I once heard a solid old Jesuit preach a homilette—one of those small sermons that crops up right after the prayers of the faithful or just before the final blessing, when Father remembers he forgot something—on the topic of the phrase “forgive and forget.” This phrase (which some incautious parish committee had inserted into the prayers of the faithful) was, the good priest pointed out, problematic. Forgiving is not the same as forgetting, and to suggest that the two are necessarily paired is dangerously misleading.
Yet the conflation of “forgiving” with “forgetting” is all too common. One of the issues, for example, with much of the current official response to the scandal of the Viganò letters, is that mere apologies will not suffice to set things right. Get the laity to grasp how sorry the hierarchy is for their errors of judgment, and all will be forgiven; obtain forgiveness, and everyone will forget that the letter was ever written. That, at least, seems to be the thinking in some corners of the hierarchy.
But the misapprehension is one that colors all of public life. Once upon a time, the worst thing that could happen to a person was that their private sins be found out; the most embarrassing punishment was to be placed in the stocks where all your neighbors could see you and learn (if they didn’t already know) what you had done. Today, in the pillory of Twitter and Facebook, many people outed for politically incorrect or morally abhorrent behavior rushes to stock themselves, hoping that a suitable quantity of abject groveling may leave them with some semblance of a reputation.
2 comments:
One source of the phrase and its legitimate application is the fact that God commits himself to "forgetting" in the Sacrament of Reconciliation. Actually, when I hear the phrase these days, this is the context.
Yes! Wasn't there a saint whose visions were validated when a superior asked her to report the sins the superior had confessed? "I have already forgot them," was Our Lord's answer.
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