Analysis: The Pope's Lenten apology - an important first step

There is much to rejoice about in Pope John Paul II's public apology for the sins of the church over the past two millennia. The overall response was appropriately positive, and many were delighted that a church, which has so often bristled at criticism, would acknowledge error and mistake. Though some felt the pope's words did not go far enough, they were at the very least an expression of candor and an opening to further honesty in the years to come.

The limitations of this apology and plea for forgiveness, made in a special liturgy March 12 in St. Peter's Basilica, have their roots in a lengthy treatise by the Vatican's International Theological Commission, "Memory and Reconciliation: The Church and Faults of the Past," released a few days before. Throughout that treatise the 30 papally appointed theologians continually distinguished between "the holy church" and the "sons and daughters" of the church - as if the church consists, on the one hand, of a sinless parent and, on the other hand, a huge mass of frequently fallible children. That distinction is a handy one since it seems to distance the institutional church (the parent) from its members (the children).

But it is an absolutely false distinction when used this way. On this earth, Catholics believe, there is but one church and it is both holy and sinful - as an institution and as the People of God. The Vatican statement quotes St. Thomas Aquinas on this point: "To be a glorious church, with neither spot nor wrinkle, is the ultimate end to which we are brought by the passion of Christ. Hence, this will be the case only in the heavenly homeland, not here on the way of pilgrimage."

Yet elsewhere in the document, the church is repeatedly distinguished from the sinful sons and daughters whom she "embraces and pardons" and holds "close to her bosom." What needs to be acknowledged more openly is the error and sinfulness which from time to time reaches into the "bosom" of the church on earth, even into the sanctuaries of the hierarchy. The very faults which the pope acknowledged - the Crusades, the Inquisition, the persecution of the Jews - were not committed only by some wayward and ill-informed sons and daughters. They were authorized and sanctioned by the church at its highest institutional levels.