Who (Or What) Is Responsible?

Structure and Agency; Systems and Individuals

Who is responsible for sin? Or should I ask: what is responsible for sin?

Before I dive into that question, let me back up to about forty years ago in my life, at a time when I was doing graduate work in Geography. I got caught flatfooted by a question from the professor concerning two divergent explanations for human events: structure, and agency. (I had to eventually admit my lack of preparation and do some studying on the matter.) The short answer was that structure explained human events by saying that individuals really didn’t matter, because systems and forces caused people to do things (migrate, fight, etc.). Agency was a re-statement of the great man theory of history, supposedly discredited in the 20th century, suggesting that individuals rose and made their mark on the course of events. Think Napoleon, Hitler, Martin Luther, et al.

I was reminded of this while reading an analysis of Magnifica Humanitas by Bishop Strickland, in which he wrote: “As a result, the roots of evil begin to appear primarily structural rather than spiritual.” He was suggesting that Pope Leo XIV (and his co-writers) were downplaying sin and personal responsibility for sin. This post is a short exploration of the idea of “structures of sin” and personal responsibility.

Peter Kwasniewski, in his laudable book on Catholic Social Teaching, His Reign Shall Have No End, uses the term “structures” and “structures of sin” several times. His references led me to Pope John Paul II’s 1984 Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation Reconciliatio et Poenitentia (Reconciliation and Penance or RP for short). (CCC 1869 also mentions the term and the document.)

RP number 16 is key. In it, John Paul differentiates in his careful way the differences and divergences between “social sin” and personal responsibility. The Holy Father more than once comes back to a crucial truth of the Catholic Faith: “there is nothing so personal and untransferable in each individual as merit for virtue or responsibility for sin.” He expounds on this, by noting that pressures can influence people without changing their responsibility, because they are free. Indeed, he turns suppositions about “structures of sin” on their head, by mentioning that the sins of individuals have a social component and effect the larger group. Furthermore, he elucidates that even large-scale sinful actions involving masses of people still have some aspect of personal responsibility: “However, to speak even analogically of social sins must not cause us to underestimate the responsibility of the individuals involved.” He follows that by arguing against the notion of blaming sin “on some vague entity or anonymous collectivity such as the situation, the system, society, structures or institutions.” In short: “At the heart of every situation of sin are always to be found sinful people.”

Solzhenitsyn’s writing presented structures (like the Gulag Archipelago) as real, but he knew that the nexus of good and evil is still the human heart.

History is still asking: structures or the great man? Theology has sometimes fallen into two similar camps: predestination vs. free will. (Who can fight against God’s predestinarian universe structure?) In contemporary political/cultural thinking, the left often explains things in a structural way, in which people who don’t have everything they think they deserve identify as victims. Victims need allies and a counter-structure to fight for them to overthrow the unjust structures.

But surprisingly, many who have been identified as “the right” also explain their perceived woes in structural terms. Their victimhood comes via the deep state and conspiracies. Libertarians and conspiracy theorists blame either a tyrannical economic-political system or vast inchoate and murky forces as dominating structures.

How does this apply to the crisis in the Church? Let’s start with the Lord’s question to the disciples: Who do you say I am? Is He the Greatest Man of history? Or the Messiah dictated by Jewish understanding and bound to act in certain expected ways?

Or what about the application of dogma, the Magisterium, and canon law? When can there be exceptions? There is an emphasis on the “pastoral,” and Vatican II was declared to be a pastoral council. “Pastoral” is not really about ministering to persons, but rather a way to ignore the law. In that sense it might be a counter-structure to the scaffold of Church teaching of the first 1900+ years.

At our individual judgment, I don’t think there will be recourse to some “structure” that was responsible for our falls, transgressions, and shortcomings. I think, from what the Church has tried to teach me, that it will be “agency” all the way. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. There will be no hiding behind one’s office or peers or the crowd. May God have mercy on us all and on each one of us individually.

You can Buy Greg a Coffee at this link. I donate funds from here to an orphanage in India run by the Consoling Sisters. Money earned from my Crisis articles goes to a great Catholic school for boys in Kentucky, St. Andrew’s Academy.

I have two self-published books available on Amazon; both are in verse: Against the Alchemists, which is a loosely-linked catechism in verse; and, A Verse Companion to Romano Guardini’s Sacred Signs, a sort of commentary on Guardini’s wonderful little book on many aspects of the liturgy and worship.