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This week, in response to a discussion on the Windrush Generation, the Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby, has spoken about institutional racism in the Church of England. Speaking with candour — and, I think, showing leadership — the archbishop confessed his personal shame as well as spoke of a broader shame he feels in looking at the history of the church’s power.

I’m Catholic, and when I was a boy, I learnt about confession. We went to confession once a month, to make sure our souls were clean. The worry was that if you died with serious sin on your soul, you might not make it to heaven; you might instead end up in hell. It was at once a threat and a fantasy, something we learnt to both ignore and fear.

These days I don’t think of confession as something that I need to do to avoid going to hell.

However, I do think of confession as something we should do when we have made hell for other people.

Often, there can be an individual purity approach to institutional sin: so, perhaps because I haven’t used a racial slur, I feel like I don’t need to say sorry. This ignores the structural sin — the original sin perhaps: That The Institutions of Many Christian Organisations have been established and maintained by and for white — and usually male — advantage.

Confession is an old word, easy to say and hard to do. To make a public confession satisfies two powerful needs: for truth to be made public, and — sometimes — for a scapegoat to be offered. It can be risky to confess publicly. I admire leaders who do it and wish more — particularly in my own Church — would do the same.

So public confessions like the Archbishop of Canterbury’s are important. So often — today and in the past — there has been denial, or abdication of responsibility in light of racism.

While public confession is important, there’s also more asked:

In the gospels, Jesus calls people to repentance, not just confession. Repentance seems like an antiquated word now, confined to the vocabularies of those with medieval approaches to morality. However, in the Greek of the gospel literature, the word used for repentance is metanoia — a word meaning change: Change of mind, change of direction, change of behaviour.

The Archbishop’s words came in response to a motion initiated by Andrew Moughtin-Mumby, a vicar of British-Jamaican heritage. He was asking for institutional apology, yes, and he also asked for action — or, in another word, repentance — stamp out racism with great effort and urgency.

Words like confession and sin and repentance sometimes seem outdated. But when we acknowledge the sins that have been forced upon other people, what else can be done but to acknowledge sin, to confess and then — with courage and conviction — to repent, to make change.

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