5.1. Some Ethical Criteria
On the level of morality, the request for
forgiveness always presupposes an admission of responsibility, precisely
the responsibility for a wrong committed against others. Usually, moral
responsibility refers to the relationship between the action and the person
who does it. It establishes who is responsible for an act, its attribution to a
certain person or persons. The responsibility may be objective or subjective.
Objective responsibility refers to the moral value of the act in itself,
insofar as it is good or evil, and thus refers to the imputability of the
action. Subjective responsibility concerns the effective perception by
individual conscience of the goodness or evil of the act performed. Subjective
responsibility ceases with the death of the one who performed the act; it is
not transmitted through generation; the descendants do not inherit (subjective)
responsibility for the acts of their ancestors. In this sense, asking for
forgiveness presupposes a contemporaneity between those who are hurt by an
action and those who committed it. The only responsibility capable of
continuing in history can be the objective kind, to which one may freely adhere
subjectively or not. Thus, the evil done often outlives the one who did it
through the consequences of behaviors that can become a heavy burden on the
consciences and memories of the descendants.
In such a context, one can speak of a solidarity
that unites the past and the present in a relationship of reciprocity. In
certain situations, the burden that weighs on conscience can be so heavy as to constitute
a kind of moral and religious memory of the evil done, which is by its nature a
common memory. This common memory gives eloquent testimony to the
solidarity objectively existing between those who committed the evil in the
past and their heirs in the present. It is then that it becomes possible to
speak of an objective common responsibility. Liberation from the weight
of this responsibility comes above all through imploring God’s forgiveness for
the wrongs of the past, and then, where appropriate, through the “purification
of memory” culminating in a mutual pardoning of sins and offenses in the
present.
Purifying the memory means eliminating from
personal and collective conscience all forms of resentment or violence left by
the inheritance of the past, on the basis of a new and rigorous
historical-theological judgement, which becomes the foundation for a renewed
moral way of acting. This occurs whenever it becomes possible to attribute to
past historical deeds a different quality, having a new and different effect on
the present, in view of progress in reconciliation in truth, justice, and
charity among human beings and, in particular, between the Church and the
different religious, cultural, and civil communities with whom she is related.
Emblematic models of such an effect, which a later authoritative interpretative
judgement may have for the entire life of the Church, are the reception of the
Councils or acts like the abolition of mutual anathemas. These express a new
assessment of past history, which is capable of producing a different
characterization of the relationships lived in the present. The memory of
division and opposition is purified and substituted by a reconciled memory, to
which everyone in the Church is invited to be open and to become educated.
The combination of historical judgement and
theological judgement in the process of interpreting the past is connected to
the ethical repercussions that it may have in the present and entails some
principles corresponding, on the moral plane, to the hermeneutic foundation of
the relationship between historical judgement and theological judgement. These
are:
a. The principle of conscience. Conscience, as “moral judgement” and as “moral
imperative,” constitutes the final evaluation of an act as good or evil before
God. In effect, only God knows the moral value of each human act, even if the
Church, like Jesus, can and must classify, judge, and sometimes condemn some
kinds of action (cf. Mt 18:15-18).
b. The principle of historicity. Precisely inasmuch as every human act belongs to
the subject who acts, every individual conscience and every society chooses and
acts within a determined horizon of time and space. To truly understand human
acts or their related dynamics, we need therefore to enter into the world of
those who did them. Only in such a way can we come to know their motivations
and their moral principles. This must be said without prejudice to the
solidarity that binds the members of a specific community through the passage
of time.
c. The principle of “paradigm change.” While before the Enlightenment there existed a sort
of osmosis between Church and State, between faith and culture, morality and
law, from the eighteenth century onward this relationship was modified
significantly. The result was a transition from a sacral society to a pluralist
society, or, as occurred in a few cases, to a secular society. The models of
thought and action, the so-called “paradigms” of actions and evaluation,
change. Such a transition has a direct impact on moral judgements, although
this influence does not justify in any way a relativistic idea of moral
principles or of the nature of morality itself.
The entire process of purification of
memory, however, insofar as it requires the correct combination of historical
evaluation and theological perception, needs to be lived by the Church’s sons
and daughters not only with the rigor that takes account of the criteria and
principles indicated above, but is also accompanied by a continual calling upon
the help of the Holy Spirit. This is necessary in order not to fall into
resentment or unwarranted self-recrimination, but to arrive instead at the
confession of the God whose “mercy is from age to age” (Lk 1:50), who
wants life and not death, forgiveness and not condemnation, love and not fear.
The quality of exemplarity which the honest admission of past faults can
exert on attitudes within the Church and civil society should also be noted,
for it gives rise to a renewed obedience to the Truth and to respect for the
dignity and the rights of others, most especially, of the very weak. In this
sense, the numerous requests for forgiveness formulated by John Paul II
constitute an example that draws attention to something good and stimulates the
imitation of it, recalling individuals and groups of people to an honest and
fruitful examination of conscience with a view to reconciliation.
In the light of these ethical
clarifications, we can now explore some examples – among which are those
mentioned in Tertio millennio adveniente69 – of situations in
which the behavior of the sons and daughters of the Church seems to have
contradicted the Gospel of Jesus Christ in a significant way.
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