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.