The Politics of Penance

Proposing an Ethic for Social Repair

Griffin

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781498204255
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

"Bless me Father, for I have sinned," says the penitent to open the dialogue in Catholic confessionals across the globe and throughout the ages. Along with the priest's words, "For your penance..." this encounter is an icon of Catholic life. But does the script, and the practices it signifies, have any relevance beyond the confessional?In The Politics of Penance, Michael Griffin responds yes. He explores great figures of the Christian tradition--the early Irish monks, St. Thomas Aquinas, and Pope St. John Paul II--to offer surprising insights for social repair. The result is a new ethic, which Griffin applies to contemporary crises in criminal justice, truth and reconciliation, and the treatment of soldiers returning from war.

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Introducing the Politics of Penance

“Bless me Father, for I have sinned,” says the penitent to open the dialogue in Catholic confessionals across the globe and throughout the ages. After the disclosure of sins and just before the bestowal of absolution comes the priest’s response, “For your penance, . . .” These lines have become iconic, providing a window into a unique element of Catholic life. But does this script, and the practices it signifies, have any relevance beyond the confessional? More specifically, does the structured imposition of a penance in the context of reconciliation work only in a church setting, or does it point to ways in which political communities can deal with acts of injustice? Exploring this question does not imply that the practice of penance within the church always works well. Too often the practice has become spiritualized—“For your penance, say three Hail Marys”—without tending also to making amends concretely. And for many Catholics, even the word penance suggests a sense of guilt-inducing confessionals and the root cause of a mass exodus from the sacrament. But, while I am interested in how penance can re-emerge in a contemporary revival of Confession, my focus in this book is different. I want to examine the nature of penitential action itself and explore what role it can play in solutions to social challenges ranging from crime and punishment to war and reconciliation.

The specific question I seek to answer is this: can political tasks of social repair benefit from insights on the nature of penance? An affirmative answer to this question is by no means obvious. Ethics that emphasize penance are not the first place political leaders turn in seeking tools after the rupture of communal life. Institutions like courts and prisons are the primary delegates in the pursuit of justice and reparation—if reparation is even an agreed-upon goal. A topic like penance seems, at best, a nonthreatening sideshow to this official work, perhaps complementary but certainly not a constitutive part of the justice being sought. In this way, the centrality of penance to the political tasks of social repair is not currently clear. And I am well aware that the Christian tradition itself offers not a single but multiple, and often competing, understandings of penance. My task is to mine this broad tradition in the construction of a single coherent concept of penance that can then be applied to public tasks of social repair. If I succeed, the result will be what I call a penitential ethic. By making this my constructive proposal, I will not be attempting to migrate this or that historical model of ecclesial practice into politics. Rather, I will glean key principles of the penitential tradition that can appeal even to a secular construal of justice, and then I will suggest how they fill gaps in the practices of social reparation today.

To begin, I offer my first and most important definition. By penance, I mean practices through which persons lament, take responsibility for, and seek to repair the wounds that are caused by sin. I will continue to develop this and other definitions throughout the book, but given the centrality of penance to my project, I will now highlight the three key elements of its practice:

Lament, by which victims and/or perpetrators express the pain and sorrow resulting from the moral and material harm done. The community also displays a capacity for lament when it engages in self-critical dialogue and encourages individuals and institutions to consider ways we contribute to injustice.

Responsibility, which includes punishment and other measures of moral accountability for wrongdoing. Penance, in fact, has been construed in Christian tradition as a kind of restorative punishment for sin. While many see reconciliation and punishment as rivals, I see them as complementary—if rightly understood.

Reparation, which seeks both restitution and, when possible, the more expansive goal of restoring right relationship in the wake of injustice. Key here will be the concept, drawn from Christian tradition, of satisfaction: working to make whole what has been broken. Satisfaction is seen climactically in the work of Jesus Christ.

In important ways these three practices are sequential. That is, they establish the ideal movements by which penance becomes social repair. However, I do not want to over-script the process, and I will need to develop the interrelated dynamics of these elements. I also will need to address how insights from theologically laden practices and principles of penance can help meet challenges that arise, ostensibly, from political contexts. In this way, my use of the term ethic is designed for easier migration from theology to politics, but I still need to justify its relevance for pluralistic settings. I will do so by digging to the natural roots of penitential practices in order to unearth basic strategies for the social repair of human communities. The three main principles guiding these strategies are the following:

Individual moral agency, which preserves personal responsibility in the wake of wrongdoing and involves its direct actors in the work of repair. This principle is at the heart of restitution and establishes for perpetrators a set of expectations tied closely to the needs of victims.

Communal solidarity, which widens the scope of who participates in lamenting, taking responsibility for, and seeking to repair social wounds. Solidarity does not substitute for individual action but rather establishes a culture of participation in which multiple layers of reparation can be developed.

A horizon of hope, which generates fresh motivation to construct a new social reality. Without this hope, reparation is a backward-looking and dreary burden. Yet when construed and constructed in the context of hope, social repair offers to those involved in wrongdoing the possibility of being inscribed into a new world.

As I develop the practices and principles of penance, I will use concrete examples to show their relevance and capacity to promote social repair. Specifically, I will apply the penitential ethic to the following three cases:

Criminal Justice, specifically the ongoing dilemma of mass incarceration in the United States. This crisis has transformed penitentiaries into ineffective models of rehabilitation and centers of institutionalized violence that are stretching the budgetary and moral limits of society.

Truth and Reconciliation, specifically in the wake of political violence. I will focus on Peru, where the failure of reparations for victims has left society fractured. Yet these conclusions are relevant in many post-conflict settings where those with political power refuse to lament, take responsibility for, and repair wounds.

The Return from War, specifically the crisis of U.S. soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. These veterans have a frightening suicide rate, which is contrasted by much functional indifference in the rest of society. While focus is given to treatment for PTSD, many soldiers are also suggesting a moral, even penitential, dimension to their recovery.

Connecting the practices and principles of penance to these cases yields the following schematic to conceptualize my project:

While the case for the penitential ethic will rise or fall with the power of these concepts to respond to political challenges, the most captivating dimension of the project comes through the illustrative embodiment of penance by my main sources. Thus I offer a chapter to each of these exemplars. I begin with the Irish monks of the fifth through ninth centuries, who developed a robust system of penances that were interpersonal, involving perpetrators in the process of seeing and undoing the damage of their sins. Making use of indigenous Celtic tradition as well as early Christian theology, the monasteries of Ireland became sites of reconciliation that injected socially reparative penance into violence-riven communities.

After a brief treatment of penitential theology after the monks, I turn to St. Thomas Aquinas. In the thirteenth century, Aquinas challenged conventional wisdom and insisted on a critical difference between restitution and penance. The latter, which he saw as perfecting the former, enables the penitent to participate in the graced performance of Christ’s redemption of the world. This approach is connected to the aforementioned horizon of hope, in which penance can be a gift that does not so much return communities to a prior situation as it does generate creative directions by which they can build something new.

Following another treatment of historical context, we meet Pope John Paul II, the saint who during the Jubilee Year 2000 captured global attention through public gestures of repentance for the sins of Catholics throughout history. Not without opposition, the pope’s strategy yielded a cascade of efforts—secular and ecclesial—for reconciliation and justice. In describing this program of collective penance, I will note the ways it was not employed by American bishops in the wake of the sexual abuse crisis. This specific failure, in fact, demonstrates why the penitential ethic is a needed and promising resource for the task of social repair. And it is to this task that I turn in my final chapters, in which I apply the ethic to the three case studies, demonstrating its contemporary value.

The practical aim of this book is to show that the penitential ethic I offer is not only a model but also a tool for analysis. That is, when practitioners are constructing or evaluating a specific initiative to address damages resulting from injustice, they can ask, does it promote individual moral agency and personal responsibility? Is there a communal dimension that allows for broad participation in social repair? Does it motivate fresh movement toward a new real...

Table of contents

• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1: Introducing the Politics of Penance
• Chapter 2: Here Come the Irish: Monks and Social Penance
• Chapter 3: A Summa for the Americas: Thomas Aquinas and Reparation
• Chapter 4: The Penitential Pope: John Paul II and the Jubilee
• Chapter 5: Applying the Politics of Penance: Criminal Justice Reform
• Chapter 6: Applying the Politics of Penance: Truth and Reconciliation
• Chapter 7: Applying the Politics of Penance: Soldiers Returning from War
• Bibliography