What Now?

by BJ Brown
Pastoral Associate

I finally went to bed on election night when it was clear that neither presidential candidate could claim victory on November 3rd. Like so many people, I’d wanted a landslide, a clear commitment to a shared vision of our country’s best possible self. When I woke up the next morning, there was (no surprise) still no final tally. But one result of the election was disappointingly evident—there is deep, deep division in the United States. There is not consensus about how to live the truths we profess.

A walk past City Hall on Thursday made vivid to me the serious dangers of our division. As a helicopter thumped over toward the Civic Center where votes were being counted, I saw more police officers than pedestrians, and all of the officers had riot gear close at hand. As I rounded from the northeast corner toward JFK Boulevard, I caught sight of a dozen people in body armor, helmets and camouflage, automatic rifles in hand.

What now? Whatever the final result of the presidential election may be (and there still is not one as I write), it is clear that a lot of very hard work lies ahead. Believing, as Pope Francis writes in his third encyclical letter, that the Church cannot remain on the sidelines but has a public role in fostering the common good (Fratelli Tutti 276), I have been wondering what role the US Catholic Church could play in the weeks and years to come.

Many members of the US Catholic Church were active and vocal in the run-up to the election. But we were hardly a unified body; anathemas were hurled by partisans for both candidates and on either side of specific issues. The Church, too, suffers from the deep divisions that bedevil our country. But could it be otherwise? 

What would happen if the US Catholic Church took its own religious practice seriously? Not its teaching—it may be time for prelates and pundits alike to set aside public statements, especially statements intended for those we disagree with. But what if we took our own sacramental practice seriously? I am thinking specifically about the sacrament of reconciliation. The US Catholic Church has traditionally placed enormous importance on this sacrament, almost treating it as a prerequisite to a place at the Lord’s table. But what if we really devoted ourselves to the practice of reconciliation?

First, we need to be clear about what this misunderstood and unutilized experience of grace is not. The sacrament of reconciliation is not a personal ‘get out of jail free card’ that we are handed in return for a brief ritual performance of naming our sins. In truth, we can’t even know our sins without an informed conscience, and that requires constant prayer, reflection on scriptures and the fullness of church teaching. Nor is the sacrament the equivalent of God calling out “ollie ollie in come free” to a scattered people at the end of a game. Our encounter with God’s mercy in absolution comes with two obligations attached: our gratitude and our penance, that is, the actions we will undertake to restore the damage we’ve done.

Our moment of encounter with God is, of course, personal. But in its preparation and its effects, the sacrament of reconciliation is inescapably social. We can’t know that we’ve sinned without knowing who we’ve sinned against and how, by commission and omission—in other words, by reflecting on our own actions and by our participation in sinful social structures. A case in point is the growing willingness to thoroughly examine our part in the systemic evils of racism in the United States. Nor can we do penance without repairing broken relationships between individuals and within the fabric of society. What if we changed our perspective on the sacrament of reconciliation and saw it not just as a practice of personal piety but also as a work of social justice? Couldn’t that offer some grace and healing to the present state of our nation?

Pope Francis reflects at length on forgiveness and reconciliation in his latest encyclical (Fratelli Tutti 236-254). Reconciliation is not a sign of weakness, he writes. It does not forget evil—here Pope Francis remembers in particular the Holocaust and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—and it does not allow oppression to continue unchecked. Forgiveness demands justice, toward both wronged individuals and wronged groups. It is achieved slowly, Pope Francis writes, through dialogue, negotiation, and refusing to yield to the destructive forces that give rise to it in the first place. Pope Francis understands forgiveness as a vigorous and demanding endeavor. Reconciliation is not quick or magical; it is hard, patient, honest work.

At Old Saint Joseph’s All Souls’ Day Vespers service, as cantors Stephen Bradley and Logan Laudenslager begin singing Marty Haugen’s Eye Has Not Seen, I realized how long it had been since I’d heard two voices singing in live harmony. I was starved for harmony, without even realizing what I had been missing. I did not want to hear it end. In the days that followed, I realized that in some ways we are all, in the US Catholic Church and in the United States, starved for harmony. 

Like beautiful music, social harmony—reconciliation of all that presently divides us—will not just happen spontaneously. Nor can it be imposed without, even by Saturday’s long-awaited election results. It must be practiced, refined, over and over again. The Church’s current practice of the sacrament of reconciliation recommends a similar approach of constant repetition. What would happen if we really worked at reconciling all that injures human dignity and undermines the common good. What difference might it make in our Church, and to our country and to the world?