Being unable to see the forest for the trees
After reading today’s Gospel selection I picked up my old pre-Vatican II missal and paged to the “The Sacrament of Penance” section. There were instructions on how to go to confession – with emphasis on making a thorough examination of conscience. It covers the Ten Commandments, breaking them into specific duties and sins. It first focuses on duties toward God; then personal life; then duties toward others: sons and daughters, students, parents, husbands and wives, citizens, employees and employers.
The examination covers twelve pages of extremely fine print. No sin or even semblance of sin seems excluded. It’s quite a moral education. It touches upon the fine points of virtue and vice, leaving me to wonder whether such dwelling upon so many fine points might become obsessive; generate anxiety that God himself would scrutinize our lives as minutely as the person who wrote up the pages of my missal. It sets one up for a kind of guilty verdict in so many ways, translates the confessional into a kind of courtroom and God into a pretty demanding judge. [Remember, this was prior to Vatican II.]
Some of the questions asked are: was I really fervent at communion; have I had the decency before communion to tell God how sorry I was for my slightest failings; do I show off; have I been flirtatious; am I industrious; do I fritter my time away; do I devote too much time to reading; do I go to bed early enough and get up at the right time??? Pretty soon such issues become distractions from the real plight of human nature as seen by St. Paul, namely that for us life is a daily struggle to climb a relentlessly down-escalator – and that we need not so much worry but help, God’s help, God’s grace, God’s and the Church’s guaranteed love to free us from ultimate despair. That’s why the sacrament was instituted, to give us hope, not to leave us scrupulous, in a state of frequent remorse.
In religious life more such minutiae were tacked on. We even had a chapter of faults each week at which we admitted to little failings, even when we couldn’t think of any. Late for chapel? Kneel in the aisle! Appearing on the streets of 1950’s Rome without one’s religious habit? Suspension a divinis. (Not to be translated as a public hanging.) Over a two thousand year history there were bound to arise what a friend of mine called traditions with a small t in contrast to our Traditions with a big T – the central dogmas of our faith. Vatican II tried to do some housecleaning of the small t’s – to bring forward the big T’s about grace, the love of God, true faith, hope, charity, solidarity, community, the eradication of fear as our motive for virtue.
Of course there were always Catholics who felt simply comfortable with God back in those days. While I was studying in Rome I met some seminarians from the Beda College (named for the 7th century English monk Bede). There was already an English College for British seminarians in Rome dating from the Reformation. The unique thing about the Beda students was their maturity; it catered to English converts to the Church, often former military officers, aristocrats, intellectuals, you know: fellows who wore monocles and black cassocks that reflected ever so slight traces of yesterday’s dinner, spoke the Queen’s English. I was told that, given the age of these belated vocations, there were only two rules on the college books. The first was: you must not use the sanctuary lamp to light your cigar; the second was: you must not extinguish your cigar in the holy water font. Jesus would have liked these fellows.