This blog began in June 2007. Like everything in life it has changed over the years, maybe even grown up and today looks at reality through different lenses that it did back in 2007.
At the side of the blog the following appears:
Readership
This blog is read around the world, on all five continents.
The blog was launched in June 2007.
Channel 4 News last evening carried a special report on Conor McGregor.
One of his supporters said that she had no confidence or trust in politicians. The journalist asked her did she know her local politicians; no, she did not know who they were, know their names or anything about their politics.
Mr McGregor was not available for comment.
I’m not a communist but Karl Marx’s words have always held a special place for me: ‘Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains!’
Three interesting dates:
On this day, July 1, 1990 The German Democratic Republic accepts the Deutsche Mark as its currency; later that year on October 3, German reunification was completed.
The following year, July 1, 1991 the Warsaw Pact was dissolved at a signing ceremony in the Polish capital.
Closer to home: on July 1, 1999 the Scottish Parliament was officially opened by Queen Elizabeth II.
One result of the US bombing in Iran is to unite the Iranian people.
There is an excellent history of the Iran Israel conflict in the Weekend section of Saturday edition of The Irish Times.
The piece is written by Dr Vincent Duran, who lectures in Middle East politics in the UCD school of politics and international relations.
How the West has created such chaos and turmoil in the region, and all to do with power, control and money.
 |
| Wrong tánaiste and misspelt |
Might it be that the real tánaiste knows a sub editor in the news desk who’s working on his campaign?
Note the newspaper’s misspelling of the word tánaiste. This from the paper of record.
It’s also worth noting how poor the newspaper’s digital customer service system is.
And all from the paper of record.
Justine McCarthy in The Irish Times yesterday. The writer of this blog may not agree with all of what she says but it is an interesting piece and well worth a read.
If women ruled the world, there would be no wars. True or false? False, if all the women were Ursula von der Leyen. Because a hawk in sheep’s clothing is still a hawk.
The president of the European Commission was the most petite participant at the G7 summit in Canada last week but she landed with the force of a grenade packed with testosterone. “I spoke to prime minister Netanyahu today,” she announced after Israel had bombed Iran in an unprovoked attack. “I reiterated Europe’s commitment to peace and stability in the Middle East. In this context, Israel has the right to defend itself.”
That same day, Israeli air strikes and gunfire killed dozens of starving Gazans, including at least 17 people seeking food from the grotesquely named Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, the honeypot for daily massacres of visibly emaciated civilians by the Israel Defense Forces.
What the f***, in the parlance of the president of the United States of America, is the European Union’s chief executive doing, phoning a fugitive from the International Criminal Court to egg him on with his killing crusades? Who gave her the authority to adopt the G7 statement of “support for the security of Israel”, a statement which, by the way, three permanent members of the UN Security Council also signed up to. “Iran is the principal source of regional instability and terror,” they claimed.
Talk about the pot calling the kettle black. Ireland, one of the 27 countries that employ von der Leyen, is currently unhitching its neutrality policy from the UN mandate because the Security Council has persistently obstructed peace initiatives. Ireland is also proposing to outlaw trade with illegal Israeli settlements, something the EU has failed to do despite an explicit requirement by the International Court of Justice that UN countries must not support the settlements in the Occupied Territories.
This is not the first time von der Leyen has given the EU’s blessing to Binyamin Netanyahu’s massacring of innocents. The day after Hamas’s murderous incursion into Israel in October 2023 left 1,195 people dead and nearly 250 abducted, she ordered that the Israeli flag be projected on to the commission’s head office in Brussels. Then, as the Israeli government announced it was stopping supplies of food, water and electricity to Gaza, she flew to Tel Aviv to assure Netanyahu he could “count on” the EU’s support in waging war on Gaza. Josep Borrell, the bloc’s high representative for foreign affairs at the time, clarified that she was not entitled to decide EU foreign policy. As a German citizen, von der Leyen may be well motivated by her country’s history to ensure the protection of Jewish people, but it does not justify siding with a genocidal regime.
Spain and Ireland’s request in February 2024 for an urgent review of the EU-Israel trade agreement does not appear to gone anywhere significant.
The woman who was Germany’s minister for defence for six years and was tipped to lead Nato before her appointment as president for a second term seems coated in Teflon-strength immunity. Nothing sticks. Even when the UN Special Rapporteur on Palestine, Francesca Albanese, accused her of complicity in Israel’s war crimes, EU leaders failed to censure her. If they need evidence, here are some facts to start with:
Israel has slaughtered more than 56,000 people in Gaza since October 2023;
Israel has attacked Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Qatar and Iran this year;
Israeli soldiers and settlers killed 938 Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem between October 7th, 2023 and the end of last month;
Israel is the only country in the Middle East with nuclear weapons;
Israel has fired in the direction of Unifil soldiers, including Irish – ergo EU – peacekeepers in Lebanon;
Israel has fired in the direction of EU officials and diplomats in the West Bank.
Mark Twain described an uneasy conscience as “a hair in the mouth”. In her acceptance speech when she was conferred with an honorary doctorate by Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in 2022, von der Leyen said the Holocaust was “an indelible stain” on her country’s conscience and it must never be forgotten. No rational person would argue otherwise. The Nazis’ systematic extermination of Jews in Europe spread its stain beyond Germany’s borders and the world must be forever vigilant in countering anti-Semitism, but not at the price of Islamophobia. The hair in the mouth turns the heart to stone when a guilty conscience can condone thousands upon thousands of children being strafed with gunfire, blown apart by air strikes, starved to death and dying of thirst.
A new EU report has stated there is evidence that Israel has violated human rights conditions agreed in its trade deal with Europe. News so stale it is an affront to the people of Gaza. About 26,000 more have been killed there in the 16 months since von der Leyen dismissed the request from Dublin and Madrid. This week, the EU’s foreign ministers decided to postpone any decision about the trade deal until they next meet on July 15th, by which time – judging by the current daily death toll – hundreds more people will have perished. Surely Fianna Fáil MEPs who voted against von der Leyen’s reappointment as president last year are kicking up a stink with their Fine Gael government partners who are in the same EU alliance as her and who backed her nomination. It is noteworthy that more than 90 per cent of the alliance’s party leaders are men.
The creation of an EU army is central to von der Leyen’s vision for Europe. Heaven forbid that it should happen on her watch. For she is living proof of the foolishness of the hypothesis that there would be no wars if women ruled the world. See also Margaret Thatcher, darling of the Tory fraternity, who sentenced 320 people to death on board the Belgrano.
As long as the patriarchy keeps choosing the women, the world will not be in safer hands. The question that will always need to be asked is which women?
It’s a year ago today since that car crash debate between President Joe Biden and Donald Trump, where Biden had his senior moment. Shame on him and the Democrat Party for attempting to hold on to power, whatever the cost.
On Wednesday the Democrats chose Zohran Mamdani as their candidate for the upcoming mayoral race in New York. He’s a charismatic candidate of the left. The Trump team are already attacking him.
Hope springs eternal.
Watching Nato Secretary General Mark Rutte joking with US President Donald Trump over his use of bad language was stomach-turning.
Is this really where we are?
Every day Trump is proving to the world that might is right. And people are doffing their hats to this man.
To think that the US president is supported by many Catholic bishops is difficult to grasp.
If a pupil/student used the f-word in school it would be rightly be considered an disciplinary issue, the US president uses it and the Nato secretary general makes a joke of his using it; pathetic behaviour by a sycophant. So much for Nato.
This week’s column in The Kerryman newspaper.
Michael CommaneIt’s my third week in a new job in Dublin. From door to door it’s a nine-kilometre journey across the city.
In good weather I cycle, when it’s raining public transport. I’m accustomed to cycling in urban and rural terrain but it is a number of years now since I have commuted through Dublin rush-hour traffic.
It’s a fabulous sensation to be back out there with the travelling public heading to and from work, indeed, there’s a sense of camaraderie about it. I often find myself knocking at the cab window of a bus and chatting with the driver; I tell them I’m a bit of a bus nerd, so regularly we talk about the new electric or hybrid buses.
I’m told that since Dublin Bus installed cameras on its fleet the number of insurance claims has plummeted.
Cycling through Dublin early on a Sunday morning has been a mind-blowing experience; the amount of litter on the streets is beyond belief; the filth and dirt strewn across the streets and footpaths is honestly astonishing. And all this has been done by people out ‘enjoying’ themselves the previous night.
Every Sunday morning council workers are on the streets cleaning it all up. I make it my business to say hello and thank them for the job of work they are doing. Sometimes we get chatting; on Sunday on Camden Street, which was in a filthy state, the council workman said: ‘I can assure you it’s just as bad over on Leeson Street, the posh side of the city’. I thanked him for his job of work as I pedalled off; he gave me a big smile and was appreciative of my gesture.
When it comes to road and footpath safety it is honestly jungle warfare. It is almost impossible to describe how bad things have got since the last time I was cycling in rush-hour traffic in Dublin. Cyclists, pedestrians, motorists, all have their fair share of clowns on the roads. Where are the traffic police who are meant to be policing our roads?
I cannot understand how there are not more serious accidents on our roads every day. It is mind-boggling the number of cyclists who break traffic lights.
I’ve heard and seen jay-walking but every day now I am observing the phenomenon of jay-cycling. Pedestrians crossing the road engrossed on their phones and if you say a word to them you get a stream of foul language thrown at you.
I’ve learned how dangerous it is to say a word to misbehaving motorist. I’ve seen road rage first hand.
Top of the list of road abusers have to be Deliveroo, Uber, Just Eat and all the others fast food deliverers. Their behaviour must be stopped. The companies for whom they work need to be held to account for what’s happening on our streets.
And then the electric bicycles that travel at speeds well in excess of the legal 25km/h; why are the gardaí allowing all this to happen? And please, don’t mention the electric scooters.
Do we have to wait for some cataclysmic disaster and a multi- million euro inquiry before something is done. We deserve better than this.
Full marks to our bus drivers for the extraordinary work they do.
Below is a link to German Chancellor Friedrich Merz's address to the German Parliament this afternoon.
It is a powerful speech in which he promises to make the Bundeswehr (German Army) the strongest conventional army in Europe. He has strong words to say on Russian President Vladimir Putin, stressing that the only language he understands is one of brutal force.
The link is in German, it’s possible to turn on the subtitles and no doubt, someway or other it’s possible to hear the speech in translation.
https://www.youtube.com/live/ohAOsD6J34A?feature=shared
On this day 80 years ago, June 24, 1945 the Soviet Union celebrated its victory over Germany with a victory parade in Moscow.
Yesterday the Iranian foreign minister visited Moscow to discuss the US bombing in Iran. Vladimir Putin has promised to offer assistance to Iran.
Why can’t world leaders listen to their people and to history?
From the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops:
Hours after the United States bombed the sites of three nuclear-enrichment facilities in Iran, Pope Leo XIV called the situation in the Middle East "alarming" and said diplomacy was the only responsible way forward.
"Every member of the international community has a moral responsibility: Stop the tragedy of war before it becomes an irreparable abyss," the pope said June 22 after reciting the Angelus prayer with thousands of people in St. Peter's Square.
In Washington late June 21, President Donald Trump announced that "the U.S. military carried out massive precision strikes on the three key nuclear facilities in the Iranian regime: Fordo, Natanz and Isfahan."
"Our objective," Trump said, "was the destruction of Iran's nuclear enrichment capacity and a stop to the nuclear threat posed by the world's number one state sponsor of terror."
"Tonight I can report to the world that the strikes were a spectacular military success," Trump said, adding that the facilities had been "completely and totally obliterated." The U.S. president also threatened that if Iran did not "make peace" then "future attacks would be far greater and a lot easier."
The U.S. bombings came 10 days after Israel began carrying out attacks on Iran's nuclear facilities and its military infrastructure, leading Iran to retaliate by firing missiles at Israel. Officials have reported that the strikes have killed at least 400 people in Iran and 24 people in Israel.
Addressing the crowds in St. Peter's Square, Pope Leo said people all over the world were praying and crying for peace.
"It is a cry that calls for responsibility and reason and must not be drowned out by the din of weapons," Pope Leo said. "There is no faraway conflict when human dignity is at stake."
In addition, the pope said, with the "dramatic scenario" of the bombing of Iran, "the daily suffering of people, especially in Gaza and other territories, risks falling into oblivion" as the attention of the world turns elsewhere.
"War does not solve problems, but rather it amplifies them and produces deep wounds in the history of people that take generations to heal," he said. "No armed victory can compensate for the pain of mothers, the fear of children, the stolen future."
"Let diplomacy silence the weapons," Pope Leo said. "Let nations chart their future with works of peace, not with violence and bloody conflicts!"
“Despite being obsessed with money, Donald Trump doesn’t really understand it”
-David McWilliams in The Irish Times yesterday.
The same old story over and over again. What was it in 2003? Remember Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and what a clever name the US and Britain gave them; they’d frighten any sensible person. But of course there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, oddly enough they happen to be in the hands of others, including the US and UK.
But for the illegal and immoral behaviour of the British and the United States in the 1950s it is most likely that Iran would now have a stable democratic government. The UK and US made sure that the oil would not be nationalised by an incoming democratic government.
And now the US and the UK try to convince the world they are the guardians of moral propriety.
Canadian academic Yoshua Bengio, one of the godfathers of artificial intelligence, has attacked the multi-billion race to develop the technology, saying the latest models are displaying dangerous characteristics, such as lying to others.
It’s often said that the Holy See/Vatican has the best secret service in the world; it has a network of priests who span the world.
Yesterday the German government appointed Bruno Kohl, the current head of the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) the German Federal Intelligence Service, as its next ambassador to the Holy See.
Kahl is a lawyer by trade; he also studied journalism at the Catholic Journalism school in Munich.
Difficult not to spot the irony in the appointment.
This week’s column in The Kerryman newspaper.
Michael Commane
Regular readers of this column may remember I wrote some weeks back about my travails with Lidl; the issue is now solved. I received a gift card for €30, which means they gave me an extra €10 on top of the price of the new hiking boots. Originally when I exchanged them I was told my bank account would be credited. That did not happen.
But really it is a case of one step forward, two steps back.
More trouble and annoyance; this time with my AA membership and with The Irish Times. Again, I found myself wasting valuable time and getting annoyed and frustrated. I find it hilarious when a recorded voice assures you that one of their agents will be with you shortly when you know there are only two or three agents at the call centre.
And then we are being told that modern technology is making everything work so seamlessly, humbug.
Some time back I spotted my AA monthly sub had jumped from €26.97 to €40.09. I phoned and what a wait I had before I was ‘privileged’ to speak with a human voice.
I explained that I was shocked to see how my sub had jumped by 33 per cent. I told the agent I was closing my membership account. She asked me had I read the email they had sent me. No I hadn’t, as they bombard me with emails. She asked me to hold while she’d make some enquiries; more waiting time on the phone. She returns to tell me that they would bring my monthly sub back to the old price of €26.97.
Imagine, had I not been vigilant in checking my bank statement I would have been left paying the higher price. And to think by one phone call the AA was willing to reduce my monthly sub by 33 per cent; that is outlandish. It means an annual saving for me of €157.44.
Talking to a friend on Saturday she told me her monthly bill with Virgin Media is €140. That’s for her television, landline and broadband. The woman is not great for checking details on her accounts. Obviously she is paying for services of which she is not availing.
The following day I discovered my access to the online version of The Irish Times had been closed.
The Saturday newspaper was delivered to my door but it seems the digital edition is not available to me; that means more phone calls, more waiting to speak to a human voice.
There is urgent need for an up-to-speed, smart regulatory agency that ensures people are being properly and clearly informed how much they are paying for the services they require.
My friend with Virgin Media may well have an extra tv socket somewhere in the house, for which she is paying, but is not even aware that it is there.
With the disappearance of paper bills it is so tempting not to log on and check for what exactly we are paying. Are companies aware of this phenomenon and take advantage of it?
Far too many people are intimidated by the antics of multi nationals and large companies.
Just think what’s in store for us when AI is up and running.
The word indulgence has been mentioned many times during this Holy Year. The bishops have sent out letters to various bodies, including chaplains in schools, hospitals and prisons. Many people when they first see the word indulgence are left wondering; this article by Vivian Boland, which appears in Conversations, might help those of us who are not familiar or maybe at sea about what exactly an indulgence is.
In this Holy Year there are many references to ‘the indulgence’ but few explanations on what it actually is. The Catechism of the Catholic Church (n.1471) says that an indulgence is ‘a remission before God of the temporal punishment due to sins whose guilt has already been forgiven’. This raises more questions than it answers. Pope Francis spoke of the indulgence in his letter announcing the Holy Year (Spes non confundit, n.23) but he glides quickly over it, says a couple of important things, but does not enter into the question of what exactly it is.
Inevitable misunderstanding?
Any mention of indulgences immediately brings to mind that their abuse contributed significantly to Luther’s protest and the Protestant Reforma- tion. The Fourth Lateran Council (1215) had already tried to act against abuse of them while the Council of Trent (in 1563), acknowledging the critique, sought again to eliminate abuses.
Even where they were not abused, indulgences were frequently misun- derstood, leading to strange notions such as the remission of ‘time in purgatory’. People often regarded this as happening automatically as long as one recited certain prayers, engaged in various devotional practices or even made donations to good causes. It seemed to lend itself all too easily to a superstitious, and even magical, understanding of how sacred power is attached to times, places and objects.
But abusus non tollit usum, the abuse of something is not sufficient reason to eliminate its practice where it is otherwise a good, helpful and perhaps necessary thing. If it is clear that the practice of indulgences is an essential part of the Church’s ministry of reconciliation and mercy, then what is needed is proper understanding and morally correct practice.
At the Second Vatican Council it was clear that further theological reflection was necessary and Pope Paul VI sought to do his in his 1967 letterIndulgentiarum doctrina which is the most recent magisterial statement about indulgences. That letter substantially informs the Catechism of the Catholic Church in its presentation of indulgences (nn. 1471-1479), seven of the 10 footnotes to those paragraphs being citations of Paul’s letter. In seeking to head off abuse and misunderstanding, Pope Paul also sought to present those aspects of Christian teaching which the Church believes led to the practice of indulgences and continue to be served by that practice.
Punishment?
Another difficulty that arises immediately comes from the definition of an indulgence as ‘remission of the temporal punishment due to sin’. To speak of God punishing people for their sins generates images of God that are childish at best, blasphemous at worst. Pope Francis is quick to point out that when we speak of punishment for our sins we are not to think of God punishing us. The Catechism of the Catholic Church is equally swift in addressing this concern: ‘punishment [for our sins] must not be conceived of as a kind of vengeance inflicted by God from without, but as following from the very nature of sin’ (n. 1472). Just as virtue is its own reward, sin is its own punishment. The punishment is implicit in the sins themselves, and is part of what sin is rather than anything added later. St Gregory of Nyssa, writing in the fourth century, already saw this:
... even if one says that painful retribution comes directly from God upon those who abuse their free will, it would only be reasonable to note that such sufferings have their origin and cause in ourselves (Life of Moses II, n.87).
Two kinds of punishment follow on sin. One is eternal because sin is an offence against God who is infinite and eternal. But God’s mercy is also infinite and eternal and such punishment, paradoxical as it might seem, is easily remitted through the grace of contrition and absolution received in the sacrament of Penance.
The other kind of punishment is temporal: this is more difficult to understand and it is the one with which indulgences are concerned. It refers to sufferings of various kinds, following on from our sins or other- wise related to them, and happening within the context of our world and its history, affecting our physical nature, relationships, community situa- tions, and particularly our spiritual condition, all that we call ‘suffering’.
Who can deny that the world is full of suffering? Or that many wicked things are done every day? In some cases we easily see a link between sin and suffering whereas in other situations it is impossible to see any direct link. There are texts in the Bible which grapple with the problem of ‘innocent suffering’, i.e., a suffering which comes on people who are totally undeserving of it. Job’s friends offered him a simplistic mathematical solu- tion: ‘the amount of your sufferings is in proportion to the extent to which you have sinned’. This remains a powerful instinct in people: a cousin dying at a young age said to me ‘I must have done something terrible to have ended up like this.’
But a Christian understanding of human suffering will regard it always in the light of Christ’s sufferings and this radically subverts any easy connection between sin and suffering. We believe him to be the sinless human being whose sacrifice saves the world from its sins by making expi- ation for them (Rom 3.25; 1 Cor 5.7; Heb 2.17, 27; 9.26; 10.12; 1 John 2.2 and 4.10). Christians are called to follow Christ by aligning their sufferings with his. Taking up our cross, we can ‘make up what is lacking in Christ’s suffer- ings’, St Paul says (Col 1.24), and so collaborate with Christ in the work of salvation (Rom 12.1; Eph 5.2; 2 Tim 4.6; Heb 10.26; 13.15f; 1 Peter 2.5).
Thomas Aquinas says that punishment is concerned with healing human relationships, restoring justice, and responding to scandal. He distinguishes ‘simple punishment’ – the sufferings I experience that follow directly from my own sinfulness – from ‘satisfactory punishment’ which is suffering that is either freely chosen, when we make sacrifices and engage in penitential practices, or is freely accepted, when I’m not quite sure why I’m suffering but seek to align my sufferings with those of Christ. Aquinas says that people can bear each other’s sufferings in this satisfactory way when they are united in a union of love. Christ has done this for our sins but he also enables us to share in his redemptive suffer- ings on behalf of humanity. That gives us a clue as to the meaning of the indulgence: it is a way in which people united in a union of love share with others the grace they receive through accepting whatever sufferings come their way.
The Communion of Saints
There are two understandings of sin in the Bible. For one, sin is an evil force that contaminates human life and passes from one generation to the next whereas for the other each individual is personally responsible for their own sin (Jer 31.29; Ezek 18.20). On the first view sin is a force or power that promotes evil in the world and contaminates all relationships. On the second view the guilt of a person’s sins belongs simply to that person and is not to be offloaded onto anybody else. Likewise the grace of each person will be individual. Each one will answer to God for their own life and receive whatever credit or blame they deserve (1 Cor 3.12).
The practice of indulgences belongs with the first way in which the Bible speaks about sin. It presupposes an understanding of human solidarity in sin and in grace which can be at odds with contemporary understandings of the human person. In contemporary culture the promotion and protec- tion of individual rights and freedoms is a fundamental obligation. That the human person is a social or political animal seems secondary. Herbert McCabe, O.P., wrote that ‘for the modern view society is made of individ- uals, for our view the individual is made of societies’ (‘On Obedience’, in God Matters, 1985, p. 231). By ‘our view’ he means the tradition coming from Aristotle through Aquinas for which the human being is by nature a social or political animal. On that view societies create individuals, not vice versa. Think about how many societies – linguistic, cultural, national, familial, religious, political – are needed to establish what I regard as my ‘personal’ identity.
Another way of thinking about this is to ask the question ‘what happened to fraternity’? Of the great values which stand at the gatepost of the modern world, liberty and equality continue to receive the lion’s share of attention. Pope Francis’s preoccupation with fraternity is not surpris- ing, not only because of the challenges facing human communities but also because it is central to the understanding of human life which Catho- lic Christianity brings to social and political debates, with notions such as common good, solidarity, social charity, participation.
This opens the way to a series of very interesting questions that unfortunately cannot be explored further here. Our present interest in them is to suggest that the kind of solidarity in sin and in grace which is presup- posed by the teaching about indulgences faces a challenge on this point: such solidarity may seem strange for a culture which values the individual in the way the present dominant culture does. But the doctrine emerged within a worldview where it is not only my sins that have consequences for the whole body of which I am a member, but where my virtues and any success grace might have in my life also have consequences for the whole body of which I am a member.
This is the most important doctrine highlighted by the teaching about indulgences: we belong together, in sin and in grace, we are one human family in Adam and in Christ. The help of Christ comes to us through his body, the Church, Paul says: ‘where one suffers all suffer and where one is honoured all are honoured’ (1 Cor 12:26), ‘the life and death of each of us has its effect on others’ (Rom 14:7). We are all affected by the sin and by the holiness of each of us.
The practice of indulgences thus highlights the doctrine of the communion of saints. This is about our ‘sharing in holy things’ such that our solidarity in sin is matched, and in fact overtaken, by our solidarity in grace (‘where sin increased, grace abounded all the more’: Rom 5:20-21). In his 1967 letter Pope Paul spoke powerfully of this solidarity as the basis for the doctrine of indulgences (n.4). The communion of saints means soli- darity in sharing what is termed the ‘treasury of the Church’. This notion – also controversial, it needs to be said – refers to the merits, prayers and good works accumulated across the centuries by God’s grace, supremely in Christ but also in Mary and the other saints. It is part of the Church’s ministry of mercy and reconciliation to share with poor struggling sinners the wealth of that treasury of grace which provides the ‘resources’ for the practice of indulgences.
Undoing the Consequences of Sin
If the doctrine of the communion of saints is highlighted by this practice, there are recent experiences of the Church which call for a serious re-con- sideration of another aspect of it. The residual effects of sin are addressed by the indulgence, Pope Francis says, consequences of sin that remain even after sins have been absolved. But these are not just in the sinner, they are also in the world in which the thoughts, words, deeds and omissions of the sinner have certain effects. In sins of injustice, for example, the practice of restitution is well established. If I sin against justice, through theft or destroying someone’s good name, the sincerity of my repentance is seen in my willingness to do all I can to undo the consequences of my unjust actions. In one way or another all sins are violations of justice and so all sins call for some restitution, an effort to undo and to heal their conse- quences, or at least to make amends and give satisfaction for the offences committed. It is, if you like, the positive face of ‘punishment’, the work involved in trying to restore an order of justice that has been distorted.
In the traditional presentation of the doctrine of indulgences this aspect is not completely absent – see especially Pope Paul’s 1967 letter, nn. 2-3 – but the focus tended to be more on undoing the effects of sin in the life of the sinner. What remains after the guilt of our sins has been absolved is an undue attachment of our wills to things that draw our affection away from God. It is to the rectification of this weakening of our will that the indul- gence is particularly addressed. In view of how indulgences have often been misunderstood, however, there is the risk of encouraging a kind of ‘spiritual narcissism’, a preoccupation with my own spiritual condition before God. It is something with which I should be concerned, of course. And indulgences can be gained also for others. But what about the conse- quences of my sins in the world, in my relationships not just with God or with myself but with my neighbour also? What about their consequences in the lives of those who have been sinned against?
The well-known saying that grace does not replace nature but brings it to perfection means there is no magical undoing of the consequences of sin. Grace is not a magic wand but rather an enabling power that strength- ens us for the difficult challenges that come with facing up to the conse- quences of our sins. Think of the work involved in the quest for truth and reconciliation in South Africa and Northern Ireland, work seen also in many individual situations, in families and communities, where painful processes of reconciliation, truth and healing have been sought. These are works of grace, not replacing nature, as if grace steps in to do these things for us, but grace enabling people to do what needs to be done.
It is clear that today the teaching about indulgences needs to be devel- oped in order to embrace more explicitly and more comprehensively the questions that arise now about the consequences of our sins not just in ourselves but in those who have been sinned against. The thirteenth century mystical writer Mechthild of Magdeburg wrote that we can already find ourselves in purgatory, as we sometimes find ourselves in hell or in heaven. We easily fall into imagining these as future places, still somehow subject to conditions of space and time, when they are spiritual realities which we experience at all levels of our being, already here in this world as well as in the life to come. So we are already subject to processes of purification and healing, reconciliation and redemption. The difficult aspects of these processes, the sufferings they entail, consti- tute ‘the temporal punishment due to sin’. To seek the indulgence is to seek God’s help, through the ministry of the Church, with the demands these processes make on us.
Concluding remark
In this short article I have tried to do three things. First, to acknowledge that the notion of indulgences is problematic for various reasons even while the Church continues to speak of them, encouraging people to gain the indulgence of the Jubilee Year. Second, to show that the most impor- tant relevant doctrine is that of the communion of saints, in other words the solidarity of all human beings in the call to share the grace of Christ. Third, to stress that the residual effects of sins already forgiven refers not just to those effects in the sinner but also in the sinned against and in the community as a whole. I hope it might encourage others to offer further reflections on this question.
