The event struck me as being gracious and moving. The faces of indigenous people both inside and outside the chamber as their stories were told and past injustices acknowledged and apologised for touched many of us deeply. I believe that this was a very important moment in our life as a nation.

There are many who continue to hold concerns about the Parliament’s symbolic gesture. Some indigenous people are calling for the gesture to be matched by action in the form of compensation payments to members of the stolen generations. For other Australians the very making of the apology itself sits uneasily. There are concerns that it is not appropriate to apologise for something that we did not personally do.

Parallels could be drawn between calls for an apology to the Stolen Generations and the church’s experience of sexual abuse reports over the last five or six years. I have spent many hours with people harmed by sexual abuse who want to hear me say ‘Sorry’ on behalf of the church for what happened to them.

They have told me that they have found it impossible to move on with healing without recognition and acknowledgement of their experiences. They want to know what steps have been taken to ensure that such abuse cannot happen again and they want to know what the church can do to set things right in their own situation.

In these cases it has not been me or other current church leaders who committed the acts of abuse. And yet it is our responsibility to set things right.

There are two meanings of the word ‘responsible’: the first meaning is, “I personally did the act that caused the harm”; the second meaning is, “I am in a position to help to set things right”. In the case of the Stolen Generations I have in mind the second meaning of responsibility.

The same processes as those I described in relation to the church’s response to sexual abuse are at work in our life as a nation.

The question is “What can we do to set right, as far as possible, the harm that has been done?” It is the nation’s responsibility to discover what will assist individuals to move forward and to achieve a measure of healing and wholeness in their lives.

I would argue that in this sense it is the responsibility of all Australians to take steps to set things right.Certainly as Christians it is our vocation to recognise injustice and suffering wherever they are found and, like the Good Samaritan, take practical action to care for those affected. The gospels teach us that whenever we minister to a neighbour, whether known to us or a stranger, in that same action we minister to Christ.

There are three important steps in the road toward reconciliation, whether that be Australia’s reconciliation with its indigenous people or the Christian’s reconciliation with God.

The first step is recognition. There must be recognition and acknowledgement of past wrong, injustice or injury.

The second step is repentance – turning around, facing in a new direction, embarking on a new way.

The Federal Parliament’s ‘Sorry’ to the Stolen Generation encompasses both of these steps.

The third step is reparation, a concept that I prefer to compensation because no amount of money can ever compensate individuals for the hurt they’ve suffered or the grief they bear. Reparation looks to the future,focussing on how our actions now can help to set things right.

Through this momentous event in Parliament, as a nation we have recognised and named reality and we have turned to face in a new direction. Our task now, as a nation and as individuals, is to find constructive and effective means of making reparation.

That task is also our vocation as Christians. It is through the completion of this cycle of recognition, repentance and reparation that forgiveness and reconciliation may, with God’s grace, become real in our lives.

Archbishop Phillip Aspinall is Primate of the Anglican Church of Australia.