repentance
What I Wish Penn State Would Do
Years ago I read a story in one of the Toronto newspapers - I have not been able to track it down again - wherein a catholic diocese in Canada was being sued by First Nations people who had suffered from abusive policies when they were students in diocesan schools.
The newspaper asked the bishop whether he was concerned about the cost of settling the lawsuits. He replied that if the diocese had to sell all of its property to bring healing to the victims, that was not too high a price to pay. He added "the church isn't buildings but people. In the end, all we need is a table, a cup, and some books - and we really don't even need those."
His attitude is the one I wish my alma mater would adopt. The cost of settling lawsuits may seem high, but when you know you are in the wrong and you know your sins have caused great harm to children, is any price too high to pay?
Because a university similarly shouldn't think of itself as buildings but as a college, a group of people who come together to read and study. And for that all we need are some tables, some books, and maybe a few cups. Not much more. Everything else should be things with which we would gladly part if, in so doing, we can bring healing to those we have harmed, and better become the people we ought to be.
How can you know that someone is contrite?
For the last few weeks my ethics students have been studying forgiveness. One of the persistent questions about forgiveness is whether, in order to be forgiven, one must first be contrite or repentant. (We have not been speaking of the idea of God forgiving people; we’ve limited our discussion to the possibility of people forgiving other people.)
I have to confess that this posting was prompted as much by my viewing, last night, of Battlestar Galactica as by our readings. In season 3, Laura Roslin calls for a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (like South Africa’s after Apartheid) after some human-on-human atrocities. That got me thinking once again about Desmond Tutu and Simon Wiesenthal, and their respective books on forgiveness.
The easy answer to my question is to say that one does not need to be contrite to be forgiven. This is easy, but not simple, because it raises other questions about the nature of forgiveness. And it brings along with it the possibility of depriving someone of their moral agency by denying the reality of their choices.
Most of us are inclined to give the opposite answer, namely that it does not make sense to forgive those who are not sorry for their offenses.
But this raises another difficulty: how do we know when people are adequately sorry? Additionally, does this position make it more likely that we will forgive those people who only seem sorry? What if someone has expressed their contrition to the best of their ability but we have not been able to perceive it, for cultural or other reasons? What if someone is not at all sorry, but has made a convincing public show of contrition?
What do you think?