You! Will! Atone!
I guess I need to clarify one quick thing about “forgiveness”.
[The second half of this essay contains heavy spoilers for the television series Better Call Saul, which is so good you should watch it in its entirety before you begin reading this essay. The spoilers don’t start until after you see the first image of Saul.]
"Let justice be done, though the heavens may fall!"
-Saul Goodman
I’m not sure what’s going on, but writing about forgiveness has become en vogue at a few different Catholic media outlets in 2022, with a lot of writers recently discussing the idea of our responsibility to forgive really serious crimes, like clerical sexual abuse, or sexual abuse in other contexts. I suppose this is progress for how the Catholic church talks about sexual abuse, which twenty years ago was at “no bad things are happening”, then moved through “bad things are happening but we shouldn’t do anything about it”, and appears to be arriving at “bad things are happening, we shouldn’t do anything about it, but at least that should make us feel kind of bad.” The theme that keeps coming up across all of these outlets is this: even if somebody has done something truly appalling and repulsive, even if you don’t want to forgive them, it is your obligation as a Christian to forgive them. That is what we do, that is our challenge, even if we don’t like doing it.
Now, many of the pieces I’ve read this year are thoughtful and interesting, but it’s been weird to see so many variations on the same thing. Here’s an abuse survivor speaking to FemCatholic about what forgiveness should and shouldn't entail, a good piece. Here's Where Peter Is trying to raise legal funds "in the spirit of charity" for that woman who got caught storing five fetuses in her fridge, in my opinion a significantly less-good piece. People tried to figure out if we could celebrate the conversion of alleged abuser Shia LaBeouf by making vague claims about “forgiveness”. Thomas Reese of Religion News Service filed a piece titled "I Forgive Pope Benedict. I Hope Others Can Too" which was about a one-off theological dispute, but, because of extremely bad timing, ran immediately after Benedict was tied to widespread abuse coverups, making the headline look incredibly callous by accident. The current ad copy for America Media's "Jesuitical" podcast includes the line "would Jesus ever 'cancel' someone? Didn't he teach us to forgive?" James Martin suggested on Twitter that we should be willing to forgive a bishop for covering up sex abuse, then realized how that sounded and walked it back, and then I made fun of him for 2,000 words.
But the most interesting 2022 article on this obligation to forgive ran in Commonweal last week, where Adam A.J. DeVille, a therapist who works with sex offenders, asked whether Catholics should strive to forgive Ted McCarrick, the former Cardinal who sexually assaulted multiple people in his care, and as a bishop who helped write the Dallas Charter, worked extremely hard to shape the policies of the Catholic church so that he could be shielded from consequences for decades. Here's DeVille's closing argument:
"Is not the petition “forgive us our sins as we forgive others” right there in the prayer Christ taught us?…A forgiving people can at the same time be revolted by an abuser’s actions, demand that he face justice and make reparations to his victims, insist he be permanently ejected from all positions in the Church, work tirelessly to overthrow the corrupt systems that allowed him to get away with his abuse for so long—and also love him as a fallen human being and a child of the merciful God who saw his own son sadistically abused, humiliated, and killed. A forgiving, loving people whom God has set free can grieve for the enormous damage many abusers have inflicted on individual victims and the Church as a whole, while also hoping with real love that, in God’s good time, they might be reconciled to us, and we to them."
DeVille is asking if we can recognize the likeness of God in a person who has done horrifying things, if we can pray for them to get better, and if we can, ultimately, aspire to reflect God's endless love and forgive someone who has done the unspeakable. He works with sex offender clients all of the time as a therapist, and he sees the likeness of God in each of them, and he prays that we can see it in someone like McCarrick, difficult as that may be. It's not a bad piece. I don't really disagree with most of Deville's points. Overall, it's very thought-provoking. Here are my now-provoked thoughts:
It is hard to forgive. It is, perhaps, the single hardest thing we do as Christians. It is hard to know when we should forgive. We have a model of all-encompassing forgiveness in a God that died for us, that gave us grace and absolution we did not deserve. It is a model to which we will always find ourselves falling short. So what can we do to try and get it right at least some of the time? I’ve been working on this moral calculus for years, and I am proud to finally unveil my complete rubric for “whether you should feel like you need to forgive someone”. It happens to be only one question long and I’m going to put it in very large type:
“Hey, is this person actually interested in being forgiven at all?”
DeVille's analysis of whether we can “forgive” McCarrick includes perspectives that I didn’t consider, and I’m also not a guy that McCarrick really needs forgiveness from, so I’m not going to pretend to be an expert on how we’re supposed to feel about him. But there’s one thing DeVille completely left out of his piece: MCCARRICK STILL DOESN’T THINK HE DID ANYTHING WRONG, COME ON WITH THIS SHIT.
If you're going to write a thinkpiece on why we should forgive a person who has committed a very serious sin, it feels like an enormous omission if you don't mention that this person doesn’t actually think he’s sinned at all. When Slate reporter Ruth Graham was able to track McCarrick down for an interview in 2019 - his last interview with any media outlet, for reasons that will become extremely clear in the next fifteen seconds - which she published in a piece literally titled "Theodore McCarrick Still Won't Confess", she gave him a chance to tell his side of the story and it went about as well as you'd expect:
"I asked him if he had done it. He has been accused of sexually assaulting minors and making unwanted advances on seminary students he invited to his beach house in New Jersey over the course of many decades. Were those stories true? “I’m not as bad as they paint me,” he said. “I do not believe that I did the things that they accused me of.”...But why would so many people lie? I asked McCarrick. In the case of the seminarians at the beach house, how did they come up with such similar stories? “I think that they were encouraged to do that,” McCarrick said. “There were many who were in that situation who never had any problems like that.” This was a point he made several times: that plenty of young men had come to the beach house and had no problems there. He couldn’t have done it, in other words, because look at all the people he didn’t harass. As for who would have orchestrated such a campaign, he declined to name names, but referred vaguely to “enemies.”"
Can we be strong enough, Christian enough, to forgive McCarrick? Well…McCarrick isn't asking for forgiveness. He's asking us to ignore his "enemies". He does not appear to have any interest in looking back on what he did and realizing that it was wrong. Now, DeVille challenges us with his article because he sees the image of God in each of his therapy clients, and I’m impressed that he can do so. But do you know what the difference is between every single one of those clients and McCarrick? The clients are all seeing a therapist! They are all taking steps to try and get better! They have all acknowledged that something needs to change! Meanwhile, McCarrick is pleading “not guilty” in his ongoing criminal trial!
Think about it this way: say you were strong enough to do it. Say you came up to McCarrick, embraced him, and said "I forgive you for what you did, for hurting so many people, for tearing apart lives, for the destroying the trust that so many have in the church. You are still a child of God just like me. I want to forgive as God would forgive, I wish for you to be reconciled to me and me to you." McCarrick's response, based on everything he's ever said, would likely be "forgive me for what?" And you would respond, baffled, "for the…for the sex abuse stuff." And he would say "oh, yeah I didn't do that," and then go about his day. Would you feel like your soul had been unburdened of its anger? Would you feel like God had been working through you? Would you feel like this would have, in any conceivable way, been a good use of your time?
Or say you were strong enough to do it for Shia LaBeouf, whom I still think we should try to pass off to the Church of Scientology in a negotiated trade for Jason Lee and a future draft pick. Say you went up to him and embraced him and said "I forgive you for what you did to those women. I want to forgive you because I want to share this church with you." Based on his recent media hits for his Padre Pio movie, he might say "hey please don't talk about that right now because I have an ongoing civil suit and if I say that I did any of that stuff I'm going to lose a lot of money." And then he would go about his day. Would you feel like you had accomplished what you needed in order to feel at peace?
God's forgiveness and love is beyond all of our understanding, but here's an interesting thing to consider: you're not God! It's okay if you want to understand why you're forgiving someone before you do it, and "Is this a person who actually thinks they've done anything wrong?" is likely a better rubric for you to use than "Is some guy on the internet telling me I have to forgive this person in order to be a good Christian?" It actually seems like a good bare minimum criterion to use in order to make sure that, say, the person you’re “forgiving” isn’t just going to go right back out and commit the same sin at the next opportunity, as McCarrick did for decades. Maybe DeVille is right and I should be asking myself “why do I think I'm above forgiving people like McCarrick?”, but I can't ask that because I'm too distracted by the question “why do people like McCarrick think they're above needing to be forgiven?”
If all of this is somehow unclear to you, you can reference the Catholic sacrament of Reconciliation, where the thing that happens before the priest absolves you is that you tell him the bad things you did and that you don't want to do those things anymore; this is something that McCarrick has yet to do to any of the people he sexually assaulted, or literally anyone else. The bishops who have covered up abuse haven't done this, and almost all of them have kept their jobs without any meaningful consequences. Many of the priests who actually committed these crimes haven’t done this, and some of them provided horrifying defenses what they did years after the fact. We all struggle with forgiveness; I certainly do. But abusers who refuse to admit that they've ever done anything wrong don't need to get free passes from us because someone needed to hit a word count for the week.
But there's a natural followup question: what does "admitting you did something wrong" look like? What should someone do when they show that they're ready to atone? Does McCarrick need to dress in sackcloth and smear himself with ashes and sit outside of a church where passerby can throw garbage at him? I don't think all of that is necessary, although I do think all of it would be more helpful than what he's done so far. Here's another way to ask the question: is there a model for what Catholic atonement could be? Is there a man out there whose willingness to face consequences far outstrips the leaders of our church, and can point the moral way forward for all of us? Yes. It's Saul Goodman.
In the first episode of Better Call Saul, a down-on-his-luck public defender named Jimmy walks into the deluxe conference room of a white-shoe New Mexico law firm, and notes its resemblance to the boardroom in the movie Network where Ned Beatty delivers his famous "forces of nature" monologue. For fun, Jimmy bellows out a few lines from that monologue, ending with "AND YOU! WILL! ATONE!"
Better Call Saul, which ended this year, was, of course, the spinoff of Breaking Bad. As dark and violent and bleak as Breaking Bad could get, it always had a steady source of comic relief in Saul Goodman, a sleazy and amoral strip-mall lawyer - played by legendary comedian Bob Odenkirk - who becomes a key part of the meth-and-money-laundering empire at the center of Breaking Bad. Better Call Saul is the prequel series explaining how the hapless public defender Jimmy McGill grew into the ambulance-chasing criminal mastermind Saul Goodman.
Jimmy has, above all else, the cockroach-like ability to survive, endure, and escape anything. He was a low-level scam artist before trying to make it as an attorney, and he has the creativity and patience to devise and execute elaborate schemes to cover his ass and keep his aspirations afloat. It allows him to keep himself alive and just barely on top as he gets entangled with corrupt politicians and massive fraud schemes and law-firm-pissing-matches and what may be a very large meth empire. This, along with every member of the cast giving some of the best performances in the history of television, all makes for a very entertaining show.
But the first five-and-a-half seasons of Better Call Saul, as it turns out, are a flawless and airtight machine whirring towards the climactic event of the series, in which an innocent man is unexpectedly murdered in front of Jimmy and Jimmy's wife Kim (Rhea Seehorn, just incredible in every episode), directly as a result of one of their schemes going awry. This destroys both of their lives. The final scene we see before the events of Breaking Bad is Kim packing her bag to get the hell away from Jimmy and stop herself from scamming or hurting anyone else.
We know how Jimmy reacts to all of this horror: he sinks into the character of Saul Goodman, attorney to the low-level scumbags of Albuquerque, and eventually accomplice to a meth kingpin. He buys a massive Trump-like home with fake frescoes and a golden toilet. He sleeps with every escort in the state. Because of what he does in Breaking Bad, more people die and more lives are ruined, and Saul makes a lot of money, which is enough for him to justify his life to himself. When the meth empire collapses at the end of Breaking Bad, he purchases a new identity and moves to Nebraska, where he leads a nondescript life as the manager of a food court Cinnabon. He escapes. He survives. He gets away with it. He always does.
But in the last few episodes of Better Call Saul, we also see what happened to Kim. She gives up her law license and moves to Florida, where she writes brochure copy for a sprinkler company (she also gets bangs). She is trying to forget what happened, trying to forget that a man is dead because of her, and trying to just put herself in a position where nothing exciting or even interesting can ever happen because of her, where she can never hurt anybody ever again, where the part of her life where people got hurt is behind her forever. It's trying to fix the future, but it's not facing the past. It's not atonement.
And that's probably why, in the penultimate episode of Better Call Saul, Kim's conscience finally overwhelms her. She flies back to Albuquerque. She tells the police about the man's death and her role in it. And she tells his widow the same thing. She has now opened herself up to criminal consequences. She has opened herself up to a civil suit that could cost her everything she has. She has confessed what she did and accepted that consequences may come and that she will have to face them. She has atoned.
On the trip back home from her confession, Kim bursts into tears. Maybe it’s worry about what’s coming, and maybe it’s shame finally overtaking her, but if you’re watching carefully, it really looks like something approaching relief.
In the final episode of Better Call Saul, set two years after Breaking Bad, the feds finally catch Jimmy/Saul. He's charged with a full battery of crimes, including being an accessory to multiple murders. But he's still Saul Goodman. He can still survive, he can still get away with it. And through some fast talking with the feds - and it's very fun to see the old Saul Goodman back at the top of his game - he negotiates a plea deal for only seven years, in a cushy minimum-security prison. And he tries to knock it down a little further by offering up information on the murder he witnessed with Kim way back when, but quickly learns that he has nothing else to offer, as the feds tell him that Kim has already confessed to what happened.
Again: Saul has survived like a cockroach for years. He is about to do it again, he is about to literally get away with murder. But he suddenly learns that the woman he loved has just atoned. And that is going to change everything.
Saul returns to the courtroom in his sharkskin suit to make a statement at his sentencing hearing. He even tricks Kim into showing up by hinting that he's going to throw her under the bus. But he's not. He just wants her there to hear what he's going to say.
In the courtroom where Saul is supposed to accept his generous plea deal, he confesses to everything, in front of the court, in front of Kim, in front of the widows of the men who died because of his actions. He confesses to all of the scams he pulled in Better Call Saul and all of the crimes he committed in Breaking Bad. For the first time in his life, he stops scrambling, stops running, says what he did, says that it was wrong, and accepts the consequences, whatever they may be. He's sentenced to 86 years, and it's not in a cushy minimum-security prison.
But Jimmy ends the series at peace. A man who has run all of his life, a man who was accused of "having a piece missing" by one of his marks, is whole again. Because he has atoned. Because now he can be forgiven, as he is when Kim comes to visit him in the final scenes of the series. He was inspired by her to finally, finally own up to himself.
It's wild to see so much back-and-forth in Catholic media on how we're supposed to think about forgiveness, and comparatively little about what is supposed to happen before forgiveness. We should not expect to be whole again until we’re forgiven, and that’s probably why there’s been so much discussion on whether we can forgive people in the church who have done so much evil. We should want them to be at peace and whole again, just as we would want ourselves to be forgiven and at peace and whole again. But we should never expect to be forgiven until we atone, until we say what we did, until we know there are consequences coming. Otherwise, we’re just getting away with it.
Does my reluctance to forgive a person like McCarrick make me a bad Catholic? Perhaps. Does it make me a worse Catholic than a sex criminal, and specifically a sex criminal who showed no remorse and used all of his institutional power to protect himself from consequences? No, it doesn’t. Does it make me a worse person than Saul Goodman? Yes. We are all worse people than the University of American Samoa's most distinguished law school graduate. He is the subject of one of the best stories of atonement in recent memory. He’s a man whose curse was always getting away with it, who finally realized that he had to stop getting away with it to become whole again. We in the church could all stand to learn something from him.