"And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us" Luke 11:4

I particularly appreciate the way Pope Benedict XVI opens his analysis of this petition in the Our Father in his book “Jesus of Nazareth”.

“Every instance of trespass among men involves some kind of injury to truth and to love and is thus opposed to God, who is truth and love. How to overcome guilt is a central question for every human life; the history of religions revolves around this question. Guilt calls forth retaliation. The result is a chain of trespasses in which the evil of guilt grows ceaselessly and becomes more and more inescapable. With this petition, the Lord is telling us that guilt can be overcome only by forgiveness, not by retaliation. God is a God who forgives, because he loves his creatures; but forgiveness can only penetrate and become effective in one who is himself forgiving,” writes the Pope.

As the Pope states, forgiveness is a theme that pervades the entire Gospel. He points to the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount; that God stepped out of his divinity to come toward us and to reconcile us; before giving us the Eucharist, Jesus knelt before his disciples and washed their dirty feet thereby cleansing them with his humble love. There is the parable of the unforgiving servant (Matthew 18:23-35) to underscore how whatever we have to forgive one another is trivial in comparison with the goodness of God.

“I am sorry,” are probably among the hardest three words for most of us to utter. The healing power of those three words, however, cannot be underestimated.

The day I was married the priest who officiated over the ceremony took my confession. I explained to him that I had stopped going to Mass five years earlier following work I did on a three-month investigative report on accusations a priest in Western Canada had allegedly sexually abused choir boys and that the archdiocese in that region chose to transfer him to other rural parishes each time these allegations surfaced. Although I called that archdiocese five times during those three months to get their comment, they did not return my messages. The story ran, and the next day the archbishop and a priest who worked as his assistant asserted that I had never called. They spoke with my supervisor’s boss and my freelance contract was cancelled the following week. Another outlet immediately hired the week afterwards, but French-Canadian communities out west being relatively devout I found myself shunned by half of the community and cheered as a hero by the other half. But what really hurt was a few months later when my grandmother died and her funeral service was officiated by the priest who claimed I had never called the archdiocese. Upon recognizing my family members, he insisted that my grandmother’s casket remain at the back of the church, despite my grandmother being a devout Catholic all her life.

As a consequence of this, my faith in the Catholic Church as an institution of mercy and reconciliation was shaken to its core and I opted to boycott the institution all the while remaining firm in my belief in God. After telling this story to the priest who was about to bless my marriage, he apologized to me in the name of the Catholic Church, which surprised me at the degree to which it came as a relief, and I committed to return to Mass and raise our future children in the Catholic faith.

Thank God he said “sorry” because that brought me back into the fold. The Catholic Church is made up of people who are as flawed and imperfect as you and me. But having boycotted the church for five years I think I became more flawed, imperfect and bore a growing amount of guilt as a result of that. Someone once described membership in a parish as being one of the white hot coals of a fire. If you pull that coal away it cools and loses its luminescence, but you just have to push it back into the fire and glows again.