Reclaiming the Moral High Ground : IN HISTORY : France Admits War Guilt--But Can a Nation Repent?

Moral credibility, once lost, is hard to regain. We make the athletic outlaw sit in the penalty box; he re-enters the game under the vigilant eyes of the referee. The abuser must com pile a record of changed ways before his “I’m sorry” is rewarded with a simple “You’re forgiven; I trust you.”

Last week, France tried to buy back moral credibility, having lost some of it a half century ago. “France” repented through the words of its president, Jacques Chirac, who acknowledged that the Vichy government, with considerable citizen support, turned Jews over to Germany and the death camps during World War II. France repented , even though that verb not does quite match the acknowledgment of “collective error” that its president said would “forever sully” French history.

How do we make repenting for millions credible? It is a collective emotional act on behalf of people long dead and of unconsulted living citizens--some of whom do not share Chirac’s view. Among these was his predecessor, Francois Mitterrand, who covered up his own complicities with the Germans as a young man working for Vichy. He had refused to acknowledge the actions of France against the Jews. No doubt he was, and is, not alone in his attitudes.

Still, Chirac repented with and for France, and it is his action that inspires fresh thinking about what such words and actions mean. French Jewish leaders found him credible, expressed satisfaction--and hoped for the best.

The cynic can grumble that repenting for one’s ancestors is phony. In 1992, many Americans owned up to their foreparents’ sins in the “genocide” of Christopher Columbus. But often the tones of our contemporaries made them sound arrogant in respect to the people of 1492: You bad Italians, and Spaniards, and Catholics, and conquerors of old did bad things. We, the virtuous ones, born later and so wiser and better, would never have done such.

The cynic also says that a repentant Chirac heaps on dead people who cannot speak up now to explain their actions then. He can make a new generation feel virtuous, and thus blight their own moral credibility. But the cynics do not introduce a higher morality. They do not allow people like Chirac and the French nation to be taken at their word and for their attitudes: remorseful, dedicated to a new start.

After the cynics come the free-market analysts of the emotions. Collective and tardy repentance, they say, is cheap. All you have to do is to say your parents, or old people, or France in wartime conditions, did awful things, whereupon you can feel better and barter for credibility. Such regretting of the past provides an easy way to deal with present-day shortcomings. Have the French, currently troubled and ambivalent about how to treat Islamic Arab refugees and immigrants, really overcome the temptation to regard others as lesser people?

Maybe so, one can say in response to anyone who calls repentance cheap. True, but not the final word. If humans are ever to aspire to change, to seek justice and find a measure of shalom, they have to be allowed to search their hearts, speak as sincerely as they know how and be regarded without suspicion.

The French are not the only group repenters. This summer, the Southern Baptist Convention voted to regret and change--and then rose for repentant prayer. Why? The 150-year-old convention originated in America’s South-North split, based on Southern support for slavery, and was later admittedly racist. Today, it attracts thousands of African Americans who will judge the sincerity of the Baptists’ “We’re sorry.”

The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, my own church, two years ago publicly acknowledged Martin Luther’s anti-Jewish ravings and their consequences. To my knowledge, this denomination is not marked by anti-Semitism. But Lutherans’ repentance for Luther’s rages was an attempt to make clear that the ideas on this subject expressed by their otherwise revered founder were to be given no credence.

Last month, Pope John Paul II surprisingly acknowledged wrongs past and present by the Catholic Church against women. He called for resolve by believers to work for new understandings. Those who wanted him to leave openings for the ordination of women were disappointed, but even Catholic feminist critics welcomed his signals of regret and resolve.

What goes on when churches and nations repent? Churches, first. They and their members repent in the face of God, presumably struck by awe and moved by transcendent love. They are to repent individually, not only in their creedal collectives. Believers have voluntarily united in faith. If unrepentant, they have a choice to dissent or depart. If they believe in a just God who calls them to repentance, they subject themselves to the highest standards of scrutiny. Watch the Baptists, the Lutherans, the Catholics.

Nations may do their repenting “under God,” to use the phrase by which most Americans signal their intent to be judged under the eyes of the transcendent. Thus, Thomas Jefferson, guilty of racism and himself a slaveholder, reminded his generation that a just God would hold them to account. Thus, Abraham Lincoln, guilty of relying on partial measures in respect to enslaved blacks, constantly called on the justice of God and the “better angels” of the citizens’ nature. Yet, concepts of life “under God” in something as diverse as a republic are necessarily diffuse, thin, ambiguous.

The French president did not invoke God. Citizens there repent and resolve with or without having in mind the all-seeing eye of a just God, the forgiving eye of a merciful one. Chirac’s words and acts express a high humanism, something of great potential value in the lives of individuals and nations.

Philosopher Max Scheler, on whom the Pope wrote a doctoral dissertation, taught well what repentance can mean. Repenting, he wrote, “is equivalent to re-appraising part of one’s past life and shaping for it a mint-new worth and significance.” In the face of those who say repentance is worthless because the past is “unalterable,” Scheler says nothing is unalterable if a change in attitude means a reorienting of the self to the present and the future. Then follows the life course in which one wins moral credibility from those offended and hurt.

“It is not repented but only unrepented guilt,” Scheler says, “that holds the power to bind and determine the future.” We learn to think that “young forces, as yet guiltless, are dormant in every soul.” But, in his memorable metaphor, the souls are stifled “by the tangled growths of oppressive guilt” that have thickened in those souls. Chirac recognized such smothering undergrowth in the life of his nation, and sought to tear it away.

The repentant nation does not simply ask, “What evil did my ancestors do?” After reviewing past action, its question becomes: “Of what evil am I, are we, now capable--or even guilty?” Repentance then can help make one mint-new, as it were, to experience something similar to falling in love or seeing the world from a new perspective, but most of all, to being liberated.

So France has an opportunity to be free of the lies it told during and after World War II. Free from the duplicities and evasions of the Mitterrand generation. Free from the enslaving cover-ups that keep the unrepentant so busy. Hymnist Isaac Watts mourned and warned, “There’s no repentance in the grave.” Nor can there be forgiving by the Jewish victims themselves. Chirac spoke up now anyhow, wanting to address the record before the grave swallows the last of the secrets, obscures the guilt and cuts off the opportunities for change.

A little girl once tried to define repentance: “It’s to be sorry enough to quit.” The century ends with ethnic and racial hatreds at least as visible and intense as they were a half-century ago, when too few “quit” hating. Whether Chirac’s France can set an example for a world that needs to be penitent and sorry, to quit hating or acting upon the hates, will be the test of the quality of the nation’s repentance. As it proves itself, seeking moral credibility: Watch France.