c. 1999 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 _ America is as awash in fake sins as the art market is with fake Monets. As with the art work, you can tell them right away. What’s missing in faux sins is the same thing missing in forged art: the passion of the real artist and the real sinner.

Character, you see, matters as much in sin as it does in love. You can be neither lover nor sinner without it. That is why the president cannot get apologizing right and keeps practicing it every chance he gets. You can’t sound repentant unless you take sin _ and love _ seriously.

Contrition explodes from the depths of a real sinner’s heart shaking the crockery in the breakfront. Like every true human reaction, it is not self-conscious or studied. It is as direct and simple as the prayer in the parable,”Have mercy on me for I am a sinful man.” Real sin and great art rise from the depths rather than the shallows of human beings. When real, they express the person fully, for good or for ill. They reveal the unique ways in which artist, lover, or sinner views and values the world.

Love, art and real sin have existential throw-weight, that is, they are powerful enough to change other persons, again for better or for worse. Lover, artist and sinner are necessarily transformed by what they express, as are people around them, as, indeed, are the yet unborn by the lingering power of what is great in love, art and sin.

You must take creation and yourself seriously in order to affect the human order around you. Perhaps much of today’s alleged love, art and sin fails because their authors offer us what little they know of themselves rather than who they have grown into in life.

These presentations distort real moral issues and shift our attention to false ones. This is like escorting us through a gallery of forgeries. Not even an audio tour will make up for the lack of contact between us and the copied artist. It is like an arranged date with a con man. Manipulation is not the same as being in touch with someone else. No space for love’s magic there. And no space for real sin either.

That is why you may find yourself reacting in an off-key way to the re-writing of the Ten Commandments that is taking place on the national scene right now. You hesitate because you may be sensing the hollowness in efforts to make people feel guilty about matters that are not really sins and to feel no guilt at all about matters that are.

Smoking, for example, is a sin, almost the unforgivable sin at present in American life. That is what the president tells us. Add also the excess violence in movies and in video games and keeping those under 17 from having access to these venues.

But what complex sins these turn out to be. Can anybody with a straight face say that depicted violence is a moral evil against the background of a merciless air war that has devastated the lives and hopes of real people beyond any counting of them? Is one a moral issue and the other not?

Smoking as first sin is also complicated. People are still allowed, indeed, encouraged, to commit the sin of smoking in order to pay for the campaigns to stamp it out.

The gravest of weightless themes in modern America is the idea that, no matter what the incident,”We Are All Guilty,”as USA TODAY summed up the White House Conference that followed the Littleton school shootings. Of what? Where? When? What did we do?

Sensible people know that we are not all guilty, that this is just another moral forgery posing as purposeful insight. And in these days healthy people must trust their own good sense in separating real sin from the surreal spin served up to us every day.

DEA END KENNEDY