There was a child psychologist named Kohlberg who used to be quite quoted in educational circles on the subject of the moral development or moral awareness of people. He thought there were five stages: 1) especially as children, we conclude that something is bad if I get punished for doing it. 2) As a bit of a development on stage one, something is seen as "good" if one gets rewarded for doing it. 3) A kind of break through comes into play when we reward ourselves, or punish other people, for keeping or breaking the "rules." Usually ten year olds are big about rules, and people often mistake boys fighting about "rules" without understanding that such debate is a major part of their games. 4) Many people start to ask in their early adolescence about what would bring the greatest amount of good for themselves, and that is not exactly good until people claim that this would be the best for everyone to follow. 5) Some people start talking about "values" and a code by which they live, but like step number four, this is usually a refinement (or regression) back to our rule and reward periods of stages two and three. The real fifth stage in moral development was when someone came to a conclusion that there were timeless values and insights into the design of creation by God in which some things are truly right or wrong. Kohlberg thought most people never really got to the last stage of moral development.
An extremely large, indeed a disappointedly large, part of the population never gets beyond the thought that something is only bad if they get caught and punished. One priest once told me about a niece who in answer to a question about the superior-ity of God’s laws to human laws opined that the latter were more important because the police could arrest those who violated the prescriptions and prohibitions of people. In such a world, people might wonder why the have gotten away with some bad act. Actually, it is terrible to get away with something bad because this leaves you a bad person, period and end of report. However, there may be some reasons why God allowed this.
Nathaniel Hawthorne once wrote a story about a rather severely harsh judge who imagined that people could imitate him in never doing anything wrong. At a crisis in his life, an angel showed the judge that he almost killed someone in a forgotten barroom fight, but a thrown bottle missed its target. Another time when the man desperately needed money and he was going to do something unethical, a sudden streak of lucrative cases came the man’s way. Another incident of forgotten adultery never came out as a blessing to the man’s wife and children. The author wanted his character to see that the man, however, was murderous, thieving, unfaithful, and, now, was about to be called to God’s Tribunal.
While I often think that people who have their faults discovered and broadcasted are deprived of the opportunity of effecting their own personal conversion, the people who will have to answer greatly are those who God has allowed to have undetected but not repented faults. None of us have gotten away with anything that caused Our Lord to die on the Cross. We do not believe in Jesus as He is if we do not acknowledge ourselves as we are.

Of course, when we think of our own mothers making that statement, we go back to a time in youthful memory when we would have disputed our mother’s contention of omniscience but, especially if you were a man, thought the better of entering into such a power struggle.  The “child” Mom knows is often enough the child Mom wants to know, the one she wants to remember is still essentially there with, at best, only minor alterations that she hopes will be only temporary, anyway.  To give Mom her due, she “knows” this child in this particular way because she has the resources to relate to that person in that way.  She has a great deal of love for that child, and she knows herself according to the way she wants to express that love for “that” child.

The fact is that few of us really know the person that we can be.  We might have an idea about the person we want to be, or the person we think we have become.  However, different situations challenge the security and completeness of that person.  Sometimes anyone of us can feel so broken-up because what we always did, because it always worked, is not working as well or at all with this new person or new situation.  The person who is the “mother” she has imagined herself to be is challenged and stretched, a bit, and I can only suppose how frightening that well might be.

Did you ever think that children of any age are constantly forcing us to reexamine who you are and who you are becoming?  Most mothers shake their heads at the end of graduation days, their child’s wedding day, their child becoming a parent, and sometimes on the day of a child’s funeral, and they wonder about how they met all of the challenges, the joys, the sorrows, and how quickly it all now seems to have gone.  They look at themselves, and they complain that a part of their person seems ripped away on certain occasions, because “that child” is not coming back in the same old way.  But, “that mother” is not exactly there, anymore, either.  She has become a more complete person, perhaps.  Maybe, the best thing a mother might say is that, “I know my self, I know my child, and I know that what is good for each of us is something different.”  Better for anyone of us to know ourselves well to understand what we imagine we see in others.

The Catholic Services Appeal helps us support a number of ministries for whom many parishes in the United States have individual second collections on Sundays. These ministries include: Aid to the Church in Central and Eastern Europe, our offerings help people who endured years of oppression under the old Soviet Union to rebuild from the ground-up, on the one hand, and compete with terribly challenging attacks from the modern world on the other.  It rebuilds historic churches and pilgrimage points, makes Catholic Mass Communication programs possible especially over the vast wastes of Siberia and Kamchatka, and trains leaders for ministry. The Catholic Communications Campaign develops programs for television and radio about our religion for national broadcasting:  Our parish will have someone join the faith who first found out about it by watching a program developed by the Catholic Communications Campaign. The Catholic Home Missions support the efforts of very small and scattered communities of Catholics to keep their faith and identity, to assist the priests who bring Mass to them, and to train the lay leaders who often must run religious education and ministry programs over whole Counties, and they are looking for people who would give their lives to this service. One nurse became a nun who drives a mobile clinic in a RV, and the Catholic Home Missions make this possible. Peter’s Pence, a name which recalls then Medieval daily wage of one pence, and one day’s labor a year was given to the Pope to support his ministry. The work of the Vatican for world peace, for order in the Church, and for charity and justice deserves our loyal support as Catholics who accept, as Jesus did, the will of God the Father to first reveal the fullness of the truth about the Christ to Peter, as well as Jesus’ consequent insistence that he would build his Church with Peter. Our present Pope seems like such a beautiful man of towering intellect and great love, and we support and enhance his ability to minister to the world with our offerings.  I wonder if you are as tired as I am of hearing attacks on the Pope because he wrote 25 years ago that a priest accused of child abuse ought to get a fair trial.  Censorship by the press is obscuring the truth. The Religious Retirement Fund provides assistance to religious orders of women, mainly, and some brothers who worked in teaching and helping professions without salary. Many of their orders became smaller and were unable to assume the large burdens of financial care for elderly members, some of whom were the last surviving members of those orders. Our Diocese has reached out to the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, Haiti, by establishing a farm there, and its biggest problem in that lawless country is security. Habitat for Humanity cooperates with our Diocese each year in building a house for a family in need, and our Catholic Services Appeal monies go to those needs. Next week, we learn a bit more about the services that our Diocese provides through the C.S.A. to Catholics and other people in our own Diocese.  

Surely one of the most terrible experiences for anyone happens when public denunciation has preceded private and   personal conversion.  A person like the woman caught in her sin from today’s Gospel is more likely to react than reform.  Possibly arising from the instinct for self preservation, the caught person still works out of the mental model they have been using on his or her own self to deny that there was really ever a serious problem.  Such a person knows that all of the people who now know the worse thing about him or her never really cared about the caught person, though people used him or her.  The caught person knows that everyone else has their own hidden secrets, anyway.  The caught person objects that his or her own part in the affair is being treated differently than the other person or persons        involved, implicated, or invested in the offense.  The caught     person focuses on the life that has been taken away from them,   despite the fact that it well may be that they should not have had all the ill gained or wrongly spend circumstances of it.  With too many things happening, and despite an often defiant front shown to the world, the caught person mostly wants the spotlight to be turned-off and all the drama and drastic assaults to just simply go away from them.  The caught person reads in the eyes of all that they have gone through a strange metamorphosis from being a person to becoming a problem.  Almost every inmate in any jail will admit that he or she is guilty of some, indeed, of many faults, mistakes, and crimes…except for the one for which he was     actually convicted and for which she is actually serving time!   Although convicts may be an extreme example, I think that people who have their sins and faults thrown at them actually have a    further complication, if not an impediment, to conversion.

Pray for people who have been “caught,” because their experience of the incidents of discovery obscures their personal conversion.  If these people must suffer in this life, can you imagine what your undiscovered sins will cost you when we must answer for ourselves in the next life.  Get into the habit confession.  Whatever your excuses to commit the sinful act, reflect a little bit more on the identity of the person you are becoming who would even   consider the sinful option.