When we read the New Testament attentively, we discover that there is nothing magical about forgiveness. But neither is it a fictitious forgetting, a refusal to accept the truth, but an entirely real process of change carried out by the Sculptor. The removal of guilt truly gets rid of something; the proof that forgiveness has come in us is that penance springs up from us. Forgiveness is in this sense an active-passive event: the creative word of power that God speaks to us produces the pain of conversion and thus becomes an active self-transformation. Forgiveness and penance, grace and personal conversion are not contradictions but two sides of one and the same event. This fusion of activity and passivity expresses the essential form of human existence, for all of our creativity begins with our having been created, with our participation in God’s creative activity.
Here we have reached a very central point: I believe that the core of the spiritual crisis of our time has its basis in the obscuration of the grace of forgiveness. But let us first take note of the positive side of the present: morality is gradually coming back into favor. It is recognized, indeed, it has become evident, that all technical progress is questionable and, in the end, destructive when there is no corresponding moral advancement. It is recognized that there is no reform of man or of humanity without moral renewal. But the call for morality ultimately remains without effect, because the criteria are veiled in a fog of discussions. In fact, man cannot bear sheer morality, he cannot live by it: it becomes a “law” for him that provokes contradiction and engenders sin. For this reason, where forgiveness–true forgiveness guaranteed by authority–is not recognized or believed, morality must be cut down to size so that the conditions of sinful action can never actually occur for the individual. Today’s discussion of morality is making great strides toward liberating man from guilt by precluding the occurrence of the conditions that make it possible. One is reminded of the mordant aphorism of Pascal: “Ecce patres qui tollunt peccata mundi!” (Behold the fathers who take away the sins of the world). According to these “moralists”, guilt simply no longer exists.
[From Called to Communion, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger]
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