During Lent, we Catholics should ask ourselves what we really believe about the moral quality of human nature. Are people basically good, or are we evil? The answer to this question has a profound effect not only on how we see and treat others, but on the type of morality with which we feel most comfortable.

Early Protestant reformers taught that human nature is evil. Our nature has been so destroyed and damaged by both original and personal sin that nothing good is left in the human being. We are totally depraved and deprived of all goodness, and our nature is so evil that everything we do is sinful. Free will, as the ability to choose between good and evil, is an illusion. We are justified by faith, but we remain basically evil and ordered toward the doing of evil. People are untrustworthy. Nothing we can do has merit in itself, our depraved nature being a wild beast that is out of control. So morality’s job is to tame and control the beast. We are incapable of controlling ourselves, so the Church must help us minimize the damage we will naturally do to ourselves and others. Its job is to allow and forbid by using law, punishment, and reward—public approval or disgrace.

Catholic Tradition disagrees. We view human nature as damaged but still oriented toward goodness. Original innocence was lost, but we are not devoid of all goodness. Free will and reason remain, although they are disordered, work less efficiently, and are highly prone to error. We are still capable of knowing, choosing, and doing what is authentically good. But to know the truth about goodness and to use our freedom properly, we need the gift of salvation, which truly heals the wounded quality of our nature by way of divine grace. Persons are not wild beasts unable to control themselves. They are good but flawed persons, capable of becoming better with God’s help in Christ.

A morality built on this understanding of human nature cooperates with God’s initiative, combining recourse to the sacraments as sources of divine grace with prayer and meditation to educate the mind and strengthen the will. It uses norms, rules, and laws as guides to help us make correct decisions and choices and to help us see into and move beyond the darker side of our nature. The Church is mother and teacher, not moral policeman.
Catholic and Protestant traditions both agree that we live in a world affected by and at times controlled by the power of sin. No one of us can follow the commandment to love God and neighbor perfectly in this life, because living in a world still affected by the power of sin often limits our ability to love effectively and fully. We find ourselves—directly against our own better natures—engaging in, cooperating in, and benefitting from evil.

And so during Lent, we Catholics repent and do penance to remind us that salvation is not yet complete in us. We are not as free or as smart as we like to think we are. Penance reminds us that we cannot save ourselves or our world, that we have not yet made sufficient use of the gift of healing God continues to offer us. We do penance during Lent to remind ourselves that our nature is still wounded, and that without Christ, we are neither free nor wise, nor capable of fulfilling the basic need of our very nature to be as good as we were created to be.