We all do wrong in our lives. We then live with guilt until we can unburden ourselves. One of the essential social functions of the Catholic Church across the West was to provide the faithful with an inviolate space to deal with secrets in a manner that fostered improvement and absolution. With the ugly rise of statist secularism, this social function has been wiped away.
Nowadays, people are discouraged from bearing witness to the wrongs they’ve done or endured. Rather than fess up for an already extremely oversexualized social landscape, people are encouraged by the state to wear their sexual abuse they’ve endured as some kind of statement of pride.
We so desperately need moral improvement in our lives. We need the social feedback that informs us of our blockheadedness, our small (or large) aggressions, our incivilities, our impatiences, and our transgressions against trust and love. Without this moral improvement, there is little to look forward to in life. Life becomes an increasingly intolerable process of withering away into depression and silence.
The real fight is to become real and to undo the harm of the past. It takes a lot of swallowing of our prideful egos to be able to admit the emotional pain, secrets, and trespasses that we carry around.
The merciful Church still permits us the much needed compassion that allows the world to live anew.
Until people can see through the Satanic lie of “pride” (a deadly sin) and return to confession, the world will continue to degrade. Let criminals confess their crimes. Let each of us unburden the abuse we went through, without politicizing it for state favor. Let us become re-sensitized to our small barbarities all the way down to the secrets we have tried to bury under.
