I watched ABC New’s “THIS WEEK” on Sunday August 9th [1998]. Cokie Roberts snapped me to attention when she dropped the expression “mea minima culpa” into the discussion. I sometimes wonder if you have to be an aging Catholic who remembers the Tridentine Latin Mass in order to savor such humor.

There is much talk in Washington and on talk shows to the effect that President Bill Clinton should say “mea culpa” to the American people. That Latin phrase is shorthand for advising the President to confess to the American people in a public setting that he has sinned, is sorry and craves forgiveness. Whether the popular understanding of mea culpa also implies a “firm purpose of amendment” is less clear.

Having been born in 1935 to devout Roman Catholic parents, I was exposed to the Latin of the Catholic Church’s liturgy very early on. By the time I was eight years old I was being trained by nuns at St. Vincent’s Academy in Shreveport to be an acolyte or “altar boy” to assist priests offer this liturgy. That entailed my memorizing a fair volume of not yet understood Latin prayers, some of which are no longer used even in translation. But the “Confiteor” (“I Confess”) has survived,  recognizably at least, in the vernacular Masses used since the Second Vatican Council. Since Cokie Roberts’s mother is U.S. Ambassador to the Vatican and since she raised Cokie, it is not surprising that Mrs. Roberts knows the context and remembers her Mass Latin.

In the “Confiteor,” before the altar, the presiding priest was sometimes joined by all the faithful assembled in confessing (without enumerating them aloud) personal sins and asking God to forgive those sins before we proceeded further into the liturgy (Scripture, Offerings, Eucharist, etc.) Each of us hung our head and ashamedly confessed to God, the angels and saints and to one another that he had sinned. And each said three times that it was nobody’s fault but our own. The Latin text was, “mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.” We beat our breasts as we said this.The English translation was “through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault.” Catholics believed then and now stoutly in freedom of the individual adult will within a human nature battered but far from annihilated by original sin. There was and is no dodging whom to blame for our self-chosen sins. We did not and do not blame an unhappy childhood or unfortunate genes or sexual orientations or the Republican party. We shamefully admit: “I did it, nobody else did it and I was as wrong as wrong can be.”

This is where Cokie Roberts’s humorous interjection comes in. (I would like to think it spontaneous, but I suspect that, like poor Mike Barnicle of the Boston GLOBE, she had heard it elsewhere, and why not?) 

The words ”mea culpa” and “mea maxima culpa” are in the ablative case in Latin. The final “-a” is long, unlike the nominative case in which the “-a” is short. In this instance the ablative case can be translated “because of my fault” or “through my fault.”  Why did Cokie Roberts interject “mea minima culpa?” The phrase does not occur anywhere in the Mass. It would mean something like “through my slightest conceivable fault” or “well, yes, I did it, but it didn’t really amount to anything much, now did it?” A lot of people when polled might rejoice at even this slightest nod by Mr. Clinton to personal responsibility.

THIS WEEK’s August 9th panel discussion was about the coming August 17th grand jury testimony of President Clinton. Would he tell the truth? Would he lie? Would he say, “Yes, I sinned but the details are none of your business, so come and get me, copper?” Somewhere in that flow Cokie Roberts smiled and asked, you mean “Mea minima culpa?” 

I smiled, too. The play on words was clever and I could, alas, imagine the President possibly taking that approach. Of course that would not quite square with his earlier assertions of having done “nothing improper,” or having had “no sexual relations with that woman...Miss Lewinsky.”  But it would count, I suppose, as some sort of secular mea culpa. After all a minima culpa is still a culpa, isn’t it? The President would accept some blame, some personal responsibility. And that would, for him, be a perceptible moral advance, would it not?

I am reminded of a saying in G.K. Chesterton’s very first novel, 1904’s THE NAPOLEON OF NOTTING HILL. With a weird, scary principal character in mind (who was a poet all of whose verses were bad) , Chesterton wrote, 
 

“It is too often forgotten that just as a bad man is nevertheless a man, so a bad poet is nevertheless a poet.” 

Similarly a minima culpa or minimal assertion of personal responsibility for bad behavior is also a culpa. From President Clinton that may be the most we might reasonably hope. He is, after all, “nevertheless a man,” and therein lies hope. 

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for Asheville TRIBUNE