All sin is personal but all sin is social

You are likely reading this column either just ahead of Ash Wednesday or a few days into Lent. In my adult lifetime, I don't think there's ever been a time when we the people have been more in need of repenting our collective sins.

This is not to suggest that it's the most morally corrupt era in U.S. history. Surely nothing can compete with the onerous institution of chattel slavery that prevailed for some 250 years. But, with this exception, we may be living in the most morally corrupt era in U.S. history. And if we do not repent of our sins, our lives together will continue to be degraded into warring sects and factions.

It's a dangerous game to cherry pick verses from the Hebrew Bible about blessings (or curses) of nations and apply them to the United States. In the first instance, such a practice tends to feed the pernicious myth that the United States is a chosen nation, or a Christian nation, or otherwise privileged by God over other nations. Catholic Christians should reject such ideas, as they tend toward idolatry, if they are not idolatrous notions in themselves.

But while it is a mistake to invoke God's specific admonitions to Israel as applying anytime or anywhere else -- especially to invoke God's alleged favor -- we can still learn what happens when a people turns its back on God.

First, however, we must dismiss the idea that we suffer from some mythical "national" or "institutional" sins. As with ancient Israel from time to time, it is not a "nation" in need of repentance, but rather the moral agents -- the people -- who constitute that nation. Institutions don't sin. The people who administer them do.

Of course, when corruption, duplicity and violence are as widely spread and deeply entrenched as they are in the current era, it's tempting to blame our current malaise on institutional structures. But only people have moral agency, and thus only people can be corrupt, duplicitous and violent. But those corrupt, duplicitous and violent moral agents can and do use institutional structures as their means to foment these human sins.

This is why, even though sin is the personal failure of moral agents, we can identify "social sin," in the words of St. John Paul II, in his 1984 Apostolic Exhortation, "Reconciliation and Penance." While sins are the actions of individual persons, the cumulative effect of those actions have immediate social implications, he explains.

In the first instance, "by virtue of human solidarity … each individual's sin in some way affects others," he says. Thus, one can speak of a "communion of sin, whereby a soul that lowers itself through sin drags down … the whole world," he continues. "In other words, there is no sin, not even the most intimate and secret one, … that exclusively concerns the person committing it." When we moral agents sin, it has "repercussions on … the whole human family."

A second social implication of personal sins is more immediate and measurable. They are sins that "by their very matter constitute a direct attack on one's neighbor," he observes.

In the U.S., we can see this, for example, on both sides of the immigration issue. One side ignores the social harm done by unfettered illegal immigration, especially of organized career criminals. The other side condemns all immigrants in a blanket expression of nationalist xenophobia. I don't need to cite any data or news stories for the reader to recognize the cumulative effects of these sins on particular communities in the U.S.

This suggests the third meaning of social sin, according to St. John Paul II. While he calls it "class struggle," one can translate that phrase into our current crisis of prejudicial, intolerant, and violent "identity politics." As the pope observes, "whoever the person who leads it or on occasion seeks to give it a theoretical justification, [this] is a social evil."

After having described these "social sins," Pope John Paul II is quick to point out that they do not absolve individuals of their responsibility. "To speak even analogically of social sins must not cause us to underestimate the responsibility of the individuals involved," he explains. Rather, recourse to "social sin" is "meant to be an appeal to the consciences of all, so that each may shoulder his or her responsibility seriously and courageously in order to change those disastrous conditions and intolerable situations."

All sin is social sin because all sin implicates all persons in a given community. This season of Lent is the time for Catholic Christians to demonstrate to the world that reconciliation can only come through repentance -- not of the "nation's" sins, but of our own.