This chapter offers a close rhetorical reading of an open hearing in the Danish Parliament’s Commission on Social Affairs concerning the Minister of Social Affair’s refusal to apologize in response to a report documenting mistreatment of children in state-supervised orphanages. The minister uses the strategy of expressing regret instead of apologizing. The chapter discusses the meaningfulness of this strategy of “regretful acknowledgement” and challenges the common dichotomous thinking on sincerity versus purity found in much literature on the topic. I show how the Secretary’s stated reasons for not apologizing are problematic on both a factual and a theoretical level. I then place the case in a larger theoretical frame to discuss the role official apologies (or the lack thereof) can have on a community’s sense of common values to be upheld (epideictic) and as a site of rearticulating the ethos of a community and giving it a voice (rhetorical citizenship)