Bless me, Father, for I have been caught.

Last year could be deemed the Year of the Public Confession, with religious, political, and military figures nearly stepping over one another for the chance to tell all. But were these people really facing the music or simply putting the best face on a sinful situation?

More than fish on Fridays, Lenten fasts, or even the Latin Mass, what I remember about a Catholic childhood before the Second Vatican Council are Saturday-night confessional lines. Standing single file in St. Mary's dimly lit side aisles, we children and the grown-ups marked time with rosary beads or prayer books and waited for our turn in those three-doored boxes in the back of church.

No one jostled, cut in, or gossiped in this, the quietest line of our week. More than anything the sisters taught us in school, the stillness of that procession let me know we were going about something serious, while the presence of so many adults--including many of my parents' friends--suggested that confessing and apologizing wasn't just for children.

Those Saturday-night lines are largely gone now, replaced in most parishes by semiannual Reconciliation services celebrated during Advent and Lent. Maybe that's why the past year caught me a bit off guard, for it seemed like every time you turned around in '95 somebody was dropping to their knees and offering a public and (apparently) heartfelt apology or confession for their sins.

In April, Robert S. McNamara grabbed nearly everybody's attention with his astonishing confessional memoir In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam (Times Books/Random House). In it the former secretary of defense and chief architect of America's failed war in Vietnam confessed that America "could and should have withdrawn from South Vietnam in late 1963," long before most of the carnage of that war had occurred.

Even more astounding, he admitted that by 1965 he had himself begun to lose confidence in the rightness of the war or its ongoing escalation, but that he chose to keep silent while an additional 56,000 Americans died in what he now believes was an unwinnable conflict. After three decades, McNamara stepped forward mainly out of a concern that we Americans had become overly cynical about our political leaders.

In June, the staunchly conservative Southern Baptist Convention surprised many when it kicked off the celebration of its 150th anniversary by publicly apologizing for its long-standing support of slavery and racism. An overwhelming majority of the convention's 20,000 delegates approved of a resolution that lamented and repudiated "historic acts of evil such as slavery, from which we continue to reap a bitter harvest," and apologized to all African Americans "for condoning and/or perpetuating individual and systemic racism in our lifetime." The resolution went on to "genuinely repent of racism of which we have been guilty, whether consciously or unconsciously," and asked "for forgiveness from our African American brothers and sisters."

The second week of July brought an open "Letter to Women" from Pope John Paul II, in which the pontiff not only expressed the church's deep gratitude for "the mystery of woman" and for all the countless gifts women have brought to the human story, but went so far as to offer something of an apology for past sins committed against women by members of the church.

Admitting that women have consistently suffered marginalization and oppression as a result of sexist structures and systems, the pope noted that "if objective blame (for these injustices, especially in particular historical contexts, has belonged to not just a few members of the Church, for this I am truly sorry. May this regret be transformed on the part of the whole Church, into a renewed commitment of fidelity to the Gospel vision."

Then in August, on the 50th anniversary of Japan's surrender to the Allies, Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama offered a public "heartfelt apology" for crimes and atrocities committed by his nation during world War II. Murayama decried the wrongs and harms of Japan's "colonial rule and aggression" and expressed his "deep remorse" and "profound mourning for all the victims of that history, both at home and abroad."

Furthermore, Takako Doi, the speaker of Japan's lower house of parliament, called for an acknowledgment of the evils of her nation's "colonial rule in Asia, the violation of human rights through aggression, and the instances of discrimination and contempt against Asian countries."

In September, however, we witnessed what was certainly the most pathetic apology of the year. Robert Packwood, expelled from the Senate as a result of countless charges of ethical and legal misconduct, mumbled an unbelievably evasive and incoherent "confession." "If" he was guilty of the charges brought by his accusers--and described in his own diary--then he was certainly sorry.

Still, he could hardly assume responsibility or express repentance for these actions since--due to an alcoholic haze--he did not remember doing them. The ex-senator added that he did not really understand that he had done anything wrong.

In early October of last year, President Bill Clinton released the finished report of his Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments and formally apologized to the thousands of Americans who had been unwitting subjects in Cold War radiation studies sponsored and later covered up by the federal government. "This recommendation reflects our view that some people were treated poorly and suffered," Clinton said, "and that there is a national duty to express regret."

Finally, later in the same month we received a posthumous confession from Nazi munitions czar Albert Speer, courtesy of Gitta Sereny's excellent biography Albert Speer: His Battle with the Truth (Alfred A. Knopf). In it we hear the convicted war criminal finally admit to the sort of specific knowledge of and participation in the Holocaust that would have earned the hangman's noose at the Nuremberg trials. Indeed, he confesses his "tacit acceptance of the persecution and murder of millions of Jews."

As we look back on a year so full of public apologies and confessions, what are we to make of all these outpourings of contrition? How are we to evaluate such heartfelt (and not so heartfelt) admissions of wrongdoing, and what might we learn from these public penitents? As Catholics, of course, we come from a church that has been wrestling with and speaking about confession for a very long time.

We celebrate the confession and forgiveness of sins as a sacrament and even developed much of our moral theology with an eye to training priests in the administration of this sacrament. On top of that, recent liturgical reforms have generated extensive reflections and writings on the nature and character of confession and penance. As a result, viewing these recent confessions through a Catholic lens may help us to evaluate and learn something useful from them.

For Catholics the sacrament of Confession begins with an examination of conscience, a process in which we are to take some quiet time and thoughtfully, prayerfully examine our behavior and lives--taking what Alcoholics Anonymous refers to as a "searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves."

In this examination we attempt to strip ourselves momentarily of distractions and self-deceptions and to look at our deeds and lives with simple, searing honesty, noting both our failures and flaws and uncovering the pieces of our lives we would rather forget or ignore. It's a process that opens up a genuine inner dialogue and keeps us honest with ourselves. Perhaps that's why Saint Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits, made such an examen part of his daily spiritual exercises.

Both Packwood's and McNamara's confessions and lives remind us of the need for a regular examination of conscience. In both cases highly gifted men who seemed to begin their public careers with good intentions and bright promise badly lost their ways and caused grave harm to themselves and others because they were unwilling or unable to critically examine their judgments or actions, even when challenged or chastised by others.

Indeed, the former senator and secretary of defense both responded to critical voices and information with a mixture of denial, deception, and open hostility, and each suppressed incriminating material (Packwood's diaries and McNamara's Pentagon Papers). Even in the end they could not bring themselves to acknowledge that they had made serious moral errors, only ones of tactic or judgment.

Of course the same might be said of the Southern Baptists' support of slavery and racism, Catholicism's sexist practices, and the federal government's cover-up of unethical Cold War experiments. Why were all these groups so painfully slow to recognize a wrong that everyone around them could see? At the heart of all these sins is not simple ignorance, but the failure to open one's heart and conscience to the moral scrutiny of the gospel. As Albert Speer once reported to Gitta Sereny, "I was blind [about the Holocaust] by choice . . . but I was not ignorant." This is a deeply sobering thought, for it means that the price of integrity is a sort of moral vigilance the constant and humble willingness to have God point out our flaws, and the steady determination not to be insular.

Even more, these confessions remind us that a genuine examination of conscience isn't just an intellectual exercise. It demands a good--and repentant--heart as well. Penitents can't simply take a mental inventory of their behavior, measuring themselves against some personal standard of self-perfection. A real examination of conscience demands opening our hearts and minds to the harms and sufferings our actions cause others. It demands walking around in the shoes of those we sin against and feeling some of that pain. It demands listening to their cries in our hearts. It demands compassion.

That's what traditional Catholic theology meant by "genuine contrition." We were to be sorry for our sins not just because we were ashamed of them, or because we were going to be punished for them, but primarily because they had offended God and harmed others.

What seems clearest about many of the public confessions offered in the past year was that these sins could never have been committed or covered up without a callous indifference to the sufferings--often horrific sufferings--of others. Again, the comment Sereny offers about Speer might be applied to McNamara's legendary reduction of Vietnam to charts, Packwood's gross insensitivity to the women around him, or indeed to every serious failure to open our conscience to the sufferings of others. "There was a dimension missing in him, a capacity to feel.... Pity, compassion, sympathy and empathy were not part of his emotional vocabulary."

More than a few critics have raised questions about the sincerity of some of last year's biggest confessions. Some have suggested that it was the possibility of attracting large numbers of black congregations into its fold that helped the Southern Baptist Convention finally see the error of its racist ways, while others said the pope's apology for sexism was part of a Vatican effort to influence the course of last year's World Conference of Women. Still others have commented that an aging McNamara was simply trying to redeem his place in history before it was too late.

Unfortunately, we have grown somewhat accustomed to hearing shallow confessions. From politicians caught in a lie or a tryst to dysfunctional talk-show guests spilling their tawdry guts all over our living-room floors, the public confession has all too often become a political gambit to gain sympathy or moral advantage or a way to get some cheap catharsis. In any case, it's hardly admirable.

For Catholics the acid test of a true confession has always been the penitent's "firm purpose of amendment." Genuine repentance demands both a realistic intention to change one's ways and a commitment to make up for harms inflicted on others. Otherwise, confession is just an attempt to manipulate the sympathy of our audience or a way to try and get out of being justly punished for our offense.

Preventing this false repentance has been the reason priests in the confessional assigned us a penance for our sins. Good penances were either supposed to help us develop new and better habits, and thus change our sinful ways, or to make some restitution or reparation for the harm we had done. Admittedly, the full harm of many of our sins could not be undone or repaired. Still we were required to make some good-faith sign of our intention to at least partially right these wrongs, to make some atonement for what we had done.

And what about purpose of amendment in last year's top confessions? Certainly Packwood hasn't shown even a shadow of genuine remorse. But what of McNamara? It's too late for him to be a better secretary of defense or to protect the men and women he sent into harm's way. And it's too late to speak out against the war. But as one commentator suggested, he could always spend the next several years washing the feet of lepers or writing personal apologies to the families of the 58,000 American casualties. If he finishes early, he might even start on the families of the 3 million dead Vietnamese.

The Southern Baptists can hardly do anything now about slavery or their failure to support the civil-rights movement or to answer Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "Letter from a Birmingham Jail," but there's nothing to stop them from supporting affirmative action or funding the NAACP or the United Negro College Fund through the next millennium.

And the Vatican? The pope doesn't name names or events in his apology, so it's hard to know what sins of sexism the church is apologizing for. But certainly his purpose of amendment could include appointing several women to lead major Vatican congregations, appointing a Vatican commission to study the harms of sexism in the church, or inviting women theologians and scholars to participate in reviewing Catholic sexual ethics.

The beginning of a new year is often a good time to pause momentarily and reflect on the course of our lives, and last year's confessional line provides us with more than a little food for thought. The Hebrew word for sin means to miss one's mark, and without some regular practice of examining our conscience, paying particular attention to the effects of our deeds and lives on those around us, it's all too easy to lose our moral way in the world.

The confessions of Packwood, McNamara, and others remind us of the need for honest self-examination, for a sensitivity to the sufferings of others, and maybe even for a regular confessor, sponsor, or spiritual guide. At the same time criticisms of last year's public confessions remind us how important a real purpose of amendment can be in our lives--to make a steady commitment to become more Christlike and make amends for the harms we have done others. If they taught us this, those public confessions may have been worth the effort.