By Robert Royal

Sin, corporate sin, was abundantly confessed this past week during an opening penitential rite for the synod in Rome. And before the whirligig of the news cycle carries off those confessions along with everything else in the coming week - I feel the need to confess myself to a personal temptation to sin in the form of weariness and annoyance with grand gestures that aim at the concrete and spiritual - and result in the abstract and bureaucratic. And pose no little danger. Please bear with me.

The penitential spectacle before the opening of the Synod needs to be viewed through lenses other than pious wishes and all due respect for the doubtless good intentions of the Holy Father. Let us describe it for what it was: Cardinals and others officially confessing sins that they have in all likelihood never personally committed, on behalf of others in the Church, who may themselves be quite personally innocent. (How many people in the Church have in any normal sense of the term sinned against "peace" or women's contributions or the environment? Repentance on that score is better recommended to the attention of specific criminals, miscreants, terrorists who are not in short supply.)

One might, of course, also start quibbling over why these sins and not others. For instance, how widespread is the "sin" of "using church teaching as weapons to hurl at others." Particularly as opposed to how frequently this sin is: ignoring Church teaching to please myself. You don't need a Pew survey to have a fairly good idea of the relative proportions, which now as always tips heavily towards the latter. The Pharisees are a small cohort - the self-willed, especially in our Age of Identity, legion.

Whenever I see broad group efforts at repentance like these, it reminds me of C.S. Lewis' profound essay, "The Dangers of National Repentance." He wrote it in the early days of World War II when British Christians and others were feeling generalized guilt for whatever part they may have played in the coming massive global death and destruction. He allowed that there was, to be sure, some Christian value in the impulse, especially contrasted with the presumption some might feel toward "self-righteousness" against the Germans and other enemies.

But several dangers also lurk in that impulse, he said. The main one is the confusion between the repentance of someone who has actually committed a sin on the one hand, and on the other hand the moral status of the claim that "we" are repenting: "You can indulge in the popular vice of detraction without restraint, and yet feel all the time that you are practising contrition."

In other words, in this context, when you say "we" have sinned, you really mean some unspecified "they" are wrongdoers, unwarranted detraction of others - a sin worth looking up that has mostly dropped out of view - masquerading as contrition on my part.

The Cardinals and others this week confessed on behalf of "the Church." But the truth is that while everyone in the Church is a sinner, very few - and certainly not the Church - have failed morally in the several ways offered.

It was especially ironic that Prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández, yes, he of the book Heal Me with Your Mouth and author of Fiducia supplicans expressed, "shame for all the times that in the church, especially us pastors who are entrusted with the task of confirming our brothers and sisters in the faith, have not been able to guard and propose the Gospel as a living source of eternal newness, (instead) 'indoctrinating it' and risking reducing it to a pile of dead stones to be thrown at others."

Cardinal Kevin Farrell, who lived with Theodore McCarrick in that Cardinal's Washington residence for years, but never saw anything questionable in his relationships with young males, was tasked to confess, according to reports, "especially on behalf of men in the church, 'for all the times that we have not recogn...