298. Group guilt?
298. GROUP GUILT?
Is there such a thing as collective guilt? If not, how can a group ever be excommunicated?
No man should be excommunicated except for a mortal sin. Now sin consists in an act, and acts do not belong to communities but, generally speaking, to individuals. Wherefore individual members of a community can be excommunicated but not the community itself.
And although sometimes an act belongs to a whole multitude, as when many draw a boat, which none of them could draw by himself, yet it is not probable that a community would so wholly consent to evil that there would be no dissidents. Now God, Who judges all the earth, does not condemn the just with the wicked (Gen 18:25). Therefore the Church, who should imitate the judgments of God, prudently decided that a community should not be excommunicated, lest the wheat be uprooted together with the tares and cockle (S22,5).
Even when a group acts as a group—for instance, the crowd that shouted “Crucify him!” at Jesus’ trial—God does not judge the group, only the individual. Thus their self-curse, “His blood be upon us and upon our children”, was not accepted by God, and the centuries-old superstition that the Jewish people as a whole were cursed as “Christ-killers” was a perversion of the truth. It was an idea that came not from the mind and will of God (the ultimate source and standard of all truth) but from the Devil. How outrageous that many Christians in the past sided with that perversion instead of with God’s judgment! Why did they? In addition to anti-Semitism, two other reasons were probably the two false ideas of group guilt and of God as accepting self-curses.
The Church has always avoided two opposite yet correlative errors typical of the world: collectivism and individualism. God judges only individual souls; yet He judges them not only on what they have done to themselves but largely on what they have done to others. “Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me” (Mt 25:40). Individuals are supremely valuable, but they were created so that they could fulfill themselves by forgetting themselves and giving themselves away to others, as Jesus did. That is almost the definition of a saint.
If God were a collectivist, He would “condemn the just with the wicked”. He did not do that even to Sodom. If there was a single good man left in Sodom, that man was saved from eternal fire. But not from the temporal fire that fell on the city. Our virtue may give us an eternal fire insurance policy, but not a temporal fire insurance policy. In this world the good often suffer because of the sins of the wicked. Our sins harm others—that’s the bad news—but the good news is that our virtue also helps others. It is a strange but wonderful justice, appropriate for a world in which we row each other’s boat as well as our own.
The Church thus does not have the authority to excommunicate groups, since even God does not do that. Even if she could to it, even if she had the authority, she would not exercise it for a practical, prudential reason: “lest the wheat be uprooted together with the tares and cockle”. Even if it were within her legal right and authority, it would harm more than help. It might be argued that it is like capital punishment today: the state has the right to use it if necessary, but since it is no longer necessary, it would do more public harm than good in the current war against the culture of death.
The Church does have, however, the authority of interdict to a group—that is, the authority to deny the Sacraments to an organized group who are in rebellion. And she exercises that authority not to punish but to reform, to bring them back. This often worked, and therefore was often used, in the Catholic Middle Ages; it does not work well, and has not been used much, in modern times.