Dear Benedict
A large chunk of your Rule is about what action the community should take towards those members who go wrong (chapter 23-30). It’s a tricky section to interpret nearly 20 centuries after you wrote it. Social attitudes and culture have changed a great deal, as I’ve mentioned before. There are quite diverse views about punishment, and a move away from, for example, physical punishment especially for young people, should be noted. You use words infrequently used today outside church circles (and even in them) like excommunicate.
It’s a serious and strong word for you to use as we see from the examples you give. A person who has done wrong is removed from community in steps: at mealtimes, at prayer times and eventually those unable to amend their faults have to leave. Such steps are common in most communities because a community cannot be a community if there are disruptive rule-breakers inside. Our criminal justice system is supposed to work on similar lines. We may seek to guide and change such individuals but what if we can’t?
The issue has become a very challenging one in our time. The central notion of confession and forgiveness means we like to think anyone can be a better person. Yet we also see damage caused by those who cross the lines as far as acceptable behaviour is concerned. Yet looking back, we can also see where, historically, lines were crossed and nothing happened, lines were crossed and there was no transparency of action, or lines weren’t crossed but someone was blamed or disciplined falsely, perhaps due to inherent prejudices and bias. So even the community can get doing wrong, wrong, or even not get doing right, right.
When a community makes a mistake against another person and punishes them in whatever way for not doing wrong but other wrong doers get away without punishment, then a bad situation has been made worse. It is charges of this sort against the Church in its various forms, and covered up or defended by some insiders, that has contributed to a widespread lack of trust amongst some outsiders. If, for example, a regulation says, a rule breaker must appear before a regulating body within 3 months and this doesn’t happen for 9 months, there should be a good reason. If one person seems to have been given exemption from a specific rule that others have to obey, again it needs to be clear why.
But most of us prefer to keep our wrongs to ourselves, and at least out of the public space (harder today than you might imagine). We also prefer to select which rules we need to keep and which don’t need to apply to us. All of which is in the forefront of my mind as we approach a 2nd (predictable) COVID19 national lock down in England (other parts of the UK may follow different lock down rules). We will have different ideas of what communal priorities should be.
Having had several decades of emphasis on extending life expectancy across the population with various health campaigns, screening and so on, we’ve now appear to have hit a wall. First some people now think that some health conditions are not worth surviving with and others think some forms of older age are worthless. Both of these are very serious communal wrongs. But if they become widespread views how will we deal with them?
Economic stability has been pushed above personal vulnerability, mostly by fear. We have seen, in previous situations, how the poor are badly served. Their life expectancy, quality of life and health are all likely to suffer more than other sections of the population. None of us wants to be in this group so we grope towards economic stability and leave the poor to fend for themselves. The MPs voting against the extension of free school meals in the holidays recently had all got good reasons for doing so, and none of them was hungry. They played on the fear of many who had been hungry in the past saying we can’t make the money stretch for ever. As a result even some people who have been hungry backed the decision hoping they’d not be on the hungry list this time.
In Britain today, no one needs to be hungry.
A community is a challenging place to live. It’s not just about being nice to the people next door or picking up your dog waste. Sometimes we learn the most about community when we do get things wrong. Putting things right is often much more difficult.
From the remembered gospel: Forgive us the wrongs we do as we forgive those who wrong us.
Help me to get things right!
From a Friend of Scholastica and a Member of the Lay Community of St Benedict.