Being a parent of small kids, it is not unusual for me to find myself forcing a toddler to apologise to another child. It’s a familiar scene — your three year old snatches a toy from someone else’s two year old in the playground, and you march him over to insist he says sorry to the (usually bemused) victim. Or there’s some pushing and shoving outside nursery and another forced apology is required after someone else’s child falls and hits her head on a gatepost.

Apologies made under duress are laughably ineffective. At best, toddlers theatrically avoid eye-contact and do a dramatic, uncaring shrug at the moment of mumbling the word “sorry”. On one occasion, after my grip was loosened on his wrist because he’d said it, one of our kids landed a punch square on the other child’s chest. 

The classic expression of such a faux-sorry is the politicians’ apology, scripted by a spin-aware spad

It is well-known that social media has detrimental effects on the mental health of adolescent girls, because impossible standards of a supposed beauty erode their self-esteem. Less well-known is the effect of the parenting Instagram content on mums and dads. I was looking at this stuff for a few weeks last year — endless posts from parenting consultants and experts telling me that nearly everything we’re doing with our children is wrong and damaging. Those sugary snacks they eat are carcinogenic. They don’t get enough sleep to ensure appropriate cognitive development. My way of admonishing bad behaviour is emotionally toxic, and so on.    

I stopped looking at this stuff because it was impossible to maintain it all. This summer the kids will mostly be grateful for this fact — it’ll mean more sugary snacks and late nights, albeit with the occasional unreconstructed bollocking. The problem is, though, that the content gets under your skin and can be difficult to forget. One of the posts I saw last year was about the evils of insisting your child says sorry. Forcing a preschool child to apologise is abusive, it said, because they don’t understand the reason why what they did is wrong, you’re pressuring them to say a word they neither understand nor mean, and you’re thus setting them up to think insincerity is the way to get on in life. 

Thomas Aquinas claimed that moral culpability requires that the offender is at the age of reason, which is around 7 years old. My experience with our kids bears this out. From around that age you can begin to reason with them more effectively — “think what the world would be like if everyone stole other peoples’ toys” / “how would you feel if you were pushed and hit your head on the gatepost”, etc. Maybe it is wrong to force an apology, but what else are you to do? Insisting on an insincere apology provides the tools and social etiquette for when the use of reason can render such apologies sincere.

What is a genuine apology? It includes an acceptance of how the misdemeanour felt to the other party, and also an understanding that the misdemeanour was wrong. Both elements are important, but all too often today only the first element comes into play. This is as if to say — “I’m sorry that my perfectly well-intentioned deed was interpreted negatively by yourself”. The classic expression of such a faux-sorry is the politicians’ apology, scripted by a spin-aware spad delicately tiptoeing around the boundaries of plausible deniability. It isn’t an admission of guilt, merely an acknowledgment of the other’s pain. It threatens surreptitious vindication. 

I was reminded of all this when Bishop Robert Barron rebuked the apology from the Olympic Committee for the opening ceremony’s attempt to mock the Last Supper at the Paris opening ceremony. He said this “so-called” sorry was “anything but an apology”, and was rather a “masterpiece of woke duplicity”. He doubted that the pastiche was well-intentioned — saying that for all their grandstanding about inclusivity, Christian believers are never included. He said that a genuine sorry would have been something like: “This was a mistake, it should never have been done, we’re truly sorry about it”. 

If everyone has their own truth, the summit of wrongdoing is mere hurt feelings relative to some group’s truth

I don’t disagree with Bishop Barron, but the discussion points to an important distinction about how apologies function, and why genuine apologies — and therefore genuine forgiveness — are so rarely encountered in today’s culture.  

A genuine apology includes an acceptance of how the misdemeanour felt to the other party, and an understanding that the misdemeanour was wrong. This second element means the misdemeanour was wrong in-and-of-itself, not merely wrong because the other party took offence. Yet, if we’re going to speak confidently about right and wrong, we need to be able to speak confidently about shared values, about shared notions of truth, and about shared ethical norms. 

In the case of the Last Supper pastiche, this fulsome sort of apology isn’t actually possible, because it’s clear those behind the scene don’t believe the fundamental tenets of the religion that was mocked. The best form of apology that could be hoped for is that partial apology that acknowledges hurt, but not genuine culpability.  

There are no easy answers to this — it’s just a fact of cultural and religious plurality. Neither Bishop Barron nor I can expect everyone to believe in Transubstantiation, however much we might want them to. But this impasse points to the deeper reasons why today’s culture is so mercilessly unforgiving. This is a culture with profound disagreements over such fundamentals as truth, human nature, life, communities, and religion. If everyone has their own truth, the summit of wrongdoing is mere hurt feelings relative to some group’s truth. Apologies are then just about ensuring some group feels “seen”, and then just acknowledgement without absolution. This is a culture in which a genuine admission of guilt – acknowledging that something was truly wrong and not merely hurtful — is a culture which cannot fully forgive.