Today is All Saints’ Day. Let’s talk about sinners, for a change. After all, none of the saints were immaculately conceived, like the Blessed Virgin Mary. Although they had been officially recognized and proclaimed as such, all of them were like us – sinners.

Many saints, in fact, considered themselves as the greatest sinners.

They were ravaged by the thought that their sins caused all the pain and suffering of people in the world. I would like to think that they became saints because of this overwhelming sense of sin. And the reason why there are so few saints today is because we have gradually eliminated sin in our vocabulary.

In his book Whatever Became Of Sin? Karl Menninger points out how our view of sin has changed over the years. Priests used to talk about sin and considered it the root of all moral and religious problems. Then sin was equated with “crime,” a civil problem, so it was put solely in the hands of the police and unscrupulous lawyers. Society began to hold the view that anything that was not illegal was moral. Soon, sin was identified with “choice,” which was supposed to be a product of social, genetic, or environmental conditioning.

Finally, psychologists and psychoanalysts relegated sin into the realm of the unconscious. We are no longer held responsible for the sins we commit. After all, sin is not a conscious act, but a disease which can be cured by medication or therapy.

A few years back, the editors of the Wall Street Journal wrote a piece that partly reads: “Sin isn’t something that many people have spent much time talking about or worrying about through the years. But we will say this for sin; at least it offered a frame of reference for personal behavior. When the frame was dismantled, guilt wasn’t the only thing that fell away; we also lost (our sense) of personal responsibility.”

Recognizing the fact that we are sinners does not mean engaging in an orgy of guilt, remorse, and despair. It means making us fully aware of the depth of the moral crisis in which we find ourselves. It means looking beyond the Constitutions and other political structures for solutions to our problems. It means making decisions not based solely on valid legal constraints and limits, or on mathematical calculation of unwanted consequences, or on obsessive predictions of worst-case scenarios. It means taking responsibility for our behavior and its consequences.

We see now the tragic consequences of the loss of our sense of sin which is slowly corroding our personal and national ethical foundation. Observe the multitude lining up for Holy Communion and the trickle of penitents going to confession. Sin and shame are correlative. Both sin and shame seem to have vanished from our political landscape. Has a politician done a shameful act? He will hire powerful image-makers for a quick make-over. Has he committed a sin that cries to heaven for justice? He will hire a battery of lawyers to make sure he is acquitted.

A person who has lost his sense of sin is prone to self-deception. He convinces himself that he has done nothing wrong, and declares: “The problem is not me; it is THEY.” Or, he avers that the wrong he has done is a private matter between him and God. He thus invokes the law of privacy to appease his conscience. In truth, there is no such thing as a private sin. In the body of Christ, we belong to one another, we affect one another, and we cannot escape one another. St.  Paul wrote, “If one member suffers, all the members suffer with it; if one member is honored, all the members rejoice with it” (lCor. 12:26). Whether we like it or not, for better or for worse, we are all connected. Sin, even the most private, destroys society.

Sin is deceptively subtle. It rarely presents itself to us in its true colors. It comes to us, like Judas, with a kiss; a serpent, with a luscious, forbidden fruit; a crony, offering a blank check worth millions as a gift; a rich businessman promising instant victory in an election; advertisers selling products that allegedly redeem us from obesity, ugliness, and dirt; or capitalistsgiving people employment and houses while destroying our natural resources and environment.

The loss of our sense of sin has led us to DUPLICITY. Each of us has become two persons: the authentic self suppressed by the other self in whom pretense has become a habit, in whom lying has become a way of life. Sin brings division. This is evident in the extreme divisiveness and factionalism in our country. We cannot seem to agree on anything, and unity appears a distant reality.

We are sinners. And it is our personal and collective sinfulness that cause all the maladies we suffer. It is when we recognize this that the movement of “grace,” the first stirrings of repentance, often begins. When we allow this to take its course, we begin our transformation from sinners to saints.