The Working Catholic: Sin by Bill Droel
U.S. Catholic participation in the sacraments has declined for nearly 55 years. Fewer weddings, fewer priestly ordinations, fewer sick people receive a sacramental anointing. Reception of the Eucharist is down, but not as dramatically as participation in the sacrament of reconciliation (aka confession).
Confession has not lost its popularity because U.S. Catholics are suddenly angelic. It is because, as one theory has it, psychological categories have replaced moral categories. This is the thesis of Whatever Became of Sin by Karl Menninger (1893-1990). The sacramental decline could also be because many people confess their sins and receive healing in 12-step groups. The decline might possibly be related to insistence on individual or traditional (in the box) confession to the exclusion of communal confession with individual absolution. My theory is that people who now attend Mass are the ones who previously frequented confession and that they now consider the penitential rite at the beginning of Mass to be sacramental.
Whatever the causes of the decline, it presents an opportunity. Young adults are unimpressed by the distinctions of years gone by: venial sin, grave sin, mortal sin; proximate cause and remote cause; commission and omission and the like. Young adults are uninterested in a presentation of sin that uses cotton ball examples: “I lied to my mother three times… I swore seven times…”
What if Catholic catechists and preachers dropped the whole 1950s routine and concentrated on teaching and preaching about social morality for, let’s say, the next dozen years? What form might confession then take? Would participation in this beautiful sacrament increase? Catholic theology has the resources for an experiment. Our doctrine is sufficient. It’s our will and imagination that are deficient.
Like evangelical expressions of Christianity, U.S. Catholicism has put the emphasis on individual sin. While individual behavior is certainly part of sin, there is also sin (great or little) inside institutions. Some policies and institutions have so departed from God’s plan for God’s creation that they perpetuate a disposition toward evil. Wage theft, as Scripture says, is a sin; one that goes beyond the behavior of one subcontractor or another. The manufacturing and distribution of assault rifles to civilians is sinful beyond the behavior of any one vendor at a gun show or any one tool and die maker. Housing discrimination, political corruption, pollution, our egregious wealth gap, internet pornography—all of these are sinful structures.
Young adults are interested in social issues. Many choose their careers with a bias toward justice—chemists, health care professionals, some lawyers, policy experts, those in social service. Young adults are interested in social issues because they want their children to have clean air and water, fair opportunity, safe schools, affordable college, artistic exposure and more.
Most grammar school students, let’s admit, are not capable of thinking institutionally. So maybe the 1950s practice of first confession in second grade or fourth grade has to hibernate. High school students, both in the classroom and in immersion projects, do think about institutions. So why not introduce structural sin at that age? Why not ask high school students to devise forms of reconciliation around sins of sexism, discrimination and poverty? High school students are capable of researching the slave labor content of the apparel sold in their school’s bookstore. Couldn’t their Catholic vocabulary help them name the sin that inhabits the apparel industry?
Esau McCaulley of Wheaton College, writing the N.Y. Times (6/11/22), uses an example from U.S. history. Slavery was not just a problem of cruel individual plantation owners. In fact, some slave owners were, in a sense, nice guys. Slavery was a societal evil as well as an individual sin of a slave owner. It is an inadequate Christianity that “limits responsibility for evil to the individual… [It is] structural injustice that gives individual evil room to operate.”
Droel edits a free newsletter on faith and work, INITIATIVES (PO Box 291102, Chicago, IL 60629).