The pope’s apology could teach other public figures about being contrite

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jan/04/pope-apology-lesson-for-other-public-figures

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Sorry doesn’t have to be the hardest word, as Pope Francis proved after slapping the hand of a woman who grabbed him

On New Year’s Day, the Pope veered off script during his address to a packed St Peter’s Square to apologise for his behaviour the previous night. Unsurprisingly, this did not involve the traditional end-of-December misdemeanour of drinking excessively and vomiting on a host’s sofa. Instead, while greeting pilgrims at the Vatican on Tuesday evening, he slapped a woman’s hand away after she grabbed him and yanked him towards her. He may have labelled the slap a “bad example” but, appropriately for a spiritual leader, the apology itself provided an immaculate blueprint for saying sorry.

Why was it so laudable? First, it came swiftly. Less than 24 hours after the incident. There was no whiff of hoping the fuss (inevitably, the slap had sparked criticism on social media) would blow over, nor of waiting for advisers to conjure a glib, legally watertight statement. Second, it was unequivocal. “So many times we lose patience – even me, and I apologise for yesterday’s bad example,” were his words in full. They contained no attempt to excuse or diminish the wrongdoing. He merely acknowledged his human fallibility, which may have chimed with those who have recently watched Netflix’s The Two Popes: the show offers an unsentimental portrait of how, in becoming pontiff, one is expected to have miraculously morphed from flawed human to spotless martyr.

Of course, it may sound odd to look to the leader of the Catholic church for tips in contrition – Francis has been criticised for not tackling the sexual abuse crisis more decisively. He’s perhaps more than adept at addressing his own personal faults than those of the institution he represents.

A proper apology from an adult human shouldn’t be remarkable. It’s something you’re expected to have mastered around the time you graduate from reception. In an alarming indictment of our education system, however, it seems hordes of people get through school without a basic grasp of how apologies work. While we’re discussing the best and worst trends of the last decade, I’ll venture that the 2010s were the exasperating era of the non-apology. The age in which the “I’m sorry if…” format rose to prominence, letting the wrongdoer off the hook by implying the victim had mistakenly detected offence in what was clearly an innocent act. You know, kitten slaughter, or something like that: “I’m sorry if you were offended that I murdered little Ginger. That was not my intention.”

Indeed, this sort of skulduggery creates an (often false) distinction between acts and intentions, leading to some of the most blatant examples of gaslighting imaginable as the guilty try to claim they didn’t mean any offence by the flagrantly offensive thing they’ve done.

But this isn’t the only variety of poor apology. Public figures have valiantly toiled in recent years to demonstrate a wide array of rubbish attempts at saying sorry. For instance, there’s also the colossal understatement apology, as showcased by Prince Andrew in his unforgivable interview with Emily Maitlis in November about Jeffrey Epstein; the only regret he admitted to having about his friendship with the convicted sex offender was the fact Epstein had, in the prince’s indefensibly mild words, “conducted himself in a manner unbecoming”.

Another example is the apology that takes so long to arrive it means nothing by the time it’s uttered, such as Jeremy Corbyn’s agonising failure during the election campaign to apologise over antisemitism in the Labour party. He declined four times to do it during an interview with the BBC’s Andrew Neil and it was finally squeezed out of him in the seediest of ways: he had to be begged by Phillip Schofield on live television. Elsewhere, there’s that craven phrase “I misspoke”, which is deployed time and again to pass off lies, ignorance or saying something offensive as a mere slip of the tongue.

In the face of such evasion, it’s tempting to think public figures aren’t truly sorry for what they’ve done, but just feign regret to wriggle out of trouble. But seeing as we’re at the start of a new year, a more optimistic stance seems necessary. If the 2010s were a string of crap sorries, here’s hoping the pope has set the precedent for a new decade where public apologies are heartfelt, not laughably hollow.