Can God Forgive Jorge Mario Bergoglio?

By Nancy Scheper-hughes
CounterPunch
March 14, 2014

http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/03/20/can-even-god-forgive-jorge-mario-bergoglio/

There are sins and there are mortal sins. There are crimes and there are heinous crimes. Finally, there are abominations, sins so violent and godless that they cried out to heaven for vengeance–or so I was taught in catechism class in Brooklyn in the 1950s.

Today some of those abominations would fall under the secular judicial category of war crimes and crimes against humanity. But, we were told, all human transgressions, even the most heinous and abominable, can be forgiven by God. This is the solid bedrock of Roman Catholic doctrine on the question of sin, confession and forgiveness. It would be vainglorious and prideful to assume that any human act, no matter how egregious, could trump or surpass the absolute and limitless Divine Mercy of God. But there are conditions to be met. First, the penitent must make a full, detailed, and complete confession. No dirty little secrets can be held back in the confessional.

(“Bless me father for I have sinned”). This includes an admission of personal guilt and responsibility (“Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa” — it was my fault, my most grievous fault). The confession must be followed by a sincere act of contrition. (“I am sorry for these sins because they offend Thee, my God, and Your infinite goodness”). Lastly, absolution and forgiveness requires the expression of firm resolve to sin no more and to resist the temptations to do evil.

Thus, even the most heinous crimes against humanity committed by the generals and their henchmen during the Argentine Dirty War (1973-1982) could technically be forgiven and erased. The Proceso de Reorganizacion (the military dictatorship’s name for the war) turned ordinary people into enemies of the state and waged a war through the process of limpieza, a political cleansing of dangerous and dirty elements, subversives, beginning with leftist guerrillas, those suspected of supporting the left, union leaders, university students, artists, writers, journalists, psychoanalysts, nuns and priests who lived and worked with the poor, and then going after the politically neutral, the unaligned, until finally the crazy generals went after the merely ‘indifferent’.