Francis' Words about the Archbishop of Paris and the Most Serious Sins. By Maestro Aurelio Porfiri
The media focused on his words after accepting the resignation of the Archbishop of Paris Michel Aupetit, accused of too casual behaviour towards a woman. The archbishop had assured that he had never gone beyond behaviour that was perhaps not appropriate, but not of a carnal nature.
When asked why he had accepted the resignation, the Pope replied:
"Carry out your own investigation. Because there is a danger of saying: ‘He has been condemned.’ But who condemned him? Public opinion, the chatter. But what did he do? 'We don't know. Something'. If you know why, say so. I, on the contrary, cannot answer. You will not know because it was a lack on his part, a lack against the sixth commandment, but not a total lack but little caresses and massages. This is the charge.
This is sin, but it is not of the gravest sins, for the sins of the flesh are not the gravest. The most serious sins are those that are more ‘angelic’: pride, hatred. These are more serious.
So, Aupetit is a sinner like I am. I don't know if you feel that way, but perhaps he is like Peter, the bishop on whom Christ founded the Church. How come the community of that time accepted a sinful bishop who had committed such 'angelic' sins like denying Christ? But it was a normal Church which was used to feeling sinful always. Everyone. It was a humble Church.
You can see that our Church is not used to having a sinful bishop. We pretend that 'he's a saint, my bishop'. No, this is Little Red Riding Hood. We are all sinners.
But when chatter grows and grows and grows and takes away a person's good name, that man will not be able to rule, because he has lost his reputation, not because of his sins which are like those of Peter, like mine, like yours: it's sin! - but because of the chatter of the people responsible for telling the story.
A man whose fame has been taken away in this way, publicly, cannot govern. This is an injustice. For this reason, I accepted Aupetit's resignation not on the altar of truth, but on the altar of hypocrisy. This is what I want to say".
Now, the Pope says some very fair things, especially towards the end of his reply in which he states that certain facts are often blown up more by a media process that fatally steers the narrative in certain directions than by a serious fault.
I have repeatedly observed how sex is used in an ideological way because it is the easiest way to catch us in weaknesses. Sexual sins according to nature (consenting men and women, but outside the marriage bond) are serious precisely because of the relative ease of falling for them. So, I don't think Francis meant to say that these sins are not serious, but that there are more serious ones.
There are some authors of spirituality who observe that other sins can be more serious because they require a deeper act of the will to be perpetrated, such as those having to do with money.
In sex our will is preyed upon by passion, for money and similar sins this is not so. In this sense we can concluded that those sins are more serious.
Jesuit Father Giovanni Blandino, whom I had the pleasure of knowing, included sexual sins in the category of ‘half-perceived' sins. But it is precisely because of their insidious nature that we must be careful not to make them appear as second-order sins.