The September 2020 issue of Commonweal magazine has an challenging article by Rita Ferrone, “Will Anything Change This Time?”.
Amid recent public protests about racism and injustice, she reminded us of and suggested revisiting John Paul II’s teaching on social sin in his 1983 post-synodal exhortation, “Reconciliation and Penance”.
Her article called attention to the need expressed by the synod bishops to talk about “social sin, structures of sin, and systematic forms of oppression that magnify and perpetuate sinful situations”.
The Pope’s exhortation was concerned not only about personal reconciliation and penance, but also about communal responsibility and the ways personal sins contribute to social sin.
The Pope called attention to the various meanings of “social sin”.
– “. . . by virtue of human solidarity which is as mysterious and intangible as it is real and concrete, each individual’s sin in some way affects others . . . every sin has repercussions on . . . the whole human family.
– “. . . the term social applies to every sin against justice in interpersonal relationships . . . against the rights of the human person . . . against others’ freedom . . . against the dignity and honor of one’s neighbor . . . against the common good . . . and its exigencies in relation to the whole broad spectrum of the rights and duties of citizens.
– “The third meaning of social sin refers to the relationships between the various human communities . . . class struggle . . . is a social evil. Likewise obstinate confrontation between blocs of nations, between one nation and another, between different groups within the same nation . . .”.
Many religious people shy away from this kind of talk. They feel that we shouldn’t mix up religion with politics—that what’s in the church is the church’s business, and what’s outside isn’t.
But, if we are open to what John Paul taught, we have some new areas and kinds of sin, social sins, to add to our examination of conscience and to the amending of our lives. The main ones he describes are:
– to cause evil;
– to support evil;
– to exploit evil;
– to be in a position to avoid, eliminate or at least limit certain social evils but fail to do so out of laziness, fear or the conspiracy of silence, secret complicity or indifference;
– to take refuge in the supposed impossibility of changing the world;
– to sidestep the effort and sacrifice required, producing specious reasons of higher order.
As Rita Ferrone observed, “An awareness of social sin, for John Paul II, summons each of us to invest personally in the work of dismantling structures of sin in order to build a civilization of love.”
You know, there’s a strange kind of uneasy comfort in regularly acknowledging, confessing, and repenting of a modest collection of familiar, almost habitual, imperfections, weaknesses, misdeeds, and failures.
We closely review our solitary thoughts, words, and deeds—sometimes painfully remembering and repenting of those involving another—but rarely does it occur to us that we share responsibility for communal or social prejudices, policies, procedures, and “structures of sin”.
As we view this world where we live, where evil is ever pandemic, and which we pray daily will become the kingdom of God, let’s try to remember to advance its coming a little by our “social-sin distancing”!
11 October 2020