sin of the religious corporation called ‘church’
Yet another, to date, unknown residential school grave yard of aboriginal children. There will be more. Like all nations and faith systems (corporate religion), Christianity has its sins to bear but how does it bear them?
What is sin? The churches (all denominations including protestant, eastern and roman catholic) have tended to consider as ‘among the greatest of sins’ anything related to chastity, when chastity is ignored or broken.
- Yet, until quite recently churches have mostly protected clergy and lay people from outside inquiry or law who break rules around chastity . Even now, some persons in special cases (who have a name, a position or influence) are protected from public view or private censure.
- Such persons fight to maintain their innocence rather than (if indeed guilty) confess their sin to their superior and go through a process of repentance. What occurs for them outside the church’s sphere is not the church’s problem.
- If a person in a church who does not have a known name, an important position or influence) are usually thrown under the ecclesiastical bus.
- The churches deign to judge as sinners those who are weakest.
- And churches tend to overemphasize good and just actions by some individuals and some policies as descriptive of the whole. When policies and some individuals do cause harm, they deny any connection to the whole or obfuscate the matter through evasion or corporate ignorance or fighting civil law.
What is ‘sin’? Sin, as one definition puts it, is ‘an immoral act or transgression of divine law’. What all the churches agree upon is that acts of ‘chesed’ (love) are the most important of divine law, the most important commandments.
The church will not apply this definition to its corporate bodies. The the activities of members of the corporation in maintaining the residential school system that have caused enormous harm and ongoing suffering for aboriginal people. No other word for what happened is more important as a descriptor than ‘sin’. Until the churches can apply the definition to individuals within the corporate structure and to the structure itself that continue after each individual passes on, then the corporate structure will remain a corporation m and not the Body of Messiah (Christ) and it ill continue to ignore, obfuscate and blame others for its failure of Christian conscience.