Radio hosts Kyle Sandilands and Jackie O are back off the air again.

After submitting a 14-year old girl to a stupid and humiliating ordeal (with a lie detector and questions about her “sex life”) their show was scrapped for two weeks.

When the station, on August 18, put them back on, they encountered a backlash from advertisers.

Apparently sponsor companies are not willing to have their products linked with these two personalities anymore, threatening to withdraw their ads if they remain as hosts.

This is a sign of hope.

Are Australians not quite as amoral and hard-hearted as some people may have thought?

Mr Sandilands had “apologised” for the bad program, but his sorrow seemed unconvincing.

He came over as being rather unrepentant.

He is quoted as saying, “We weren’t suspended, we weren’t fired. We weren’t anything. We took ourselves off air because we wanted the story to die down.”

Did he think that Australians don’t care about public child-abuse-as-entertainment?

That after the novelty of their effort “died down” they could come back and do much the same as before?

* * *

To put it all in rather blunt terms, what they did to that girl was a sin.

Sin taints everybody — the one doing it as well as the victim.

More important again, sin offends God.

It is not a good idea to offend God.

God is our judge.

The only way to deal with sin is to repent of it, and to confess it, and get rid of it, and ask God to forgive it, and to firmly resolve that with God’s help one will not sin again.

That is what the Catholic Church teaches.

That is what Jesus Christ taught.

It is all in the Bible.

* * *

To be forgiven, one must come to God in person in the way he has prescribed, which means confessing your sins to a priest, who can then grant you forgiveness and absolution in God’s name.

Jesus gave his Apostles — his first priests — the power to forgive. He told them, “If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.”  . (John’s gospel, chapter 20)

The Catholic Church teaches that when Christ said that, he meant it.

Other organisations  calling themselves “Christian” — but which do not insist on Confession to a priest — are no good.

Few, if any, Protestant groups practise the Sacrament of Penance — otherwise known as Confession. That is also amazing, considering the teaching of Jesus as quoted above.

* * *

In the Sacrament of Penance, the believer confesses to the priest in a private room (the Confessional) accusing himself of his sins.

The priest may then ask questions. If he is satisfied that you are sorry for your sins, and intend to give them up, he then passes judgement,, and forgives you in God’s name.

Finally he prescribes a “penance” or punishment — usually prayers to be said.

The Sacrament of Penance is the act, on the good performance of which, more than any other duty, your eternal welfare depends.

At every Confession, you should remember that this may be the last Confession you will have the opportunity of making before you die.

Always confess, therefore, with the same sincerity you would have if confessing on your death-bed.

Mary MacKillop was born in Melbourne on January 15, 1842 and died in Sydney on August 8, 1909.

On becoming a nun in 1867, she took the religious name “Sister Mary of the Cross”, so that when Pope John Paul II “beatified” her in 1995, she became “Blessed Mary of the Cross”.

Some people had hopes that she might be “canonised” and become “Saint Mary of the Cross” some time during this anniversary year of 2009.

But some things cannot be rushed.

* * *

What we do need in a rush is to learn what Mary MacKillop’s life can teach us about how we ourselves should live.

What was it that made her able to cope with opposition, bureaucratic bungling and personal ill health — and still live like a saint, maintaining her love for the school children, the Sisters under her charge and even for the enemies of her work.

* * *

The key to understanding Blessed Mary of the Cross is that she was always ready to FORGIVE.

Are not Christians obliged always to forgive? When the twelve disciples asked Jesus how to pray, did he not teach them a prayer which asks God to “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us” ? 

When enemies were persecuting them, Blessed Mary once wrote telling her Sisters, “never by word or act in this trying time to say or do anything that would reflect upon the Bishop, either his priests or his people. Now more than ever we should be humble, patient, charitable and forgiving. If we cannot excuse everything we can at least excuse the intention.” 

* * *

In modern times people are often browbeaten into making apologies for past events. For example, Mr Rudd’s February 2008 formal “apology” to Australia’s Aborigines for white families having, in the past, for various reasons, taken over the care of Aboriginal children.

Why no formal speech of forgiveness from representatives of the Aboriginal races?

Apologising to human beings is all very well. Apologising to God, and doing what must be done to show him that we are sorry for ever displeasing him — that would achieve a lot more.

Australia, as a nation, will only please God when White Australians and Black Australians join together in united acts of apology to God, acknowledging that none of us — none — has anything to offer God except lives befouled and contaminated by selfishness and sin. 

We must mutually forgive each other and, as one nation, ask God for a complete makeover at both personal and community levels.