Fintan O’Toole: How to survive a scandal and get everyone to forgive you

Instead of hiring very expensive crisis managers well known people caught up in scandals might take some tips from an admittedly unlikely source: the Catholic Church. Over the past 2,000 years, it has to have come up with some good ideas about giving up yer oul’ sins.

The most influential Irish invention of all time is the Christian sacrament of penance. It was Irish monks in their stony cells who solved one of the great problems of humanity: how to forgive and be forgiven.

Before they did this there was a bleak binary: you were either saved or you were damned. About 1,500 years ago the Irish developed a new and innately hopeful idea and took it with them as they moved as missionaries through western Europe. The idea, as Diarmaid MacCulloch puts it in his magisterial History of Christianity, was “not only that sin could be atoned for through penance but that it was possible to work out exact scales of what penance was appropriate for what sin: tariffs of forgiveness. They saw the spiritual life as a constant series of little setbacks, laboriously compensated for before the next little lapse.”

Penance sounds rather grim, but this was in fact a great act of liberation. It created a ritual through which the slate of sin could be wiped clean and a life could begin afresh.

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Like most Irish people my age I grew up with this old ritual of individual confession. It was a three-act drama. The first act was to make a full confession – a complete and honest account of whatever it was you had done. If you held stuff back or wrapped it in evasions it was a bad confession – not only that you could not be forgiven but you had now added another sin to your pile.

The second act was to “strive earnestly to be truly sorry” and adopt what we learned to call “a firm purpose of amendment”. You sincerely regretted your sins and intended not to repeat them. The third act to accept the penance – usually a set number of prayers you had to say. You were meant to try to do this with good grace.

It’s a formula those old monks could now sell to troubled clients. Tell the truth, be genuinely sorry, accept your penance.

And yet it is remarkable how almost everybody – including, of course, the Catholic Church itself – forgets to follow it. Especially if they have power and money they assume that they can get to the redemption bit without going through the other three stages. There are sins from which there is no return. There are also sins that double as crimes – in which case the rules of redemption are rather tougher.

But in ordinary matters of lust or greed or (in that other great Irish spiritual concept) “losing the run of yourself”, where no irreparable harm has been done, most people are quite forgiving. Especially if the guilty party is familiar and well-liked, there’s a natural desire to let bygones be bygones.

Instead of playing into this desire, however, powerful people so often react to being caught out by following, not the well-mapped road to redemption, but the winding path of denial. The full confession is now the self-serving and evasive narrative crafted by lawyers and spin doctors. Its subtext is always the same: I didn’t know anything.

Instead of sorrow there is anger. Or, more often, a weird fusion of the two: I’m terribly sorry if anything was done that should not have been done, but really it was those other b*****ds who did it. “By me” becomes “to me”.

The keynote is always victimhood. In place of acknowledgment and accountability there is the claim to be more sinned against than sinning. Whatever wrong I may have done is nothing compared to the wrong that is being done to me now.

There is a “purpose of amendment”, but it is decidedly not “firm”. It’s soft as mush: learnings have been taken. The “culture” (that invasive fungus that clings to the walls of institutions and makes everybody within them do bad things) will change. And instead of the gracious acceptance of penance there is the strategic deployment of restitution. Gestures are made, but they are calculated and calibrated.

This stuff seldom works. It is ineffective because it is does not satisfy the public’s need to feel that the wrong that has been done is being taken seriously by the person who did it. Those old Irish monks were doing their best to cut us poor humans some slack. They thought we were basically good and that, if we strayed offside, we should be given a way back.

But they also knew that if redemption was too cheap nobody would value it. There was a difference between cutting some slack and severing the whole rope of responsibility. Hence their “tariffs of forgiveness”:

If you’ve done wrong and you want to find a way back you have to be willing to pay the tariff. You have to go through that three-stage process that we might call a tripartite agreement. Otherwise, instead of a ritual drama of redemption, we are simply left with the feeling that we are being played.