`Bless me, Father,'' Catholics say, ''for I have sinned.'' In darkened booths, anonymous penitents enact the sacrament. Many times, confession amounts to little more than a recitation of petty offenses, apparently lacking in deeper meaning, yet often the confessional is the scene of majestic encounters with the hard truths of the human condition. Men and women peel back the shell of denial to see themselves as they really are and to use what they see as the occasion of new choices. Such people are never more noble or brave than when admitting to themselves and God that they are flawed and afraid. Thus confession is not mainly an act of self-abnegation but the opposite - a positive determination to take life seriously, to face reality, and, where necessary, to change. But change presumes the admission of need for it.
At the far other extreme from such serious moral reckoning are the political conventions, both the Republican just past and the Democratic coming. Sacramental confession is the act of an individual, entirely private, while the conventions are collective and public, yet the gravity of the one lays bare the weightlessness of the other, suggesting what is missing from the national conversation that is our politics.
The Republicans have been derided for the staged shallowness of their convention, but the Democrats will inevitably follow suit. It isn't only that the nominating spectacles of the two parties are media circuses but that they are such exercises in triumphalism. ''Virtue is mine,'' saith the candidates, ''the fault is theirs.'' Convention speeches eschew any examination of the nation's conscience, much less the party's or the nominee's, in favor of a rampant blaming of the other for all public ills.
Failure is so thoroughly located outside one's own faction that the rare exceptions to this rule - like Colin Powell's challenges on race and poverty, prisons and schools - reek of the inauthentic and can seem, therefore, the most hollow moments of all.
The confessional, not the convention, is the place to say ''I have sinned.'' So this is no plea for political acts of moral exhibitionism. Inappropriate self-revelation also reeks of the inauthentic. But the way in which Republicans and Democrats blame each other for the obvious shortfalls in our common life - race and poverty, prisons and schools - deflects attention away from the hard truth that those quite public failures belong to all of us.
Abortion, military policy, money, AIDS, world hunger, children, crime, education - each of these issues involves a deep moral crisis that is not being addressed exactly because every American citizen is invited by the rhetoric of politics to think the cause of the crisis is someone else, and therefore so is the solution. Perhaps that is why Americans report feeling marginal to the electoral process, why so many tune out the conventions, and why many will not even vote in November.
Is it too much to hope that the national political process invite each citizen to an examination of a citizen's conscience, asking how each one stands in relation to the crises of society? This is not a matter of a puritanical preoccupation with personal morality but rather of a decidedly political challenge that is proper to democracy.
Instead of glibly being called to point fingers across the way, could we each be called to a moral reckoning with our own parts in the social injustices that mar the nation? Too many homeless children, too many nuclear missiles, too many abortions, too few treatment slots for addicts, too few women in the boardroom, too few good teachers - who causes all of this? The Democrats? The Republicans? If candidates and parties stopped pretending that they are only virtuous while their rivals are only flawed, wouldn't the rest of us be more likely to face this harsh reality: how the large social changes all claim to want - more schools, fewer prisons - actually require universal personal changes that all would just as soon avoid. The burdens of justice fall on everyone; otherwise it isn't justice.
The problem with the traditional Catholic form of private confession and the reason why it is deemphasized today is that it makes sin seem an entirely individual matter, as if only God feels the hurt of it. In fact, every human failure, no matter how apparently private, affects the whole community, and so, equally, does every act of moral courage and humility. This religious insight is also the core truth of democracy: Each of us is responsible for the whole.
Our politics must enshrine this, or our democracy will die. Shallow, feel-good conventions that deflect responsibility and obscure what is required for real social change are a sign of that death coming. Instead of being bored by Philadelphia last week and Los Angeles next week, we should be alarmed.
Until our leaders openly acknowledge that every charge they hurl across the partisan divide is a charge that they can first bring against themselves, we the people will know that we have yet to hear the truth, which is that each of us can be charged as well. Moral responsibility belongs to all. That truth is hard but liberating. To admit it is to begin to change. That truth is the one blessing America needs.
James Carroll's column appears regularly in the Globe.
