crimes may carry scars, but only a wrong’s primary victims have the right to accept or reject an apology. What do we do, for instance, about injustices in which victims die without leaving descendants? Those might be the cases that most cry out to Heaven for vengeance—but they leave no one to whom apologies can be directed.

And how far back should apologies go? What about situations in which atrocity begets atrocity? Should apologies be mutual? Or should we try to figure out who started it? In wars, the winners almost always end up killing more people, but that does not necessarily make the losing side innocent. The violent history of the American West, after all, includes white civilian victims too, women raped and children slaughtered. Should someone apologize to them? What of intertribal violence?

We cannot really even begin to answer such questions, yet the sins they involve are real. We have arrived at a point where sins become literally unforgivable because both apologizing and accepting apologies are impossible.

We are, however, close to one of the most fundamental of Christian doctrines: original sin. The doctrine is usually associated with Eden’s forbidden fruit, but original sin has as much to do with the events in Genesis that immediately follow Adam’s choice to eat of the Tree of Knowledge: Cain and then Lamech commit murder; a bottomless spiral of wickedness provokes the Flood; a tower rises in Babel when men imagine they can grasp Heaven on their own.

Original sin is not something we did individually. It is the guilt of all those crimes that are still shaping us, defining who we are. For us descendants of Adam, original sin is undefeatable. You do not have to be a Christian to feel the weight of this existential catastrophe.

What makes our rites of public apology so problematic is that they are designed around a mutation of the doctrine of original sin. The harmfulness of the current variant of public apology is that—in today’s script—guilt, punishment, and victimhood are distributed unevenly among demographic groups. As a society, we require apologies from some groups for their crimes, but not from other groups for theirs. Dividing the world up into victims and victimizers—like Hegel’s master–slave dialectic—traps everyone in a vicious circle. When I worked on the Rosebud Reservation, a tribal leader once expressed frustration to me, saying, “Our problem is that the tribe is dependent on the federal government, and we don’t have a way to break that dependency.”

Symbolic apologies tend to reinforce a narrative of dependency. In our public apology script, the action of whatever outsider is issuing them—the government, the pope—is really the main event. And, since apologies are only demanded of one side, the other side—here Native Americans—becomes permanently passive. It is almost as if whatever group is labeled “victim” possesses only second-class moral agency. When the words and actions of only one group are subject to intense moral scrutiny, the sense of responsibility of those in other groups seems not to matter as much. Moral scrutiny applied only to one side may seem like compassion for those in the victim group, but it is in fact profoundly demeaning to them.

Some insight into the dynamics at play can be gleaned from the work of René Girard, known for his work on scapegoating. Girard identifies a tendency within societies suffering from conflict and division to try to achieve peace by uniting against a scapegoat. Destroying a scapegoat brings a temporary catharsis but proves unsatisfying in the long run—so we start hunting for new scapegoats. Girard was particularly attentive to the perverse ways in which contemporary society uses claims of victimhood to identify new scapegoats. Claiming victim status can really be an assertion of power. “The modern concern for victims obligates us to blame ourselves perpetually,” Girard wrote, but the “victims most interesting to us are always those who allow us to condemn our neighbors.” If we claim to be defending victims, even savaging our enemies can seem an act of virtue. Events in Canada over the past two years fit the classic Girardian pattern. Girard even notes that in our day Christianity is always “the scapegoat of last resort.”

In the end, Girard’s awareness of the human capacity for self-deception led him back to Christianity. The only thing capable of breaking the pattern of scapegoating, he thought, was the resurrection. Original sin is only defeated with the resurrection of the new Adam. It is noteworthy that within our sacramental system, confession offers no remedy for original sin. Only the paschal waters of baptism defeat the ancient curse.

I sometimes wonder if, when confronted by such troubling contemporary issues as race relations, we Christians downplay the resurrection. It may seem too supernatural a doctrine to invoke among modern thinkers, too Christian to be inclusive. And the resurrection comes with too many other dangerous addenda, like the crucifixion and the final judgement.

Yet, perhaps divine judgement is precisely the element our reflection on historical sin needs. The judgements of any particular moment are as fallible as they are fickle. Those church and government figures who promoted forced integration through residential schools a century ago thought themselves to be on the cutting edge of progress. Those condemning them today also imagine themselves to be the representatives of progress. The final judgement of God leaves less room for self-satisfaction because it recognizes that, while the appalling sins of history will not ultimately escape punishment, neither will our own. What of those sins we commit today that we tacitly accept—perhaps do not even notice—because they are the sins of our time?

Though it was not always apparent from the media coverage, if one examines Pope Francis’s speeches in Canada, it becomes clear that the forgiveness he implores is from God: “the Church kneels before God and implores his forgiveness for the sins of her children.” This is no different than the Lord’s plea from the cross. My concern here is that the Church’s prayer to the Father has been stifled inside the post-Christian ritual of public apology.

As any participant in a twelve-step program can tell you, the intervention of a higher power is necessary to break free from the morass of sin. When that higher power is not front and center, we get lost in a thicket of recriminations. Thus, we spend resources on ground-penetrating radar—perhaps hoping that it will turn up something terrible—instead of confronting the drug violence next door.

Today’s ever-multiplying secular apologies are like the sacrifices mentioned in the Letter to the Hebrews, which “can never take away sins” even when offered day after day. The story of the Tower of Babel in Genesis is often interpreted as a critique of the folly of utopian pretensions, the attempt to achieve through human means alone what only God can give. The only response to original sin—and all its unsettling corollaries—is the full Christian story; perhaps especially those parts, like the resurrection and the last judgement, that unsettle us. Our contemporary rites of public apology are ineffective, ultimately counterproductive—like adding new stories to the Tower of Babel—because they pretend to a justice that only God can give.