Hey, I Said I Was Sorry! : Apologias: Mostly they’re self-serving in self- renewing pursuit of the meaningless.

We shall gather at the ri-i-ver,

The beee-yoo-ti-full, bee-yoo-ti-ful ri-i-ver.

It all started with the Pope.

Three years ago, he officially apologized for the church’s wrongful persecution of Galileo 300 years ago.

On a roll, the Pope then went on to apologize for the church’s complicity in the slave trade as well as the exploitation of native peoples throughout the Americas, an exploitation that continues to this day. But no mention was made of that.

Then the Southern Baptist Convention hopped on the holy bandwagon and issued a formal resolution lamenting its roots in the slave-owning aristocracy and apologizing to all African Americans. In a real spirit of brotherhood, its African American members also got to lament.

Lutherans expressed sorrow that their founder had engaged in anti-Semitic diatribes that for a couple of centuries served as a basis for persecuting Jews. (No apology yet from Pat Robertson on his book that draws extensively on anti-Semitic sources.) About 800 German Christians went to Holland to apologize to the Dutch for the Nazi invasion. New Zealand Christians have apologized to the Maoris for numerous transgressions.

Linked to author John Dawson, whose book “Healing America’s Wounds” is helping fuel this grand Apology-O-Rama, is an ambitious plan to atone for the Crusades.

Atone for the Crusades?

Yes! Opening prayers are planned at the site where Pope Urban II launched the First Crusade in 1095. Then lamenting apologists will move through the Balkans (carefully, I hope) to further atone for Christian atrocities committed against all the hapless Muslims they found along their way. Not planned, apparently, is a whole lot of atonement for the equally hapless Greek, Turkish and Palestinian Christians who were also cheerfully slaughtered by Crusaders who passed through and leveled their cities as a sideshow on the road to a Jerusalem that was in no need of being “saved” from anything in the first place. (But why quibble when you’re in the grip of a fun fad?)

This global apology trend actually is wise. Since one of the fundamentals of Christianity is the belief in a final judgment, with the millennium just five years away, it can’t hurt to peer over one’s shoulder while breaking out the erasers for a little judicious fiddling with the Holy Account Books, now can it?

No, indeed.

But why stop with self-serving book-fiddling? There’s real growth potential in all this lamenting business. Consider:

Presumptuous Christian door-bell ringers and self-righteous televangelists can apologize for telling the world it must believe exactly as they say, or else. Ditto for fundamentalist mullahs.

The Lakota raiding party can apologize to that Crow raiding party for that lethal little dust-up by the Bitterroots back in 1847.

Iraq and Iran can apologize to each another for the countless “martyred” children slain and left rotting along their shared border.

Japan can apologize for Pearl Harbor, the United States can apologize for its Manifest Destiny, for eradicating Native Americans, for slavery, for bombing Vietnam back into the Stone Age and for Newt Gingrich. Scotland can apologize for haggis, and England can apologize to France for the Hundred Years War (or should that be vice versa?). And think about the endless lament-fest possibilities to be found in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Mea culpa, mea culpa. . . .

Whee! Isn’t this fun?

And best of all, there’s no need to examine and change the fundamental mind-set or belief system that directly leads to the behavior that requires an apology in the first place. No sir! It’s all feel-good repentance on Sunday, business as usual on Monday and invitations out to another cathartic Apology-O-Rama by Friday: the self-serving in self-renewing pursuit of the meaningless.

Hallelujah!

Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

For now.