good stuff from Mark Shea's blog:
"I Have Said Elsewhere...
that mercy, in addition to being God's greatest quality is, when demanded of us, his most appalling one. We love the idea of mercy for ourselves. We hate it and regard it as a travesty of justice when applied to others, especially others whose sins hurt us. I recently wrote that part of the duty of laypeople is, of course, to extend forgiveness to the priests and bishops who have so agonizingly betrayed us. I got complaints back from folks saying, in effect, that we are under no obligation to forgive if they don't acknowledge their sin. This attitude, in addition to being flatly against the model of Jesus Christ and St. Stephen, who forgave their unrepentant murderers, is a formula for modeling the American Church on that happy land known as the Balkans, where people remember everything and learn nothing.
Yes, the perp may go on living in denial till the day he dies. But if we forgive, we do not have to live with his having endless power over us till the day we die. Refusal to forgive is like taking poison and expecting the other guy to die.
And from another Sheaite entry:
A priest I know once pointed out to me that one of the marks of the satanic is that it claims to see right through you, to identify you with your sins and pin you to the wall like a bug on a card. The devil, in speaking to Jesus, says "I know who you are!" He does the same to us. He says "I see right through you. You are your sins. This is who you really are!" In contrast, Jesus never does this. Indeed, in the miracle of grace he distinguishes us from our sins and frees us from them. Peter says, "Go away from me, for I am a sinful man" and Jesus doesn't say, "You're damn right you are! You sicken me!". He liberates Peter from that. He calls him by a new name and gives him a new life.
Something that troubles me about the way in which we treat sin is this tendency to speak as though our sins name us. "Now we know who Jesse Jackson--or Cardinal Law--or Whoever--really is." The answer of the Faith is, "No you don't. Not when you are naming people by their sins." Sin is what destroys persons. It's not what constitutes them. To the degree that we sin we are not who we really are. Doesn't mean that we can't sin, of course. Radical evil is a reality. Nor does it mean that we should not speak clearly of evil when it is committed. But when we say that "This is who X really is" we are in fact delighting in evil and rejoicing in a lie. The point of the gospel is not that our sins name us, but that Jesus comes to free us from our sins and really name us. It's a reality we as Catholic will have to cling to, not least because of the temptation we will feel to indulge it as more betrayals from our clergy come to light.
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