Sunday, August 16, 1998

The last thing we need is another public confession

By EUGENE KENNEDY

Religion News Service

The last thing America needs is another public confession, even if -- perhaps especially if -- it comes from the president of the United States.

Actually, we are suffering from an oversupply of public confessions. Having triumphed over a sense of shame -- or perhaps never having grown up enough to acquire one -- Americans love to confess their most bizarre activities as publicly as possible.

I do not use the word sins because few, if any, of these bizarre activities are sins. They are the badges and banners of immaturity rather than grave adult moral choices.

Sin is a serious matter. You must be a grown-up, fully aware of a contemplated act, its capacity to injure the self and others, as well as its consequences. Then maybe -- if no emotional factors nullify it -- you can sin.

That kind of sin does occur every day, of course, but those who commit them are not interested in publicly confessing them.

They want to deny, hide or disguise them.

At least they have a sense of sin, the very thing that has been drained like lifeblood out of therapy-minded America. That is why public confession lacks moral authority. It is now an empty formula in which the person says, "I accept responsibility," a phrase that falls far short of "I accept the blame."

Americans who confess in public admit to gross behavior rather than mortal sins. They belong in "Animal House" rather than in a Graham Greene novel about the demands of a real conscience. In all the current discussion, have you heard anybody use the word conscience?

Daytime talk shows depend on, and are overwhelmed by, volunteers eager to tell their tawdry but largely unsinful tales.

Soon you may receive e-mail and fax confessions from perfect strangers. Hallmark will start printing Confession Cards with a nice verse -- "I thought my goal in life was just to be thin/I'm fat but happy now that I know how to sin" -- so that all the guilty person need do is sign and send it.

Confession Day may join the roster of our celebrations, something like Arbor Day with a graphic of Jesus cursing the fig tree.

So the last thing we need is a president of the United States making a public confession. However, advice is pouring in to President Clinton about what and how to confess. Authentic self-examination and confession cannot be spun or fabricated for us.

As solemn and singular as coming into this world and leaving it, we are on our own to admit our moral failures. See how simply it is described in the Bible: The man who says from his heart, "Have mercy on me for I am a sinful man."

The most sacramental TV moment of the decade occurred in November 1993, when the late Cardinal Joseph Bernardin of Chicago called a news conference to answer the charges he had sexually molested a seminarian when he had been archbishop of Cincinnati.

He rejected the advice of public relations counselors and legal advisers on how to "handle" the questions. He told me, 10 minutes before the conference started, "I believe that the truth will make me free. And I am going to tell the truth."

A few minutes later he stood before 70 Chicago reporters as accustomed to public lying as the coroner is to public death. Character counted as, within a few moments, it was clear to them the cardinal was telling the truth, that his goodness was transparent, and that, by the end of the session, the truth had made him free. As it did when the jerry-built case against him collapsed.

The truth has a tone of its own and ordinary people recognize it immediately. It needs no spin, no complicated strategies, no Jimmy Swaggert crocodile tears.

If Clinton is looking for a model, it won't be one forged by the advertising/public relations complex. He will find it in the saintly Cardinal Bernardin who lived the truth that ultimately freed him.

Of course, Bernardin had a big advantage. He was innocent in the first place. (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.)