(Image by Riccardo Antimani)

Ten years into his papacy, Pope Francis has delivered a lot of apologies for clergy abuse. Most recently, during his trip to Portugal for World Youth Day in August, Francis met with survivors of abuse on his first day in the country. Earlier this year, a panel looking into the Portuguese church’s history of abuse found that more than 4,800 children may have been abused by Catholic clergy between 1950 and today. So the pope traveled to Portugal to apologize once again. But are the pope’s apologies actually good apologies? And what makes an apology worthwhile in the face of something as grim as clergy abuse?

As has repeatedly been the case elsewhere, the church hierarchy in Portugal downplayed and hid its abuse issues for decades. The church has paid a price for this, both literally in the form of payments to abuse victims, and figuratively in terms of the shrinking number of Catholics. Like many other European countries, Portugal has seen a decline in the number of practicing Catholics in the past few decades, and its abuse inquiry may exacerbate that decline.

After an hour-long meeting with victims, the pope said that “it is often accentuated by the disappointment and anger with which some people view the church, at times due to our poor witness and the scandals that have marred her face and call us to a humble and ongoing purification.” While the pope has repeatedly acknowledged the anger and suffering of abuse victims, there’s a lack of specificity in this statement about what actions the church will take in Portugal. Bishop José Ornelas, the head of the Portuguese Bishops Conference, said in February of this year that abuse “is an open wound which pains and embarrasses us.” It’s true that both the pope and Ornelas’ statements acknowledge that victims have suffered and that the church has done wrong. But is acknowledgment really an apology?

In January of this year, Marjorie Ingall and Susan McCarthy published a book called Sorry, Sorry, Sorry: The Case for Good Apologies. The authors, who run a website tracking bad public apologies called SorryWatch.com, drew on psychology, sociology and law to come up with a six step process toward what they define as a good or worthwhile apology. The steps they offer include using the word “sorry” in your apology, being specific about what you’re apologizing for, showing you understand why it was bad, not making excuses, saying why it won’t happen again, and making reparations. If we apply this formula to most apologies for clergy abuse, we might get as far as number 1, after which many churches skip to #6 and offer a payment in order to move the problem along. Or, as has lately happened with increasing frequency, church dioceses declare bankruptcy to avoid paying reparations.

This is why many victims of clergy abuse cannot and should not offer forgiveness. An insincere, weak, or poorly formulated apology followed by an offer of money that is meant to essentially get them to go away does not facilitate any kind of psychological or spiritual healing, but instead sweeps the problem under the rug, and doesn’t guarantee the same thing won’t happen again in the future. The Greater Good Center at U.C. Berkeley explains that, in their research on forgiveness, one key element of a meaningful apology is explaining why an offense happened, “especially to convey that it was not intentional.” But when it comes to clergy abuse, the problem is that it is almost always intentional. No person in power abuses someone else by mistake.

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After revelations of abuse in the Southern Baptist Convention rocked America’s largest evangelical denomination, leaders of the church gathered in Anaheim, CA in 2022 to draft a series of reforms to try and prevent future abuse. Pastor Griffin Gullege said that in many cases, rather than apologizing, Baptist pastors who abused congregants and church staff would only admit to a “moral failing” before resigning, thus avoiding any consequences. The “resolution of lament and repentance” they drafted ultimately read, in part, that the SBC leadership:

“publicly apologize to and ask forgiveness from survivors of sexual abuse for our failure to care well for survivors, for our failure to hold perpetrators of sexual abuse adequately accountable in our churches and institutions, for our institutional responses which have prioritized the reputation of our institutions over protection and justice for survivors, and for the unspeakable harm this failure has caused to survivors through both our action and inaction.”

Unlike many of the apologies offered by the Catholic church, this statement at least admitted wrongdoing and did not offer excuses. But it never gave any specific next steps, nor did it explain why this abuse, the scale of which is still being investigated, was allowed to go on for so long. The scale of the abuse cover ups led to Russell Moore, one of the denomination’s most prominent public figures, to resign in disgust, and to refer to the abuse as apocalyptic for Southern Baptists.

In failing to be specific about next steps, the apology gave the SBC loopholes to return abusive pastors to the pulpit. Just a few months after it was issued, former SBC president Johnny Hunt, who was named as an abuser in the investigation, was cleared by the denomination to return to pastoral work.

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Why are so many clergy apologies hollow and meaningless? The answer is connected to the concept of clericalism, which in the Catholic church has repeatedly been linked to the history of abuse. The Association of U.S. Catholic Priests issued a whitepaper in 2019 unpacking what clericalism means. Essentially, clericalism upholds the idea that clergy are special or above the laity to the degree that they aren’t questioned, or that they become so isolated that it can enable abuse. But this has dire consequences for both clergy and laypeople. For clergy, it can lead to narcissism, which in turn allows them to feel they can get away with, for example, spending thousands of dollars of parishioner’s donations on travel, remodeling rectories, or in the case of one bishop, providing cash gifts to Vatican higher ups.

Clericalism can also allow clergy to feel they can abuse people and not need to apologize for it. In some cases, parents tell children to “never question a priest,” which sounds like a red flag to many of us, but is a behavior that still persists today  in many churches. In the Catholic church, the shrinking number of seminarians means young priests can have their egos inflated by leadership and laity alike, which too can lead to their feeling that they don’t owe anyone apologies.

This isn’t just a Catholic church problem. The Secrets of Hillsong documentary, which aired earlier this summer, revealed that Fred Houston, who founded the evangelical megachurch in Australia in 1983, and Brian Houston, his son who helped grow the church into an international evangelical powerhouse, may have both sexually abused women. Brian Houston is currently  being charged with covering up his father’s abuse. But this was somewhat overshadowed by the downfall of Hillsong’s “hypepriest,” American pastor Carl Lentz, known for his tattoos, pricey sneakers, and friendships with celebrities from Justin Bieber to Kanye West. Lentz, who participated in the documentary, is being accused of sexual abuse by at least two women, accusations he claims are “categorically false.” Because of the scandal, Lentz was fired from Hillsong in 2020.

The apologies offered by both Lentz and Brian Houston are vague, and once again allow both men the loopholes they need if they someday want to return to ministry. In the documentary, Lentz says “I let down, genuinely, a lot of good people, and I can only apologize and change.” But how he will change and what that means in the case of the women and staff members he’s accused of abusing remains unclear. In terms of Brian Houston, who resigned from the church in 2022, Hillsong issued an apology the same year in which they stated that “we apologize unreservedly to the people affected by Pastor Brian’s actions and commit to being available for any further assistance we can provide.” In both cases, it’s unclear what, exactly, these two former pastors are going to do, and even more unclear what Hillsong will do.

Watching the Hillsong documentary, it’s easy to play armchair psychologist and see that both Houston and Lentz display characteristics of narcissism, which includes a grandiose sense of self-importance along with a lack of empathy and a tendency to use other people to the narcissist’s advantage. That same description might be applied to any number of Catholic or Southern Baptist Convention clergy who were abusers as well. And it’s likely that a narcissist cannot issue a meaningful apology because, given their ego inflation, they cannot see they have done anything wrong. Denial, excuses, and deflection are easier than owning up to abuse, explaining why it happened, and offering reparations.

Because abuse is so often about power, clergy abusers find it challenging to offer a good apology. Because apologizing means humbling yourself, it also means voluntarily letting go of the power you hold over other people. Clericalism doesn’t allow this to happen. But the exodus of believers from the Catholic church, the Southern Baptist Convention, and megachurches led by abusers like Hillsong, along with a series of shallow apologies may be enough to humble their leadership. That doesn’t guarantee their apologies will get any better. But at least more people will be aware they are owed one, and the more a meaningful apology is demanded, the more one might someday be offered.

Kaya Oakes is the author of five books, most recently including The Defiant Middle: How Women Claim Life’s In Betweens to Remake the World. She teaches writing at the University of California, Berkeley.

The post What Makes an Apology Worthwhile? appeared first on The Revealer.

(Illustration of Beef’s main characters. Image source: Netflix)

Driving can be dangerous, and driving can be rage-inducing. When someone cuts you off in traffic, you may allow your imagination to run wild, possibly to violent places. That’s the premise of the new Netflix series Beef, which spirals from a driver honking and giving the finger into an incident of road rage so severe it becomes an operatic tale of revenge.

Beef creator Lee Sung Jin told Forbes that the series was inspired by his own road rage episode, when he started to follow a driver who cursed at him. But Lee quickly changed his mind and drove off, unlike Beef character Danny, played by Stephen Yeun. Danny’s fragile mental health snaps after Ali Wong’s Amy pisses him off in a parking lot, inciting a car chase and bitter fallout, unfolding over ten episodes that depict elaborate and violent paths of revenge that few of us will ever follow.

Beef has sucked in so many viewers because it allows us to live out the fantasy that we can extract justice from our enemies and maybe even get away with it. Like many other revenge stories, Beef has a religious subplot that delves into the complex ties between race and religion in Los Angeles’s Korean Christian communities. If revenge is the opposite of religious teachings about forgiveness, it’s also something we’re culturally and socially discouraged from pursuing. What revenge movies and TV shows do is to provide an outlet for our desire to get even or settle the score with people who’ve done us harm. The longing for revenge is deeply human, but we constantly suppress it so that our lives don’t turn into chaos. Because religion so often focuses on revenge as a moral wrong, revenge stories also give us a guilt-free way to imagine what our own acts of revenge might be like. While we might not escalate our own revenge fantasies to the scale that Beef does, movies and shows that depict someone getting even can provide a socially acceptable way for us to imagine our own acts of revenge.

(A scene from Beef. Source: Netflix)

Psychologists who study revenge fantasies have discovered that children who experience trauma frequently imagine revenge as a way of coping. Because children feel a lack of control over their circumstances, revenge fantasies can help them to regain agency and give them an outlet for their anger and confusion. As adults, revenge fantasies can similarly provide an outlet for people who’ve experienced trauma, particularly for adults dealing with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Because trauma can make us feel humiliated, imagining revenge is a way of protecting ourselves from further harm. Psychologists Craig Hain and Anna Weber argue that visualizing revenge can “regulate feelings of injustice and loss of control,” which in turn can help a person regain stability after a traumatic experience.

On the other hand, the danger of revenge fantasies is that repetitive escapes into them can exacerbate feelings of distress. Researchers who work with people who actually enact revenge have found that they don’t rid themselves of post-traumatic symptoms. Many psychologists argue that revenge fantasies should be contained to an occasional occurrence, guided by a therapist, making them just one pathway a person might briefly travel on their way toward healing. This idea of revenge fantasies as a pathway would also help explain why revenge movies and TV shows are so enjoyable. They allow us to imagine what it would be like to act on our imaginations, but only for a couple of hours at a time, and always with an exit ramp back into a more comfortable reality.

Revenge fantasies have a long history in art and culture, but in the Renaissance they became an obsession for writers and audiences alike. The revenge plays of Shakespeare, Thomas Kyd, and Thomas Middleton, among others, became so popular they turned into an entire theatrical sub-genre of the tragedies audiences greatly enjoyed. The English Renaissance philosopher Francis Bacon’s influential writing on revenge, along with the violent religious conflicts that surged as Protestant kings and queens sought to purge England of Catholics, meant that revenge was much on the minds of theatrical audiences. Bacon described revenge as “a kind of wild justice; which the more man’s nature runs to, the more ought law to weed it out,” and warned that “a man that studieth revenge keeps his own wounds green, which otherwise would heal and do well.” Revenge plays were a way to show audiences how revenge could have catastrophic outcomes, as it does in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, but they were also bloody, murderous, candlelit fun.

Renaissance revenge tragedies mostly follow a similar structure, one that’s still imitated in revenge movies and TV shows today. A person is driven mad by the murder of someone close to them. They then discover the identity of the murderer, either through a visit by a ghost (in both Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy and Shakespeare’s Hamlet) or via their own sleuthing. In turn, they plot revenge on their enemies, which sometimes escalates to gruesome proportions. This may have peaked in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, when Titus murders his enemy Lavinia’s sons, bakes their remains into a pie, and serves it to her at a banquet. I once saw a production of Titus where the entire cast pretended to vomit during this scene, but the audience’s groans mixed with fits of uneasy laughter at the over-the-topness of it all showed that hundreds of years later, Shakespeare’s revenge fantasies still resonate.

A cursory scroll through any listicle of revenge films shows that most of these movies still follow a fairly comparable plot pattern to their Renaissance ancestors. Gone Girl, Memento, Gladiator, Old Boy, Promising Young Woman, Midsommar and pretty much the entire Quentin Tarantino catalog follow similar story arcs to Hamlet, The Revenger’s Tragedy, and The Spanish Tragedy. A person is wronged, sets out to correct that wrong, and vengeance is theirs. These movies are often violent to uncomfortable degrees, depending on your tolerance for onscreen violence, but the death and fighting is often cartoonishly epic in scale, with hundreds of extras being mowed down in epically scaled explosions, sword fights, or gun battles.

Many of these movies also have religious themes or subplots, which allows them to offer escapism from moralistic real life. Midsommar is about a death obsessed pagan cult that the grief-stricken protagonist is slowly sucked into. The writer of Promising Young Woman, Emerald Fennel, described the main character as an “avenging angel” and told an interviewer she hoped the film would act like a Biblical parable about revenge. Oldboy director Park Chan-wook grew up Catholic in Korea, where he was aware of “a sense of guilt that is unique to Catholics.” As a film’s depiction of retribution escalates, viewers can use the character’s pursuit of revenge as a substitute for their own with far less dramatic moral consequences.

The John Wick franchise has made revenge into its entire modus operandi. Played by Keanu Reeves, the films’ titular retired assassin is given a puppy by his dying wife in the first film, and when baddies break into his home and kill the puppy, it leads to an escalating series of revenge acts that quickly reach absurdist degrees. The John Wick movies are also loaded with Catholic symbolism, including a pope-like character called “the elder,” adding some religious balance to all the carnage. The formula has proven so popular that there are now four John Wick movies for people to binge if they’re having a particularly bad week.

But that propensity to take revenge to the most outrageously violent endpoint is where many of these films and shows can lose their audiences. Even for people like myself who think and write frequently about social and religious pressures to be forgiving, the excessive scale of revenge depicted in these productions can be overwhelming, the equivalent of being stuck inside a first person shooter video game for hours on end. And that can be fun, but it can also be exhausting.

(Beef poster. Source: Netflix)

I loved streaming Beef, but as it went on, I found myself thinking that I wanted to get through it as quickly as possible. Watching the two main characters decimate their lives and hurt the people around them for the sake of revenge became queasily challenging as things tipped out of control. I lost interest in Tarantino’s movies years ago, depressed by his overuse of racial slurs and casual misogyny, but also because I don’t have the stomach for hours and hours of people being shot and stabbed for the sake of revenge. For some of us, revenge fantasies, as it turns out, have their limits.

How much revenge is too much? Just as psychologists argue that our own revenge fantasies can be a healthy means of coping if we contain them to the world of the imagination and use them to move through a trauma, the same might be said for revenge movies and shows. If there were multiple seasons of Beef, would we really want to watch them back-to-back? I’m sure there are people who’ve had a John Wick weekend, but that might be too much revenge for most people. Some Shakespeare theater companies won’t even touch Titus Andronicus, worried it will turn off audiences looking for escapism via the cozy familiarity of A Midsummer Night’s Dream or Twelfth Night.

The real tragedy is that today, revenge can escalate into horrifying real-world incidents of mass shootings as acts of revenge, something so common that it is difficult to think of a week that has gone by this year without one. In the face of that scale of tragedy, depictions of revenge on screen might seem dangerous or like a form of temptation. However, we already know that violent video games do not, despite arguments to the contrary, have a strong connection to America’s gun violence epidemic. There is some evidence that after the release of a popular, violent video game, violent crime rates go down rather than up, suggesting these games, and perhaps these films and shows, offer people an outlet for revenge fantasies, and are not the source of gun violence in the United States. That’s more the result of unfettered access to guns and an obsessive attachment to the Second Amendment.

Like any media depicting violence, if we consume it with some degree of awareness, revenge movies and shows can be a way of processing our pain so we can avoid acting out a desire for revenge. These productions can theoretically help us avoid tragedy by depicting revenge’s worst possible outcomes. The fact that many of them end with the main characters regretting their revenge isn’t a coincidence. Shakespeare was a deeply religious moralist, and his revenge plays end with a message about the danger of revenge when it goes too far. Beef also ends with a depiction of revenge’s danger, becoming a modern fable for our age. If forgiveness needs to have limits because some things are unforgivable, perhaps we need to put limits around our revenge fantasies too.

Kaya Oakes is the author of five books, most recently including The Defiant Middle: How Women Claim Life’s In Betweens to Remake the World. She teaches writing at the University of California, Berkeley.

The post It’s a Beef: How Revenge Movies and TV Shows Help Us Cope appeared first on The Revealer.

(Image source: BBC/Getty Images)

House cats may spend most of their days asleep, but when they’re awake, they’re likely to spend at least some time fighting one another. Competition in the natural world for food and territory may be a far cry from a comfortable life of puffy sofas and regular feedings, but animals still feel a need to battle it out. But no matter the species, even if they bite hard enough to draw blood, animals usually seem to forgive one another.

Anyone who’s watched a nature documentary knows there are exceptions. Sometimes animals fight to the death. More typically, fights end quickly, and the herd goes back to grazing or hunting. Sometimes animals become enemies for life. But they mostly return to being compatible.

This may not be what we think about in the larger scope of conversations about forgiveness. But our hominid ancestors lived in tribes, and we are still animals. Moving quickly past conflict made our survival as a species possible because we learned how to stop fighting before we killed one another. In any competition for survival, a pack is more likely to survive than a solitary animal. It could be argued that forgiveness is hard-wired into our DNA.

Yet the reason we evolved as a species from swimming to crawling to walking is because we were willing to override our genetic code. We learned to forgive to protect the pack, but we also learned when a pack member could not be forgiven. In those same nature documentaries, you might recall the solitary animal, cast out on its own, wandering the wilderness. That is the unforgiven animal. And revenge or retribution might be as deeply embedded in our genes as forgiveness.

But what do we really mean when we talk about forgiveness? The understanding most of us have is that forgiveness is essentially a kind of moral gift, granted to someone who has wronged us. There’s also a common notion that we somehow “forgive and forget,” moving past harm and leaving it behind, which is often far from our lived reality. Forgiveness is often portrayed as something that will help a person turn their life around. Seemingly every religious tradition describes forgiveness as a virtue. Muslims refer to Allah as “Ghafir,” or all-forgiving. In the Dharmic religions of Buddhism, Hinduism and Jainism, seeking forgiveness is an important step toward both mental clarity and cultivating compassion. Judaism’s focus on forgiveness is so paramount that many regard Yom Kippur, literally “Day of Atonement,” as the holiest day of the year.

Christianity, however, is what shaped much of Western thinking about forgiveness, and nearly every classic work of literature, film, theater, and music made by Christian or lapsed Christian artists has involved some portrayal of forgiveness. In America in particular, our collective imagination is shaped by the idea that forgiveness is a virtue, and failing to forgive is a vice, sin, and failure.

Up until the 20th century, when psychology evolved into its contemporary form, how people understood forgiveness was rooted in philosophy and religion. And both of those continue to influence how we talk about forgiveness today. In essence, our understanding of forgiveness often lands in the middle of a Venn diagram of philosophy, psychology, and religion. Plato and Aristotle, the founders of Western philosophy, saw controlling anger as important to leading a virtuous life, and understood forgiveness as a route toward freeing a person from anger. But as Christianity evolved and conquered, forgiveness itself became a virtue, and failing to forgive became a vice.

(Scene from Promising Young Woman)

On the opposite hand of forgiveness is revenge. And depictions of revenge can be a highly enjoyable way for us to live out the fantasy that we might get our own retribution instead of being forgiving. In the 2022 film The Banshees of Inisherin, a conflict between old friends escalates to absurdist levels of violence as the two men trade acts of revenge. At the end of the film, Pádraic, whose house has been burned down by his former friend Colm, says “some things there’s no moving on from, and I think that’s a good thing.” In 2020’s Promising Young Woman, a former medical student whose friend was raped by a classmate systematically takes revenge on everyone from the school who colluded to cover it up. In 2002’s Oldboy, a man freed from prison after many years for reasons he doesn’t understand sets out on several acts of revenge. And even 1980’s classic comedy 9 to 5 is about a group of women who get revenge on their misogynistic boss.

These movies are enjoyable because they are a kind of wish fulfillment. Instead of being forgiving, the characters get what most of us really want deep down inside when we have been wronged, which is to hurt the person who did it. Sublimating that instinct for revenge is one of the great battles of our lives. The difference between us and our house pets is that we keep thinking about being wronged long past the event itself, sometimes for years or decades.

Revenge fantasies are an escape from the reality that forgiving is sometimes just more pragmatic. But the fact is that while forgiving one another may be part of what keeps our world from tumbling into violence, it is not always as easy as we are taught. And it is not always possible.

While many portrayals of forgiveness focus on reconciliation, with the offender being welcomed back into a relationship, modern philosophers like Jean Hampton have argued that reconciliation can be “morally unwise.” If the offending party isn’t asking to be forgiven, offering forgiveness can put the victim in a more vulnerable position. This is closely related to cycles of abuse in domestic and institutional relationships. If a victim is always forgiving, the offending person is essentially given permission to keep harming. A tendency to rush to forgiveness can also indicate a lack of self-respect, because the individual who does this may struggle to understand that sometimes forgiveness isn’t actually owed.

Some philosophers also argue that forgiveness cannot work unless it comes with conditions. Charles Griswold writes that it is the wrongdoer who is responsible for fulfilling the conditions for forgiveness. In Griswold’s argument they must acknowledge they’ve done wrong, repudiate what they’ve done, express regret, commit to change, show they understand the damage they’ve done, and explain why behaved poorly in the first place.

But even if reconciliation isn’t always possible, philosophically, “reconciliation is the goal to which forgiveness points.” The animal kingdom example works again here. The pack is stronger when reconciled. It will survive. The same can be argued for nations struggling to move past painful episodes in their histories. South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which shed light on the atrocities of apartheid, worked to demonstrate that unless those atrocities were made public, reconciliation would never really be possible, and the nation would never be unified.

For many religious people, divine forgiveness can be difficult to grasp and explain. Who can really know the mind of God? If forgiveness is in God’s hands, as Jesus says on the cross, how does one know when or if God has forgiven? The truth is that one can’t and doesn’t know. We can only assume that some combination of atonement, right behavior, amends, and apology will get us close enough for God to grant us forgiveness. In Catholicism, the priest, acting “in persona Christi,” does the forgiving on God’s behalf in the sacrament of reconciliation, more commonly known as confession. But forgiveness in confession always comes with penance of some sort, or else, the church teaches, it doesn’t work.

There is also a performative kind of forgiveness, where a person asks for forgiveness but is essentially unchanged when granted it. If forgiveness means moving past and letting go of resentment toward someone who’s wronged you, as many philosophers and psychologists agree, that assumes that the person being forgiven is actively working to avoid making the same mistake again. This, of course, is far from reality in many cases.

But who is forgiveness really for? In philosophy and religion, art and literature, forgiveness is often depicted as liberating for the person who has done wrong. But modern psychologists have begun to focus instead on the idea that forgiving is about liberating the person offering the forgiveness from resentment, anger, or a desire for revenge. If holding on to grief or pain can lead to resentment, which can be psychologically damaging, forgiving someone could theoretically be an end to that resentment. In this framing, the person doing the forgiving is who benefits the most.

The psychologist Fred Luskin, who formerly ran Stanford University’s Forgiveness Project, says that learning to grant forgiveness is a way of understanding that being told “no” is a universal experience. According to Luskin, “the essence of forgiveness is being resilient when things don’t go the way you want.” Learning to accept that things are not always as we hoped is a key to moving past resentment and into forgiveness.

But Luskin contends that you cannot forgive someone without grieving. When someone does us wrong, we must recognize that our relationship is forever changed, and we have to grieve that change. Instead of letting go of the experience, Luskin says allowing ourselves to grieve helps us transform our emotional response to it, which can help us to become more resilient and more forgiving. He also maintains that not hiding the process you’re experiencing is crucial. Research has shown that people who experience trauma and don’t share that experience have worse outcomes than those who do. This may be why sexual abuse victims find it so difficult to arrive at forgiveness, since shame and secrecy are inherent to many cases of sexual abuse.

The former pope Benedict XVI died while I was working on this essay, and the knowledge that he had failed to act to end sex abuse by priests in Germany while he was an archbishop overshadowed every word of praise I saw lavished on him in obituaries and on social media. Children were raped while he stood by and did nothing. Why were people so forgiving of a person who’d colluded to allow that to happen?

Because the sexual abuse atrocities were so shameful, they had stayed a secret until Benedict retired from the papacy and were not made public until the same year he died. Among the eulogies praising his theological mind and his love of music and art, the voices of abuse victims were hardly heard at all. It’s likely they had not forgiven him.

If psychologists argue that learning to forgive benefits the person who has been wronged because it allows them to move past resentment and into freedom from mental burdens, the problem is that memories of a traumatic event can last for the rest of a person’s life. Sex abuse victims have talked extensively about this, as have war veterans, and many other people whose bodies and minds have been violated.

When it comes to people who are not able to forgive, some psychologists argue that this may actually be a way of protecting themselves from further harm. Jeanne Safer, author of Forgiving and Not Forgiving, argues that “enshrining universal forgiveness as a panacea, a requirement or the only moral choice, is rigid, simplistic and even pernicious.” Yet, according to Safer, we have come to expect forgiveness to be granted so universally that we demonize anyone unwilling to grant it. The problem here is that we equate forgiveness with a kind of moral purity that few people can live up to. In her reading, there are actually many cases when not forgiving someone is the most appropriate action to take.

Safer describes three types of people who withhold forgiveness. For the first type, “moral unforgivers,” refusing to forgive means telling the truth, asserting fundamental rights, and opposing injustice. “Psychologically detached unforgivers” accept the painful reality that they cannot experience any positive internal connection with a betrayer, which forgiving would require. And “Reformed forgivers” have faced conflicts between feelings, religious principles or ethics, and have come to reject the conventional attitudes they once accepted. But none of these three types of people is vindictive or against forgiveness in principle. They share the capacity to forgive, but have come to a decision that forgiveness, rather than freeing them from patterns of negative thinking, can further damage them psychologically.

In Safer’s telling, the decision not to forgive can sometimes be liberating for the children of abusive parents. This does not mean those people necessarily cut off all communication or refuse to acknowledge a parent, but that they are “outraged but not obsessed” by the harm done to them. When people insist on universal forgiveness, it can blind them to the fact that reconciliation without forgiveness is also a viable possibility.

The pandemic has also revealed fault lines in our understanding of forgiveness. In the most recent season of the podcast Serial, the poet Rachel McKibbens tells the story of how her father and brother both died from Covid just a few weeks apart. Her father, who had been physically abusive to her and her brother throughout their childhood, still displayed qualities that caused both Rachel and her brother Peter to stay in touch with him as adults. Their father took them in when their mother put them in foster care. He supported Rachel’s interest in acting and theater and drove her to rehearsals all over the Los Angeles area. He loved movies and watched them with his kids, and was scrupulous about making sure they were well fed. But he drank, and when he drank, he got violent. Rachel and her brother, like many children of abusive and alcoholic parents, became a team and paired up together against their father’s rage.

When Rachel grew up, she moved across the country. But her brother moved back in with his father, and tried and failed to get him to stop drinking. When Covid arrived, both father and son refused to get vaccinated. They began to tunnel down rabbit holes of conspiracy theories about vaccines and the government, fueled by texts from a cousin. Her father refused to go to the hospital when he got Covid, and he died at home. Shortly after, Peter’s health rapidly declined as well.

As Peter’s own Covid case got worse and he became feverish and short of breath, he called his sister. Rachel told him, “If you don’t go to the E.R. right now, I will not forgive you when you die.” Peter went to the E.R., where he was put on oxygen, but he refused medication because he believed a conspiracy theory that doctors receive money if they give medication to Covid patients. He told his sister he was released because he was getting better, but this was a lie. He had discharged himself against medical advice, went home, and died. He was 44 years old.

Three years into the pandemic, there are millions of stories like this. Rachel says she herself feels like she needs forgiveness for not pushing her father and brother harder to get vaccinated. But at some point, when a person refuses to get help, even to get something as simple as a vaccine, they move past being forgivable and into a messier, greyer area.

During the AIDS epidemic, millions of people were abandoned by their parents and families because they were considered untouchable. But it was the enraged, unrelenting pressure from gay men, at that time the most at risk of contracting the disease, which pushed the American government and pharmaceutical companies into funding medical research to make lifesaving drugs affordable and accessible. Some of those same men who survived AIDS never forgave or reconciled with the families that rejected them.

(Dallas Texas Digest headline from April 1990)

Today, untold numbers of queer and trans kids are also rejected by their families of origin, and they, too, struggle to feel forgiving. But if they cannot bring themselves to forgive the parents who rejected them, does that make them bad people? I know far too many people who fit these descriptions, who cannot forgive their parents and have had to self-create families that would be more understanding and supportive. In no cases would I describe them as “bad.” They are, in fact, some of the most empathetic and compassionate people I’ve ever known.

Perhaps, for some people, forgiveness can be freeing. But in cases where it would do further damage, enable abuse, or cause someone to engage in self harm, forgiveness can do the opposite. It can put us into a moral cage of “goodness” where we become trapped by the idea that failing to forgive means we are fundamentally bad people. And this is particularly true among Christians in America. Decades of the rise of fundamentalist thinking about Christianity have led people to believe that Jesus always preached forgiveness, that he demanded it, and that failing to give it makes you a bad Christian and even an apostate.

But American Christian ideas of forgiveness are also shaped by our country’s history of believing in predestination, manifest destiny, slavery, colonialism, misogyny, homophobia, and many other social ills that have become deeply intertwined with Christianity. The idea that forgiveness must be universal is cross denominational, too, impacting every American Christian from Catholics to Protestants, from overwhelmingly white Mormons to Black Christians who belong to churches founded by slaves.

Just as our nation both insists it believes in the separation of church and state and demands lawmakers to take an oath of office with one hand on a holy book, we fetishize forgiveness, but we also have the highest incarceration rate in the world. The death penalty is legal in 27 states. Families trying to cross the border into the United States, often fleeing abuse and violence, are put into cages or detention centers where they lack adequate food, medicine, and water. And a woman seeking an abortion because of an unplanned pregnancy will be unable to get one in thirteen states as of this writing, and likely many more in the future. We are not a forgiving nation.

But it needs to be clear that as the author of this column, I am not against forgiveness. Forgiveness can indeed be liberating. It can mend relationships, heal emotional wounds, and make us feel better about ourselves. But expecting universal forgiveness can also give abusers permission to keep abusing. It can cause self-harm. It can lead to suicidal ideation and addiction. It can also drive people away from religion when religion makes them feel like failures for being unable to forgive. Forgiveness is something that should improve our lives and our society, but America today is a stellar example of why this is very much not the case. We need to see that forgiveness has limits, and that for our own good, we sometimes need to heed them.

Kaya Oakes is the author of five books, most recently including The Defiant Middle: How Women Claim Life’s In Betweens to Remake the World. She teaches writing at the University of California, Berkeley.

The post Fetishizing Forgiveness appeared first on The Revealer.

(Image source: Getty Images)

In recent years, people at the university where I teach in California tried to address the fact that we work on land stolen from indigenous people by appending land acknowledgements to their email signatures. But the Ohlone people who had lived on the land where the university constructed its buildings had already been decimated and scattered. The emails may be sent from Ohlone land, but there are few Ohlone left to claim it.

Land acknowledgements are a kind of apology. But for white people, like sticking a Black Lives Matter sticker on their car, they are another performative gesture at trying to make amends for the sins of our ancestors. Whether your white ancestors arrived in America with the pilgrims or more recently like most white Californians, you have benefited from the conquering of lands that belonged to others. Native American activists have become increasingly vocal about this, and, gradually, white Americans have tried to offer apologies. But do these gestures really mean that Native Americans owe white people forgiveness? And after years of being told to “forgive and forget,” can the genocide of Native American people, or any people conquered by others, really ever be forgiven?

A 2015 study by psychologists on forgiveness found that most people forgive in two ways. The first, decisional forgiveness, is a conscious decision to let go of hurt feelings and move forward “free of the effects those feelings can bring.” The second, emotional forgiveness, involves replacing negative emotions toward someone who has wronged you with positive ones, like compassion or empathy. But while most psychologists argue that forgiving can help a person move past trauma, another study in 2011 found that being forgiving can perpetuate and excuse abusive behavior. The fact of the matter is that while forgiveness should theoretically prevent people from reoffending, in many cases, it actually gives them permission to do so—on both personal and communal levels. Indigenous Americans have suffered because of this.

***

California’s oldest standing buildings are the Missions, which were overseen by an ambitious Spanish Franciscan friar named Junipero Serra. Serra, who arrived in Baja California in the late 1760s, had a singular goal: to convert as many of the seemingly recalcitrant Native Californian people as humanly possible. Considering how many Native people ran away from missionaries, they weren’t so much recalcitrant as terrified. One indigenous family seeking help for their sick infant once brought the baby to Serra, who assumed they wanted it baptized, and then fled when it looked like Serra was about to drown their child.

As Serra slowly made his way up California, building missions as he went, more and more Native Californians converted to Christianity. But once they converted, rather than finding salvation, life often became desperate and unpleasant. Not allowed to leave the missions, they were separated from family members, stripped of their languages, rituals, and cultures, and forced to labor for the church. Disease and hunger were rampant. Missionaries beat, whipped, and treated Native Californians with a condescending, infantilizing attitude.

(Mission Santa Clara in California)

By the time I was born, California’s population had been reshaped many times over. Oakland, where I grew up, had gone from a city of Italian and Irish immigrants in the early 20^th century to a city with more than 50% Black population during the Great Migration. Immigrants from Mexico and Central America began to pour into California in the 1970s and 80s alongside people from Asia, Southeast Asia, and Africa. But there were always Native Californians, too. It’s just that, thanks to Serra, not many of them remained.

Our teachers, with a mind toward building a more diverse story of California, took us on field trips to see the Miwok Village at Point Reyes National Seashore alongside tours of missions. But for people who grew up in the 1980s and later, instead of hearing stories praising Serra, we began to hear other stories: of disease and death, of cultures wiped out, of people who had once been rich in land now homeless. We learned that some things are unforgivable.

Among those stories, one has stuck with me for fifty years as an example of what it means to decimate a group of people so utterly that there is no possibility of forgiveness. It has also defined both what it means to commit an unforgivable act, and how that act can have repercussions for generations.

On August 29, 1911, a starving Native man wandered into Oroville, California, where he was sent to the town jail. He was Yahi, a tribe that had been deliberately and violently massacred by white settlers. In the 1840s, there were approximately 400 Yahi living in Northern California. By 1911, there was one.

Desperate to get rid of this unwanted man, the town reached out to the University of California Museum of Anthropology, which was at that time located in San Francisco, seeking help for the visitor whose name was unknown. Alfred Kroeber, who ran the museum, proposed that the man be moved into the museum to live rather than repatriated to a reservation in Oklahoma. Because it was a Yahi custom not to speak his name to outsiders, Kroeber began calling him Ishi, meaning “man.” Ishi suffered from numerous health problems in the museum, where he lived for four and a half years. In one of the first photographs taken of Ishi, he is thin, covered in what looks like a loaned coat, and barefoot. The anthropologist James Clifford writes that this image, widely circulated when Ishi was “discovered,” was the beginning of Ishi’s story being stolen from him. “Stripped of any context, he is pure artifact, available for collection; pure victim, ready to be rescued.”

Kroeber considered Ishi a friend, and he and other UC anthropologists tried to learn Ishi’s language and customs, hoping to preserve them. But their methodology was, by today’s standards, dehumanizing. Ishi was advertised as “the last wild Indian in California,” and essentially put on display in the museum, where he would carve obsidian arrowheads and sing Yahi songs for crowds of tourists. Against his will, Ishi traveled with Kroeber to the site where his family was massacred to help Kroeber document Yahi life. Ishi’s narrative became Kroeber’s narrative, and Kroeber’s growing fame became dependent on Ishi.

(A photo of Ishi. Source: California Museum)

Ishi struggled in the museum, partly because he was surrounded by the remains of other Native Californians, and partly because he was not accustomed to living indoors or wearing Western clothing. He would sometimes be sighted hunting on nearby Mount Parnassus, but for the most part, he was confined indoors and forced to be a living exhibit. By many accounts, he was friendly, but one can only imagine what he went through psychologically spending nights surrounded by the bones of massacred relatives.

When tuberculosis swept through San Francisco in 1916, Ishi contracted it, probably from a curious museum visitor eager to see a live “wild Indian.” When he died, Kroeber initially opposed letting Ishi’s body be autopsied, but later agreed to have Ishi’s brain sent to the Smithsonian, where it remained until 2020.

By then, narratives about Ishi’s life had changed. Kroeber’s wife Theodora, also an anthropologist who studied Native Americans, wrote what was for many years considered the definitive book about Ishi’s life, Ishi in Two Worlds. But it was an imperfect book in many ways.

As a child, like many Californians, I was assigned a young reader’s version of Theodora Kroeber’s book in school, so the Ishi I knew was the Kroeber’s Ishi, not the Ishi who belongs to the Native Californians who would later spend decades fighting to reclaim his brain so they could lay it to rest with his ashes. Among the mythological stories the Kroebers created is that Ishi was the “last” Indian living wild in California, which is clearly not true: while Ishi’s tribe was wiped out, the descendants of many of the Indians who ran from Serra still live there today.

Even while it acknowledged the genocide of Native Americans and grappled with the trauma Ishi experienced when his family was massacred, Theodora Kroeber’s book also contributed to the mythology of the “healed” Native American. She created a narrative of a person who has been tortured but still manages to be able to move past pain and into forgiveness. Kroeber divides her book into two sections, “The Terror” for Ishi’s life before he arrived at the museum, and “The Healing” once he got there.

But the truth is much more complicated. Ishi will never be able to tell us if he forgave the people who slaughtered his family, if he forgave the seemingly well-meaning white anthropologists who placed him in a museum and exploited his story, or if he forgave Serra and gold prospectors and everyone else who has tried to reinvent California in their own image. Ishi will not even be able to tell us his real name, because it could only be spoken by another Yahi, and they are gone. The remains of Native people that so bothered Ishi when he lived at the Museum of Anthropology were moved along with the rest of the museum to the UC Berkeley campus soon after Ishi died. Thousands of students, faculty, and staff sit in classrooms and offices built over containers of those remains.

In 2015, despite protests from Native Americans, Pope Francis canonized Junipero Serra in Washington, D.C. The pope described Serra as “excited” to learn Native customs and ways of life. But Native Americans disagreed. Five years later, as statues of Confederate generals, Christopher Columbus, and other disgraced historical figures were being toppled across the country in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement, Native activists knocked down a thirty-foot-tall statue of Serra in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. Statues of Serra soon fell in Sacramento and Los Angeles as well. California governor Gavin Newsom had delivered a formal apology to California Native people in 2019, recognizing the history of genocide in the state. But for Native activist Morning Star Gali, “an apology is nothing without action,” and for her and other California Native people, statues of Serra were a reminder of a painful past and needed to go.

(Statue of Serra. Image source: Jaime Reina for Getty Images)

The Catholic Church disagreed. San Francisco archbishop Salvatore Cordileone did not apologize to Native activists for the damage the church had done to them throughout history. Instead, he called the activists a “mob,” accused them of “an act of sacrilege,” and called toppling the statue blasphemy. Cordileone performed an exorcism at the site of the statue, with his own film crew on hand, documenting the ceremony on YouTube, saying “evil has been done here” and calling Serra a hero. The statue, depicting Serra thrusting a cross forward with his arms spread wide, now dented and splattered with red paint, has been put in storage. The California legislature voted to replace it with a statue honoring Native Californians. To this day, such a statue does not exist.

***

In July of 2022, Pope Francis made what the Vatican described as a “penitential pilgrimage” to Canada. The history of Canadian residential schools became an international scandal as reports went public of thousands of unmarked graves of First Nations people on the sites of former schools. Led by missionaries from Catholic and Protestant denominations on the premise that they would educate First Nations children, Canadian residential schools instead performed what many Native people consider cultural genocide.

Effectively stealing, in most cases, First Nations children from their parents, missionaries who ran residential schools sexually, physically, and psychologically abused generations of Native Canadian children. And they learned how to do this from their American neighbors. Nicholas Flood Davin, a Canadian politician sent to the U.S. to study “industrial schools” for Native Americans, wrote in 1897 that “if anything is to be done with the Indian, we must catch him young.” To achieve the “aggressive civilization” desired by these politicians, missionaries separated siblings in the schools, weakening family ties, and stuck needles into the tongues of children caught speaking their indigenous languages.

First Nations religions, languages, and cultures were annihilated, and untold numbers of children died in residential schools. One report from 1907 estimated a quarter of previously healthy children died in the schools. And anywhere between half and three quarters of those sent to residential schools later died from suicide, addiction, or violence.

Residential schools still existed as recently as 1996, and the first apology for the Canadian government’s part in them occurred in 2008, when Stephen Harper, then the Prime Minister, offered a public apology before an audience of First Nations people. “The Government of Canada,” Harper said, “sincerely apologizes and asks the forgiveness of the Aboriginal peoples of this country for failing them so profoundly.” Loraine Yuzicapi, who had been sent to a residential school in the 1950s and sat in the audience as Harper apologized, had a succinct response to a journalist’s question about Harper’s apology. “It wasn’t good enough,” she said.

(A Canadian residential school. Photo taken in 1940. Image source: Library and Archives Canada)

For people who were colonized or enslaved, as well as for their descendants, our growing understanding of trauma theory backs up what they have long said: apologies are not always enough to earn forgiveness, because violence, whether mental, physical or spiritual, can do damage that lasts generations. Residential schools may have been formed for what their founders saw as a meaningful purpose, the assimilation of indigenous people into white society and the salvation of their souls through forced conversions to Christianity, but anyone with even a cursory knowledge of missionary history is aware that violent white supremacy shaped those missions.

By the time Pope Francis arrived in Canada, First Nations people were understandingly skeptical. Calling the residential schools a “disastrous error” and “catastrophic,” the pope said he humbly begged forgiveness “for the evil committed against the Indigenous peoples.” But the pope also said missionaries were acting on behalf of the government, what he described as the “colonizing mentality.” Pope Francis did not ask forgiveness for the Catholic Church itself, but for its members who abused children. In doing so, the pope perpetuated the same patterns that made the sex abuse crisis possible.

By pointing the finger at individuals rather than the institution that enabled and even encouraged them, churches and governments alike involved in the residential schools have used the same “bad apples” excuse for generations. The problem is that this effectively allows the institution to call itself blameless. And that in turn increases the potential for the same abuses to happen again.

Murray Sinclair, an Ojibwe Canadian senator and the former head of Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation commission, said that this deflection made the pope’s apology feel hollow. According to Sinclair, the pope’s words “left a deep hole in the acknowledgement of the full role of the church in the residential school system, by placing blame on individual members of the church.” For Sinclair and many other First Nations people, the pope’s apology was too little, too late. They would not be granting forgiveness.

***

In his book The Body Keeps the Score, psychiatrist Bessel Van Der Kolk writes that for the traumatized person, “the past is alive in the form of gnawing interior discomfort.” Physical aftereffects of trauma become “visceral warning signs,” and survivors of trauma “become expert at ignoring their gut feelings and in numbing awareness of what is played out inside.” Van Der Kolk’s hypothesis is that this is another form of the fight or flight instinct experienced by people with anxiety and panic disorders. Because they’ve experienced trauma, they never feel safe, and as Van Der Kolk writes, “Being able to feel safe with other people is probably the single most important aspect of mental health.”

Many Americans have looked to Canada as a country with more exemplary social equity, and knowledge of the residential schools shattered that. Since we know America is not a safe country for women, people of color, queer people or, increasingly, children at risk of being shot at school, the question remains whether or not the United States, as a nation that has inflicted trauma on generations of people, is worthy of forgiveness.

In an article in Indian Country magazine, Dina Gilio-Whitaker, a member of the Colville tribe, writes about attending a production of a play by a Native American writer. The play posed the question of whether or not Native Americans can forgive what was done to them by the United States, and at the end of the play, a non-Native audience member turned to Gilio-Whitaker and said “you have to forgive if you want to heal.” Gilio-Witaker, who says that she experienced domestic abuse, writes that granting forgiveness was not what she personally needed to overcome trauma. She needed to get away from the abuser. She adds that being taught that forgiveness was the only way to move past the abuse perpetuates a victim mentality for abuse survivors because they can be stuck in a perpetual experience of trauma while the abuser moves on.

On a collective level, after war or genocide or colonization, communities “face the extremely challenging prospects of having to rebuild,” while also coping with the psychological impact of violence. After a violent conflict, people on both sides have to find a way to exist alongside one another. Instead of asking people stuck together in the aftermath of violence whether they can forgive, Gilio-Whitaker suggests a better question: what will it take to heal historical wounds, and “heal the relationships between indigenous communities and settler governments and societies?” If we can move past an expectation of forgiveness, she writes, the oppressed are no longer “held to an impossible standard,” and we can also recognize that healing is a shared responsibility, and not an individual one.

Perhaps if we can let go of the idea that forgiveness might be possible after something as unfathomable as a genocide or war, or incest, domestic abuse, rape or a million other traumatizing acts, we might also be able to let victims and their descendants experience a sense of freedom since they no longer “owe” anyone. The Rev. Eric Atcheson, an Armenian-American whose ancestors survived the Armenian genocide, told me that he does not see it as his or any other Armenian person’s responsibility to be forgiving, because the people who could have offered forgiveness are now dead.

“If God wants to forgive culprits of a genocide,” he says, “that’s God’s affair. I don’t get to forgive them in my ancestors’ stead.” Rev. Atcheson adds that those who accuse the descendants of genocide or war to be “clinging to the past” by refusing to forgive are incorrect. In refusing to forgive or forget the Armenian genocide, Atcheson believes he is “setting [himself] free while the deniers remain burdened.” In many ways, this makes perfect sense. We are taught that forgiveness is an unburdening and a letting go, but what if realizing you cannot forgive someone or something is the actual unburdening? As Atcheson says, if it is God’s decision whether someone is forgiven, that can free us from the guilt of feeling like we are bad people when we cannot do the same.

And to reduce any group of people to their experience of suffering is also a form of dehumanization. It’s amazing to read that Ishi laughed, told jokes, and enjoyed walking around San Francisco and meeting people considering his entire family was massacred while he hid and watched. That doesn’t necessarily mean he was forgiving, but that like every other human being, he felt a range of emotions that extended beyond trauma and its impact on him. But he also continued to speak Yahi, to practice his tribal rituals, to hunt and carve arrowheads. Living in the museum may have felt like a trap, but when Kroeber wanted to take Ishi back to his home territory, Ishi did not want to go. To return meant returning to the site of the trauma. He was trapped in a liminal space, and that is where he died.

To imagine Ishi or any person who survived a mass slaughter laughing or smiling may tempt us to think they have “let go,” forgiven, or moved on. But anyone who’s been to a funeral knows that sometimes you laugh hard at funerals because this, too, is a release. That’s not the same as moving on or moving past something, but a momentary opportunity to feel something other than anxiety or grief. The person being asked for forgiveness, as Gilio-Whitaker writes, is also being “held to an impossible standard.” That, too, is turning human suffering into caricature, the “noble savage,” or the rape victim so holy she is willing to forgive the man who violated her, or the former slave who somehow forgives the person who owned and abused their body.

If we are called to be forgiving no matter what, many people who have been through hell will fail. Perhaps what needs to be forgiven is, instead, the inability to forgive.

Kaya Oakes is the author of five books, most recently including The Defiant Middle: How Women Claim Life’s In Betweens to Remake the World. She teaches writing at the University of California, Berkeley.

The post The Colonizing Catholic Church, Indigenous Americans, and Problems with Forgiveness appeared first on The Revealer.

(Image source: Jose Luis Magana for the Associated Press)

In 2009, a Brazilian man raped his nine-year-old stepdaughter and she became pregnant with twins. Her mother, panicked that her child would die as a result of the pregnancy, arranged for an emergency procedure to terminate the pregnancy. Abortion is illegal in Brazil except in cases of rape and when the mother’s life is in danger – both true in this case – and up to 250,000 women a year there end up in emergency rooms because of botched illegal abortion procedures. Brazil’s population is more than half Roman Catholic, but even for the most faithful Catholics, what happened next was shocking.

The nine-year-old’s hips were so small they would have made the pregnancy dangerous, so an argument could have been made that the Catholic church would allow the pregnancy to be terminated to save the girl’s life because this was a case of “double effect.” Double effect is what the 13th century theologian and philosopher Thomas Aquinas referred to as “causing a morally grave harm as a means of pursuing a good end.” Technically, under church canon law, anyone who aids in an abortion or participates in one is considered to be excommunicated latae sententiae, or automatically. For Catholics, excommunication means a person is banned from taking communion in any church until they go to confession and repent. But the priest or bishop they confess to is ultimately the person who decides whether or not a person is forgiven. However, when a pregnancy is terminated to save the mother’s life, as it was in the case of this pregnant child, the church can make an exception and not excommunicate her.

Because most abortions are private matters between a person and their doctor, it would be impossible for the church to know who has and hasn’t received one. But because the case in Brazil was so appalling, what happened next was international news that still resonates today. Archbishop Sobrinho of the city of Recife excommunicated the girl, her doctors, and her mother. At the time, he told Time magazine, “abortion is more serious than killing an adult.” Sobrinho said that anyone who disagreed with the church on his decision was not Catholic and should feel free to leave the church. “We want people who adhere to God’s laws,” he said.

(Protest in Brazil. Image source: Silvia Izquierdo for the AP.)

Catholic teaching on abortion has always been closely intertwined with ideas of sin, forgiveness, and repentance. Yes, the young girl, her mother, and the doctors who performed the procedure could go to confession, repent for their actions, be forgiven, and start receiving communion again. But did they really sin? And do people who have abortions really need to be forgiven? Those questions are rarely asked in the larger debates about what the end of Roe v. Wade will do to the Catholic church in America. But they are crucial to understanding why the case of the Brazilian girl offers us some clues about what may come next not only for those seeking abortions in the United States, but for the Catholic church too. It also raises uncomfortable questions about sin and forgiveness for the Catholic church and the people who belong to it.

***

Five decades of relentless focus on abortion above all other issues, compounded with ongoing fallout from the clergy abuse crisis, has driven many Catholics out of the church. Widely cited statistics about the demographic decline of Catholics in America are so familiar to some of us who cover the church that we can recite them by memory at this point. For every person who joins the Catholic church, six Catholics leave. There are now more ex-Catholics in America than practicing ones. And the end of legal abortion in America will likely mean even more attrition out of the church for the majority of Catholics who believe abortion should stay legal and therefore safe.

The concern of many, both Catholic and not, is that the conservative Catholics judges on the Supreme Court will use this ruling to erode additional rights that protect bodily autonomy, like the rights to contraception and same-sex marriage. Technically, these things are also off limits to Catholics as both are considered sinful, and one would need to repent to be forgiven of them. But along with abortions, which Catholic women have clearly been having for quite some time, contraception use and same-sex relationships are common among members of the church. The days of enormous Catholic families, which I frequently saw as a child, are long gone, belying the notion that American Catholics see contraceptive use, which Pope Pius XI once described as “stained by a great and mortal flaw,” as a sinful act in need of forgiveness. And given that anywhere between 30 and 75% of Catholic priests are gay men trapped in the closet, the idea, too, that same-sex relationships are sinful makes the whole church seem to reek of hypocrisy.

The history of how the Catholic church came to see abortion as a sin is long and complicated, but the debate has been consistently focused on two things: when life actually begins in the womb, and when the fetus achieves “ensoulment.” The idea of ensoulment goes all the way back to Aristotle, who believed ensoulment occurred around the 40th day of pregnancy for male fetuses and 90 days for female ones (and we can note that misogynistic ancient Greek views of women have certainly left an imprint on the Catholic Church). That belief was passed on to St. Augustine – who himself impregnated and abandoned a woman and the child of his she bore – and to St. Thomas Aquinas. The idea of delayed ensoulment persisted in church teaching until the 19th century, clouding the issue of when abortion was and wasn’t permissible. When more sophisticated science about pregnancy entered the picture in the 20th century, the church decided that ensoulment and life begin at the moment of conception.

Because the Church considers abortion at any stage of pregnancy an act of murder, Catholics are taught to believe that every moment of conception will lead to a viable life, even though a zygote and a 24-week-old fetus that can breathe on its own are not the same thing.  The church currently states that life beginning at conception is a “scientific fact,” but this too is debatable. Even with our more developed contemporary understanding of biology and embryology, scientists, ethicists, politicians, and theologians cannot agree when “personhood” begins. We know that not every fertilized egg implants, that miscarriages are common in the first part of pregnancy, and that in the vast majority of cases, people seek out abortions in the earliest stages of pregnancy. We also know that sometimes people need abortions in order to survive sepsis, cancer, and other things that can kill. So we have to ask, yet again: why is abortion considered so terrible a sin that it incurs excommunication every time it happens?

The church teaching on this is convoluted. In order for a person to incur excommunication, Canon Law 1323 specifies the person must be over the age of 16, aware of the punishment for their sin, and free from “grave fear.” Many real-world examples of abortion fall outside of those parameters. I attended Catholic schools for most of my elementary school years and went to a Catholic college, and while we were told that abortion was sinful, excommunication was never mentioned. Moreover, abortion was not the main focus of the Catholic Social Teaching I encountered in my youth. The death penalty, humanitarian crises around the world, nuclear threat, and the racism pervasive in our local community were usually treated as more urgent issues.

In the decades since Roe became law, however, the Catholic church in America has shifted its focus from issues of poverty, war, the death penalty, and the environment to eradicating abortion as its highest priority issue. Although beliefs about the legality of abortion are decidedly mixed among lay Catholics, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ relentless focus on ending Roe has led to what Catholic writer Garry Wills calls “the cult of the fetus,” in which the life of the unborn trumps the life of the mother every time. The bishops have long sponsored events like the annual March for Life in D.C. and have formed generations of priests in seminaries who see abortion as the church’s greatest concern. And there is no mistaking the fact that this campaign has primarily targeted Catholic women. Just before the Supreme Court overturned Roe, San Francisco archbishop Salvatore Cordileone excommunicated Nancy Pelosi for her support of abortion rights, ostensibly to encourage her to “repent.” Pope Francis, meanwhile, has strongly advised that the eucharist should not be weaponized and used as a political tool. But the American bishops seem to have missed that message.

In an attempt to ease the pain of excommunication, in 2016, Pope Francis changed the manner in which excommunications are lifted for those who have had an abortion. In the past, a person seeking absolution for abortion would have to go to the bishop to get their excommunication lifted and to be absolved. Today, one can instead go straight to any parish priest. Unfortunately, however, most Catholics do not know about this change or the steps one can take to remain in the church after having an abortion because the church has barely broadcast this decision. Case in point: I was in Rome during the Jubilee Year of Mercy following Francis’s decree, and the topic of easing excommunication for those who have had an abortion was never mentioned in the seminar I attended for journalists covering the church. And even with this change, there is still no guarantee that if you go to confession the priest will absolve you.

Technically, anyone involved in an abortion needs to seek repentance, as in the case of the Brazilian girl’s mother and doctors. But rarely do we hear of men involved in abortions doing this. The face of the anti-abortion movement is typically not a man, but a woman, and not the low income mother who is the most likely person to seek one out. And you do not have to go far in Catholic whisper networks to hear of seminarians who impregnated girlfriends and procured abortions for them before going on to be ordained, priests doing the same, or the spotty history of popes with mistresses who more than likely sought out “assistance” from a local herbalist when one of those mistresses got into trouble.

Catholics who are now arguing that the church will be there to support pregnant women seem to have forgotten that the church had fifty years to build networks of community support, to lobby for family aid, and to provide viable alternatives for the babies they are so enthusiastic about welcoming. But in those fifty years, it has not done those things to a degree in any way adequate to the number of children who will soon be born into lives of violence, poverty, and hunger or the number of women who will get sick and die from a lack of abortion access. To truly be “pro-life” and “pro family,” the Catholic church could spend more money, provide more resources, and lobby harder for the lives of families. It does not, however, do these things to a degree that makes a demonstrable difference now, nor does it have concrete plans for the future, and millions of Americans are aware of this. So who is the real sinner here?

The fall of Roe and the celebratory nature of many Catholic responses to it may mean more Americans will finally leave the church. This happened in Brazil, where the number of Catholics was already declining when the nine-year-old girl was excommunicated, and many more have left since. In Ireland, another historically Catholic country, the death of a woman whose demise came as result of being denied an abortion to end her sepsis in 2012 created an international outcry. Ireland’s own clergy abuse crisis, which involved tens of thousands of “illegitimate” children being abused in industrial schools and even more “fallen women” sent to work in asylums which still operated into the 1990s, caused more and more Irish people to shake off the Catholic church’s grip on their bodies and minds. In 2018, Ireland voted to make abortion legal.

When it comes to sin and forgiveness, the church tends to gloss over its own teaching on conscience. In Gaudium et Spes, one of the documents that came out of Vatican II, the church teaches Catholics that “[a person] has in [their] heart a law written by God,” and that obeying our conscience is the thing from which our dignity arises. A person can seek out an abortion for a million reasons, but in each case, the decision as to whether or not it is a sin in need of forgiveness will happen in their conscience, not in the confessional, not in the chancery office, and not in the echoing hallways of the Vatican. For many in the coming weeks, months, and years who will see suffering and death wrought by the end of Roe, including another 10-year-old girl in Ohio, that same conscience may well lead them away from the church that brought about that end. And they will probably never forgive it.

Kaya Oakes is the author of five books, most recently including The Defiant Middle: How Women Claim Life’s In Betweens to Remake the World. She teaches writing at the University of California, Berkeley.

The post Whose Sin Is It Anyway? Catholics, Abortion, and What Comes Next appeared first on The Revealer.

(Image source: Christianity Today)

Construction noise is a constant background in the soundtrack of our American impulse for self-improvement. Lately, however, that sounds less like buildings going up and more like the toppling of statues and the chiseling of buildings that represent our problematic history. At U.C. Berkeley, where I teach writing, many of our buildings have been experiencing an overhaul. Yes, one of the most dangerous earthquake fault lines in California runs right through the middle of campus and some of those buildings are aging, crumbling, and in need of earthquake retrofitting. But a simultaneous building rejuvenation reflects the university’s attempts to correct mistakes of the past. In a scene playing out on campuses around the country, maintenance crews are peeling, grinding, and chiseling the names off of numerous academic buildings.

One of my classes currently meets in the Social Science building, known until last year as Barrows Hall. David Prescott Barrows was an anthropologist who wrote multiple racist screeds against Black and Filipino people. Berkeley’s Building Name Review Committee voted to strip his name from the six-story building that is ironically home to the Ethnic Studies department. Barrows and the others whose names are being removed are long dead, so it is impossible for them to ask for forgiveness. The university, instead, must stand in for individuals.

Institutions are increasingly forced to ask for forgiveness on behalf of people both living and deceased. The process is frequently arduous and clunky, and the results often unsatisfying for living victims or their descendants.

Recently, the American evangelical flagship magazine Christianity Today shocked thousands of people by dropping a surprise story in which Christianity Today reporter Daniel Silliman revealed that, for over 12 years, female employees had experienced sexual harassment from former editor-in-chief Mark Galli and former advertising director Olatokunbo Olawoye. According to the current Christianity Today editor-in-chief Timothy Dalrymple, Silliman was invited to write this investigation by the magazine’s editors. At the recommendation of abuse victim and attorney Rachel Denhollander, Christianity Today also hired Guidepost Solutions, a business consulting company, to investigate the abuse claims and make recommendations. Silliman did not see the Guidepost report until after he had concluded his own reporting. The magazine, according to both Silliman’s article and Guidepost Solution’s report, had done little if anything to mitigate the abuse.

The story of how all of this unfolded is highly unusual in journalism. Unlike the Boston Globe reporting on clergy abuse in the Catholic Church, the timing and circumstances of both Christianity Today’s reports surfacing at once is curious. Oftentimes, when an institution reports on its own failings, it is doing a form of public relations to get ahead of and shape the story before an outsider reveals the unvarnished problems.

Christianity Today, founded by Billy Graham in the 1950s, has had a large readership, making it a powerful voice for conservative Protestant values around issues of sex and sexuality. It has also been primarily led by men, and, statistically, men are far more likely to sexually harass women than vice versa. The response to Silliman’s report that female staffers were groped and verbally abused was explosive on social media. Even in the post-Trump era, white evangelical culture remains a subject of fascination for many outside of it.

Unlike the Catholic Church, where abuse cases must at least theoretically be reported to central bodies like diocesan offices, evangelical churches have no center of power akin to Rome and there is often no one like a bishop supervising the behavior of pastors. Often, there is little, or no, accountability for pastors beyond their congregations. Unfortunately, according to Silliman’s reporting, that structure — with a powerful man at the top and everyone else below — was replicated at Christianity Today. And powerful men, no matter their religious background, are most concerned with protecting themselves.

In Silliman’s report, most of the harassment cases disclosed to Human Resources were buried or pushed aside, but much of the harassment never even made it to HR. In one disturbing incident, a woman whose sexual harassment was reported to HR by a colleague found herself on the receiving end of a stream of grievances from former editor Mark Gailli, who accused her of seeing “everything” as sexual harassment. Amy Jackson, a former associate publisher who left the magazine in 2018 due to what she described as a “hostile work environment,” told Silliman that “the culture when I was there was to protect the institution at all costs.”

Anyone who remembers Jim Bakker, Jimmy Swaggart, Doug Phillips, or any other name on the long list of evangelical pastors who were involved in sex scandals knows there is a pattern among powerful evangelicals preachers that often leads to abuse coverups. In addition, the #ChurchToo movement started by evangelical women who were victims of abuse has also made it clear that these patterns of abuse and coverup are more extensive than many people had previously known. The issue at Christianity Today, too, seems to be a consistent pattern of denial that anything was wrong. Guidepost Solutions, the consulting firm hired by Christianity Today, reported that the publication’s “flawed institutional response to harassment allegations could have been influenced, in part, by unconscious sexism,” and that some of the problem may have stemmed from older men “out of touch with current workplace mores.”

For his part, Galli, who retired from Christianity Today in 2019, sounded defensive in an interview with Religion News Service’s Bob Smietama, in which Galli claimed that the stories in Silliman’s report were “taken out of context” or “simply not true.” Galli left evangelicalism behind when he retired from Christianity Today, ironically converting to Catholicism, a denomination with its own history of abuse and denial. Olayowe, on the other hand, was fired by Christianity Today in 2017 after being arrested in a sting operation and pleading guilty to meeting a minor for sex. He did three years in prison and now lives as a registered sex offender.

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When we’re thinking about the idea of forgiveness, the Christianity Today story leads to two overlapping questions: who is really at fault here, and should they be expected to seek forgiveness?  In his editor’s letter that accompanied Silliman’s report, Timothy Dalrymple said the whole process had taken place out of a greater need for transparency. “We owe it to the women involved to say we believe their stories,” Dalrymple wrote, “and we are deeply sorry the ministry failed to create an environment in which they were treated with respect and dignity.” Dalrymple had just come on board as editor-in-chief when some of these accusations began to surface in 2019, and more women continued to come forward in subsequent years. All evidence seems to indicate a series of miscommunications and a problem with the institutional culture of the magazine and of evangelicalism, rather than responsibility residing with a single person. Dalrympe’s apology is straightforward and accompanied by promises for greater accountability. Time will tell how or if that manifests at Christianity Today, but evangelical notions of forgiveness may make maintaining that promised transparency a challenge.

In an interview with Slate’s Molly Olmstead after the report was released, Silliman talked about what forgiveness means for evangelicals like himself. From an evangelical perspective, Silliman says, “there is an idea that in any kind of personal conflict or disagreement or even harm, the ultimate aim for Christians should be the reconciliation of the two parties.” Silliman goes on to say that one of the accused men he reported on seems to believe that “a true Christian should not report stuff if it gets in the way of reconciliation.” Journalists who publish such reports, according to this logic, hamper possibilities for forgiveness and reconciliation.

(Image source: Christianity Today)

That pattern of blaming members of the media for spending too much time reporting on abuse and too little time focusing on stories of reconciliation is not new and not even a particularly evangelical pattern. Back in 2003, now-Archbishop Wilton Gregory, formerly the head of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, told reporters that while reporting on abuse was helpful in creating more accountability, “the way the story [of abuse] was so obsessively covered resulted in unnecessary damage to the bishops and the entire Catholic community.” Gregory neglected to consider that many of those reporters were themselves Catholics and perhaps invested in holding an institution they cared about accountable, much like Silliman.

But a reason reporters might not be focusing on stories of reconciliation between abuse victims and church-led institutions is simply because there are not many stories about reconciliation and forgiveness to tell. Over and over, institutions like the Catholic Church, Christianity Today, and universities big and small have apologized for covering up, hiding, and abetting abuse in many forms. Very rarely do abuse victims announce that they have forgiven the institution and are ready to move on. Perhaps that is because the institution has not earned and is not owed any forgiveness.

Christianity Today’s self-investigation was received with varying degrees of emotions on social media. Author Kathy Khang wrote “sadly, I’m not surprised.” Union Seminary professor Isaac Sharp also pointed to institutional failure as a root cause, saying evangelical culture has a “systemic sexual abuse problem that will continue virtually unchecked” while leaders fail to acknowledge “the reality of structural evils.” Pastor and writer Eric Atcheson called it a “huge red flag” that Christianity Today had reported on its own abuse cases, saying this wasn’t a case of transparency so much as an example of “zero meaningful external accountability.” And former Christianity Today managing editor Katelyn Beaty added that she had herself witnessed some of the abuse at the magazine, but as “a young woman in her first job,” she was unclear about what to do to stop it and instead hoped the men in charge – some of them later accused of abuse – would be the ones to do something. She added that while she hoped to see change, she was watching to see if current editors would “rise to the occasion or crouch in defensive protectionism.”

It also didn’t escape the eyes of many on social media that Christianity Today released this report right after it launched a hugely successful podcast called The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill, an investigation of the evangelical megachurch in Seattle led by Mark Driscoll. Driscoll, who was known to scream and swear during sermons, also had a habit of describing women as sexually submissive in graphic detail. But Mars Hill was so financially successful that people looked the other way until Driscoll irreparably upset his followers by plagiarizing extensive portions of his books.

According to some listeners, however, the podcast pointed fingers at everyone but Driscoll himself, reflecting that same institutional pattern of protecting the powerful. In Religion Dispatches, Jessica Johnson called this “gaslighting at the scale of population” and “a systemic problem for an insatiable evangelical industrial complex.” Mars Hill’s elders and congregation seemed to look the other way when Driscoll shouted abuse at people. But the public exposure of plagiarism, which risked the financial well-being of the church profiting from Driscoll’s book sales, was apparently a bridge too far. If Christianity Today were assessing its own issues of how it handled abuse at the same time it was producing an ethically troubling podcast about another case of abuse, can Christianity Today be trusted? Time will tell.

But institutions rarely follow best practices when they are accused of abuse. When these reports surface, transparency and accountability are paramount. But an apology and promise to do better are not enough to earn an institution forgiveness. Until these things are accompanied by some form of action, whether that’s public accountability, reparations, abusers stepping out of the public eye, or following the principles of restorative justice to prevent future harm, no institution or individual is owed forgiveness.

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When an abusive person’s name is drilled off a building, the shadow of the old name often remains visible even when a new one is mounted on top of it, gouges in the surface that never fully fade away. The same can be said about institutions with histories of abuse. Apologies may be offered, but the shadowy history is now visible to everyone, hiding in plain sight. And abuse being visible to everyone does not mean it deserves to be forgiven. It just means we are able to see it more clearly when it inevitably happens again.

Kaya Oakes is the author of five books, most recently including The Defiant Middle: How Women Claim Life’s In Betweens to Remake the World. She teaches writing at the University of California, Berkeley and writes the Revealer‘s column, “Not So Sorry.”

The post Christianity Today’s Sexual Misconduct Problem and the Complications with Forgiving Institutions appeared first on The Revealer.

(Image source/credit: Arickx Photography)

Pope Francis has never had much of a filter, which has sometimes showcased his sardonic humor, as when he referred to an anti-vaccination Cardinal on a ventilator with Covid as “the irony of life.” At other times, however, his off the cuff comments about women, queer people, and gender issues have felt insulting. In January of this year, while speaking to an audience at the Vatican, the pope referred to the recent global birthdate drop as a “demographic winter.”

But Pope Francis, who’s written and spoken powerfully about the dangers of climate change and the catastrophic capitalist exploitation of the poor, didn’t blame population decline on those issues or even on the pandemic, which has led many people to reconsider the idea of starting a family. Instead, he blamed people who have pets instead of children.

The pope then dug in further, saying the choice not to have children is “selfish,” and that it “takes away our humanity.” According to Pope Francis, when cats and dogs replace children, it’s a slippery slope toward a bleak Children of Men-style future, and it’s the happy couples adopting pets instead of raising kids who are to blame.

It’s no secret that I’m one of those people who doesn’t have children, and I have long bemoaned the attitude that people without children, and women in particular, are acting selfishly. A recent anthology of essays by childless women entitled Selfish, Shallow and Self-Absorbed illustrates the pervasiveness of this concept. The irony that the pope, who himself has chosen to forego having children, is finger-wagging people like me was not lost on social media, where queer couples, single men and women, and straight couples alike groused about his choice of words.

But, as it turns out, this isn’t the first time the pope has called childless people selfish. In a 2014 interview, he referred to people without children a “greedy generation” and a sign of a “depressed society,” and added that choosing not to have children is, you guessed it, selfish. People without children, according to the pope, will grow old and bitter from loneliness. Cats and dogs are easier to care for, he admitted, but the people who adopt them are rejecting the more complicated job of taking care of a child, all due to selfishness.

Again, ironic. And painful for many of us to hear. But some voices in Catholic media have urged us to reframe this conversation. In America magazine (full disclosure: I’m a contributing writer to America), editor-in-chief Father Matt Malone admitted that as an unmarried cleric he is an “imperfect messenger” on this topic, but argued that the pope is not talking about couples who can’t have children for biological issues or those who “lack the means to care for them properly.” The pope, he writes, was instead referring to financially comfortable couples who choose not to reproduce. These couples, according to Fr. Malone, are substituting a pet for a child. As a result, he argues, they are on a slippery slope toward thinking that adopting an animal is equal to raising a human child.

This is an interesting argument, but not a persuasive one. Although I know many people with pets, I have yet to meet a pet owner who seriously believes their dog or cat is, in any way, human. And yet, animals do express love and need care. Unlike people or the Catholic Church, pets don’t judge. When Saint Francis was discerning whether to retreat from the world or to keep preaching and his advisors encouraged him to keep preaching, his first sermon was delivered not to other people, but to a flock of birds. Today, “pet parent” is usually used in a joking way, but when a person (okay, this person is me) begins to project too much thinking or feeling onto their pet, they usually realize what’s happening and laugh it off. I’ve talked to my cats throughout the pandemic because I share my house with them, but I’ve never expected much in return except for warm feet when the cats cooperate by sitting on them.

I’m also cognizant of the fact that both Pope Francis and Fr. Malone are aware of the many reasons people cite for not having children, such as economic hardship, environmental danger, and political instability. But condemnations of childlessness coming from clergy also make it sound like not having children is sinful. Is it? And if so, is it something that needs to be forgiven?

Hamartiology, the branch of theology dedicated to the study of sin, is closely connected to ethics. And sin, loosely defined in a Christian context, is anything that goes against God’s will, or, in a secular sense, something that harms other people. But in both Christian and secular contexts, the person who chooses to have a child is rarely considered selfish, sinful, or bad, whereas the person who doesn’t is all of these things. Childless people are often accused of being self-obsessed and putting themselves first. But when a couple has a child to “save their marriage,” it is largely considered a reasonable decision even if that relationship is emotionally turbulent or even violent. In her book “Why Have Children?” philosopher Christine Overall points out that while a person who doesn’t have children is frequently interrogated about that decision, a pregnant person is rarely – if ever – asked why they got pregnant. “The choice to procreate,” she writes, “is not regarded as needing any thought or justification.”

But the choice to have children, Overall writes, is something we should think of as a moral and ethical choice rather than a simplistic matter of biology, that people should have kids because that’s what some bodies are made to do. When a child is born, according to Overall, “a new and vulnerable human being is brought into existence whose future may be at risk.” Oftentimes, people have children without thinking about the impact that child might have on the people around them, the economy, and the environment. This can also include not considering their own capacity to care for that child, or how they are contributing to overpopulation.

When Christians talk about having a child as a sinful act, they are usually referring to single parents having kids “out of wedlock.” The Catholic Church still teaches that giving birth outside of church-sanctioned, heterosexual marriage is sinful, but the culture has largely left that idea in the past. Times have changed since The Scarlet Letter, and most of us would agree today that single parents have not sinned and do not need to be forgiven. Sometimes God even makes bodies that can’t make babies, and there are plenty of childless people in the Bible, including that person named Jesus Christ. Does God think those people are selfish?

(Image credit: Remo Casillio for Reuters)

Amidst this debate we also have to acknowledge that the Catholic Church suffers from the problem of clericalism, where priests, bishops, cardinals and popes are seen as “special and superior to laypersons and their authority should be accepted without question,” according to psychiatrist Thomas Plante, who has written widely on sex abuse in the Catholic Church. Clericalism, Plante writes, leads to authoritarianism, narcissism, and a sense that the clergy are right while anyone who disagrees is wrong and must seek forgiveness. So clergy may not see their own childlessness as selfish because of their self-perceived specialness, but some of them will still cast aspersions on others who make the same choice. Clerical culture also leads celibate clergy to pretend they don’t have sexual impulses, which can contribute to “destructive coping strategies” (ahem, abuse crisis) and an unwillingness to ask for help because of a desire to maintain a facade of perfection.

But another fact about Catholic clergy is that they can be incredibly isolated and lonely. Members of many religious orders aren’t even allowed to have pets, and with the priest shortage in America, many priests live alone and have little to no sense of community. When they harangue others for not having children, we have to remember that they have also lost that possibility for themselves, sometimes even giving up the chance to have an animal companion. Could there perhaps be some jealousy involved, or some sense that because they gave up something for what they see as the greater good, anyone who doesn’t have children is selfish? From their perspective, childless couples are deliberately choosing the social, emotional and physical benefits of marriage without the burdens of child rearing.

I’m obviously not a Catholic priest (that pesky issue of being a woman!), but I do know a number of them fairly well and can see and hear what a difficult job they have, and how they’re not really encouraged to share their regrets about choosing vocation over family and losing out on the highs and lows of intimate partnership. I imagine the pope might feel that loss as well. He grew up in a large family home surrounded by siblings, and now lives alone in an apartment surrounded mostly by staff, not by friends and loved ones. I may not have children, but I can see whoever I want whenever I want, befriend people of every gender without worrying about it looking weird, babysit and take my nieces out to dinner, and generally go about my life with a greater degree of freedom than the pope or any priest in the Catholic church.

None of this means I’m selfish or sinful, and, in fact, much like a member of the clergy, my life overflows with responsibility for other people and occasions to take care of them. It’s just that those people aren’t my biological children. But we don’t go around calling priests selfish for choosing not to have kids, nor do we say these things about Jesus, who, as far as we know, never changed a diaper in his life. By persisting in this idea of childless couples as selfish, the pope reveals the overly narrow paths the church offers lay people: you can either commit to celibacy as a single person or you can get married, but you should only do the latter if you’re willing to procreate as much as humanly possible, because sex should always be potentially procreative. With this point of view, the pope demonstrates he’s much more conservative on issues of sex and relationships than he is on economics or the environment.

But to return to, and expand on, my original question: if people who are selfish need to be forgiven, does that mean that the pope, who chose not to have children, is also in need of forgiveness?

I don’t have a tidy answer to that question, but I do think that if the pope really believes that childless people are selfish and sinful and need forgiveness, he and every other member of the clergy should probably ask for forgiveness for the very same thing. Francis has often said that he too is a sinner, but has never really opened up about what it’s like to be an elderly man without children, nor have I ever heard a priest preach a sermon on this topic or even bring it up in conversation.

If the pope has regrets about not having children, ambivalent feelings about it, or is even happy he made that choice, opening up would be a radical act of solidarity that might make room for much more complex and enlightening conversations between those who have children and those who don’t, and enable us to develop language about the ethics of both of our choices, a language less focused on sin and forgiveness and more on mutual human struggle and compassion. Imagine hearing a priest preach about what it means to give up intimate relationships, or hearing bishops talk about the people under their care with the same compassion and understanding a parent ought to show their child. Maybe that kind of openness would mean we could even start to forgive one another for being so judgemental about a decision that is nobody’s business but our own. But that would also require the pope to understand that if he does not need forgiveness for not having children, neither does anyone else.

Kaya Oakes is the author of five books, most recently including The Defiant Middle: How Women Claim Life’s In Betweens to Remake the World. She teaches writing at the University of California, Berkeley.

The post The Pope, Pets, and Childless Couples appeared first on The Revealer.