Sin No More
Apparently, there's no such thing as sin anymore.
I needed to fact-check a couple of points in my Ignatian Examen handout. Rather than head down to my office to get my tattered and taped Louis J. Puhl, S.J. 1951 edition of The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, I thought I could do a quick Google search and find what I needed. I was wrong.
Instead, I found a few websites featuring modernized versions of The Examen with no mention of sin. This isn’t shocking, given that talk of personal sin has fallen out of favor in plenty of circles, supplanted by social sins and whatnot.1 When you reimagine The Examen to get sin out of its scope and you end up with this vague “modern” take:
Become aware of God’s presence.
Review the day with gratitude.
Pay attention to your emotions.
Choose one feature of the day and pray from it.
Look toward tomorrow.
To departure from Ignatius’ own words and appease modern sensibilities, the website claims: “In the Spiritual Exercises, St. Ignatius suggests five parts to this prayer. But there are many versions adapted for different circumstances and experiences. There is no set form or ‘correct’ way to pray the Examen, only guidelines for you as you review your day with God.” This “new” version is still a review of the day and that’s about the only point of contact with the original. This is interesting. The problem of sin and Ignatius himself have been canceled from this vapid version.
Dissatisfied with my Internet search, I pulled my copy of the Exercises from my bookcase. The Examen appears within Week One of the Exercises, which, in Ignatius’ words, “is devoted to the consideration and contemplation of sin.”2 Not surprisingly, then, Ignatius’ version of The Examen deals explicitly with sin. And, it doesn’t read much like a set of “guidelines” with “no set form.” It’s about as set a form as you can get. Here it is:
Method of Making the General Examination of Conscience3
There are five points in this method
The first point is to give thanks to God our Lord for the favors received.
The second point is to ask for the grace to know my sins and to rid myself of them.
The third point is to demand an account of my soul from the time of rising up to the present examination. I should go over hour after another, one period after another. The thoughts should be examined first, then the words, and finally, the deeds.
The fourth point will be to ask pardon of God our Lord for my faults.
The fifth point will be to resolve to amend with the grace of God. Close with an Our Father.
Points 2 and 4 speak directly of sin. Point 3 demands an account, hour by hour, of sins in thought, word, and deed. And point 5 implies sin when it speaks of needing to amend your life with God’s help. In other words, The Examen exists to help the you confront your personal sin and to root it out of your life, and it does so in a rather prescriptive way. This makes sense given that Ignatius was a straightforward military man.
In the end, it’s helpful to compare these versions side-by-side. Things become clear. In this case, some are trying to correlate The Examen with a culture that doesn’t believe in sin. When you capitulate to the culture, when you pick-and-choose from the tradition based upon the inclusion ethos or whatever, you risk departing from meaning of the original altogether. The Exam is stripped it of its power to open one to repentance and transformation through God’s grace when you soften its intentionally sharp edges. I would argue that Ignatius’ original Examen still works—because sin still hasn’t gone out of style in the 500+ years since he drafted it.
The University of Mary’s The Religion of the Day takes this up, noting the location of the “source of the world’s evil” is “not in the individual human heart, but in fundamentally corrupted and therefore oppressive structures of human existence.” See The Religion of the Day (Bismarck, ND: University of Mary Press, 2023), 19.
Ignatius of Loyola, The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, trans. Louis J. Puhl, S.J. (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1951), §4.
Ignatius of Loyola, The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, §43.