We’ve all done things we regret.
One of the many salvific glories of Catholicism is the Sacrament of Penance, although, as we all know, the priest’s absolution does not make the penitent a tabula rasa – a clean slate.
For one thing, although our guilt before God is forgiven (not erased), the temporal consequences of sin will likely continue. Let’s say I commit murder and then, after experiencing remorse, sacramentally confess the crime, turn myself in to the police (likely at the priest’s insistence), and am tried, convicted, and sentenced to life in prison. My confessor’s absolution would not, because it cannot, erase the effect of my crime on the lives of the victim’s family and friends.
In Hamlet, a troupe of players come to Elsinore, and the officious and duplicitous Polonius, chief counselor to the murderous King Claudius, assures Prince Hamlet that the actors (a disreputable profession) will be used “according to their desert,” to which Prince Hamlet replies:
God’s bodykins, man, much better: use every man
after his desert, and who should ‘scape whipping?
It’s then that Hamlet realizes that their “play’s the thing/Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king.”
That word, conscience, has two meanings in the
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