Mercy, Crime and Punishment
An interview with Fr. Daniel Moloney on Mercy Part 2
This is the second part of a three part interview with Fr. Daniel Moloney author of the Mercy, What Every Catholic Should Know (2020 Ignatius).
Part 1 can be found here
You touched on some themes of solidarity and the point of mercy. You also touch on the merciful actions of government — that the point of mercy from that perspective is to convert persons who are working against the common good to understand their reality and then turn and support the common good.
Yah I think that you want someone to finish their prison sentence and become a law abiding citizen. Where the goal isn’t that they go back to a life of crime and just wait to get caught again. They say: “You know I learned my lesson I think I should behave.”
One of the things that struck me about that is we are living in a society right now where you have the media where they say you cannot hire these people because they were in prison. You can’t hire these people because of their past lives and that seems to be working against mercy and the common good and not the point of mercy and, as you say, prison.
There is a whole history, I did not go into this in the book really, there is a whole history of Christian influence on the prison system, especially in America. In fact, one of the reasons Alexis de Tocqueville came to America was to study this new-fangled system of prisons that we set up that were called originally penitentiaries. That was rather than a prison where they put you in a cell until they put you in the stocks or punished you in some other way, the town square.
These new prisons became places to help you repent — penitentiary — where you would reflect on your sins and you would think about how you should reform your life.
We sort of secularized them a little bit where we call them corrections facilities and corrections officers rather than the more religious word of penitentiary. There is a whole thought where prisons ought to be a place where a person will sit and think and grow better.
Think of Dostoevsky writing about prison and how that would help you reflect on your life and reform. That sort of idea came from America and from American Christians. Catholics and Quakers basically in different parts of the country both arrived at something like this theory.
What happened though as I talk about a little of this in the book. People secularized the notion of penitentiary. We don’t want it to be something religious. They started to psychologizing. So you had this whole movement in the 40s and 50s and 60s where people say: ‘Well there is no criminality; there is only mental illness.’ And so, that is when those sorts of people put psychiatrists in charge of the prisons. It was wrong. People actually can have bad will. They are not just crazy and have illusions about the way of the world and they are not hallucinating. They actually look at the world and decide they are going to do evil.
But the psychiatrists, when they were put in charge of the prisons, ended up releasing people back to society and saying: ‘hey they are cured.They are now law abiding citizens,’ and then we had these giant crime waves in the 70s and 80s. Look at a movie like Dirty Harry or something like that where they are criticizing the bad notion of mercy and rehabilitation and therapy that was being used in the prisons. And then you had the 1980’s law and order backlash where we said we want to lock em up and throw away the key.
So to go back to your question: How we treat prisoners after they get out. The whole idea that we should rehabilitate and reintegrate them into society is tainted by the psychiatric notion of rehabilitation from back in the day.
That’s fascinating. So we took from the possibility of the conversion to the medically idea of conversion to the no it didn’t work. So let’s throw it all out in a sense.
Yeah, and mercy got lost. It became sort of like: “Well, that’s psychobabble weakness talk.”
One of the things you bring up is in the early days of Christianity you basically had three serious sins really serious sins that one had to go to the bishop for was apostasy, murder and adultery.
So, how do we go from there to I remember reading something written in the 40s and 50s that said: ‘not sending your child to a Catholic school was now a mortal sin.’ So, how do we go from these three to this whole list of mortal sins?
Well, I think it actually started with just apostasy in the very early days of the church where that was the one sin that you needed to go to confession for. Where confession meant that you have a private conversation with the bishop, tell him your sin and he would give you a penance.
So there’s a big fight in the early Epistles of Barnabas and Shepherd of Hermas [writings similar to other literature in the Bible, but were not accepted to be inspired by the Holy Spirit] or something out of which is literature from maybe the year one hundred and fifty. These were some of the earliest writings in arguing that there should be, yet, the chance to forgive the apostate against the strict crowd that says: ‘No, once you leave Jesus, your baptism is basically negated.’
So you start with this. Back then one chance of repentance was considered to be the lenient/laxist party of mercy. That was partly under the extraordinary conditions of the persecutions — the Roman persecutions of Christianity. Later, you had some murder that was also a very public sin and adultery resulted in a different way a serious public sin. And so those two required penance.
Penance was public. Penance would be something where you’d basically join a religious order for a time. One would join the order of penitents and would wear a habit and would sit in a particular section of the church with all the other penitents. In a still different section of the church, you would have people wearing a habit who would be the order of catechumens [People entering the church for the first time]. And there’s a kind of similarity between them. In fact, Lent involved both of them. So that Lent would be a time when the catechumens would be preparing for their baptism at Easter and the penitents should be preparing for their absolution on Good Friday.
Okay, and so this is kind of a cool. So that is why Lent has both those characters: both the character of baptism and the character penance because the people would be in solidarity through the body of Christ. They would be praying with and accompanying both those who are entering the church and those who were being reconciled with the church. So anyway, so that was the way things worked in the early church and its very public.
But it was sort of over time for centuries that the formal notion of going to the bishop and being absolved. What grew up alongside of it was the monks like the desert fathers. They wouldn’t go to the bishop but to a more senior desert father and tell him: ‘Hey, here’s what’s wrong with my life and you help me fix it.’
And so that’s a practice in monasticism of going to a spiritual director, what we call it now. As well as making a confession in the rule of Saint Benedict, you would make a confession to all the monks about your violation of the rule: ‘So I snuck in extra, you know carrot or something.’ You have to confess that to everybody and so they’re those sorts of monastic practices which were about seeking pardon from a superior as an avid element to spiritual direction. That practice grew and spread and then eventually the bishop started to say: ‘Well alright, we will tack on the formal absolution forgiveness. We will call it sacramental absolution forgiveness,’ also were those who are trying to pursue this life of perfection like the monks are.
So what we have today goes much deeper into the nature of justice and the nature of goodness and the nature of holiness than those early days.
Part 3 Next Week
Fr. Daniel Moloney’s Book: Mercy, What Every Catholic Should Know is available through Ignatius Press