c. 1998 Religion News Service
(Eugene Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author most recently of”My Brother Joseph,”published by St. Martin Press.)
UNDATED _ Whatever else may be said, the president reflects the moral point-of-no-return at which America now uneasily finds itself.
We have forgotten how to sin in any robust and identifiable way. Listen to the president; he’ll tell you. And tell you again.
Hand in hand with that, we have forgotten how to be virtuous. We haven’t so much lost as we have misplaced our sense of good and evil.
William Bennett asks,”Where is the outrage?”Outrage is beyond the range of the morally numb. It requires an acquaintance with evil, maybe burn marks to prove it, a sense that we contain the awesome moral power to hurt others, to violate their trust, for example, because we understand that there is no neutral corner in human relationships.
No climate sustains an environment in which”nobody will be hurt.”In real life, somebody is always being hurt.
What is a sin worth if it does not flow from some great passion or some noble cause? Lacking these sources, it also lacks even the possibility of investment with true humanity or the risk that defines a sin.
The problem is that if you can’t sin, you can’t go to hell.
And if you cannot be virtuous, you cannot go to heaven either.
And that is where, morally and spiritually, we find ourselves.
If you wondered what Limbo is, that vague place theologians once dreamed up as an address for unbaptized infants, look around bland America. No sinners, and no saints, nothing felt deeply enough to call for instant replay about anything we have done.
The president’s relationship with Ms. Lewinsky was passionless. His apologies have been sinless.
That is why they have been ineffective. At the root, he refuses to connect them to any human activity, to any mature moral agency inside himself. We would be glad to forgive but we can only absolve sinners who admit that they are sinners.
President Clinton can, simply and directly, speak in terms of right and wrong about himself. He would thereby restore the vocabulary of sin to us and we might learn to speak it again.
Clinton would thereby slay the Advertising/Public Relations dragon, the smoke from whose nostrils, thicker than that of battle, has obscured our vision of morality for such a long time.
Spin would also be slain. It only thrives where the people have first been rendered morally indifferent, ready for spells to be cast on themselves, ready, in other words, for primitive magic as a substitute for moral awareness.
We cannot survive as human beings if we think that we have no effects, either for good or for ill, on each other. Life’s lack of meaning would overwhelm and extinguish us were we unable to affect the lives of others by loving or failing to love them.
Were the president able to heal his forked tongue and speak with a true voice about sin, Billy Graham could cancel his next crusade and Pope John Paul II his next overseas field Mass.
The reason so many legislators prompt him to admit wrong in a truthful way has little really to do with him except symbolically.
They long, as do we all, for somebody to restore the morality to our moral discourse. And, in the same moment, to give back to us what we sorely miss _ our sense of sin and our capacity for virtue. The president’s defining work is simply to speak the truth that will make him, and all of us, free.
DEA END KENNEDY
