THROUGH UNTRUE

Today, Pentecost Sunday, the gospel reading narrates that Jesus breathed upon his disciples saying: "Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive anyone's sins, their sins are forgiven; if you do not forgive them, they are not forgiven" (John 20:22-23). However, many Catholics no longer take these words of Jesus seriously. They find it difficult to believe that priests, whose failures and scandals have become all too familiar, are empowered by Jesus to forgive sins.
The loss of respect that Catholics once accorded to priests may have led to the dwindling practice of confession. But it may also be because many Catholics have lost their sense of sin. And this is more troubling. A few years ago, the prominent Wall Street Journal in the United States published an editorial lamenting that the word "sin" is rapidly disappearing from our everyday discourse. It stated: "Nowadays, people no longer talk, think, or worry about sin. But sin is important because it provides a framework for personal behavior. When this framework was dismantled, not only did guilt disappear, but our sense of personal accountability and shame vanished as well."
In 1973, the late Karl Menninger, a world-renowned psychiatrist, wrote a book titled "Whatever Became of Sin?" In his book, he predicted that if sin disappeared from our vocabulary, the confessional box would be replaced by the psychiatrist's couch or the judicial courts. Sin would be equated with criminal offenses or mental aberrations.
Menninger's prediction has come true. Today, many psychiatrists consider sin as a manifestation of deviancy, or pathological and external conditioning. They view sin as a product of mental illness that can be cured through medication and counseling. However, Menninger saw it the other way around.  Many psychological ailments are often the effects of unconfessed and unrepented sins. He wrote, "The best solution to many of our psychological woes is absolution, and it is free."
Judicial courts, populated by an ever-growing number of lawyers and judges, have also contributed to the loss of our sense of sin. Judicial courts have become the final arbiter of right and wrong. Notorious criminals would boldly declare: "Don't judge me. Let the court decide." Sadly, it is all too common that the rich and influential are seldom convicted. In fact, we often hear about convicts living in personally designed prison cells that resemble five-star hotels, complete with expensive amenities and entertainment.
So, in our country, we frequently hear news about unsolved scams costing billions of pesos, wealthy individuals acquitted while the poor languish in overcrowded jails, gambling being glamorized, and children being prostituted. Who takes responsibility for all of these? We have yet to witness well-known convicts admitting guilt for their crimes that cry out for justice. We have yet to see a super-rich government official admitting that he stole money from public coffers. We still hope to see a major player in the illegal drug trade surrendering to authorities and face punishment.
The vanishing of sin coincides with our lack of regard for the voice of conscience. We have learned in our catechism that conscience tells us what is right and wrong.  But before conscience can speak, it must have been informed by a moral conviction arising from our natural capacity to know right from wrong, or from instruction by a moral authority and our openness to the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.
Without the proper education of conscience, it is naïve to assume that when we are faced with two options—one requiring sacrifice and the other coinciding with our inclinations—we will decide objectively. We should not underestimate our ability to deceive ourselves.