Mar 30, 2010
“It would be better for him if a millstone were hung around his neck and he were thrown into the sea, than that he would cause one of these little ones to stumble.”
Christ’s censure of crimes against innocence could not be stronger. Rightly therefore are we repulsed by crimes of abuse, and never more so than when they are committed by priests, called to be signs of Christ in the world.
Light is the best disinfectant, so in the long run the cycle of investigation, exposure, confession, reparation and reform that the Church has been undergoing in different countries is part of the continual conversion and renewal that each Christian, and the Church as a whole, must undergo on the way to Christ.
The Holy Father has called for fair criticism and scrutiny of the Church as the only way forward –and he is certainly receiving the scrutiny portion, if not the fairness. As Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York said to his flock after Mass on Palm Sunday:
“No one has been more vigorous in cleansing the Church of the effects of this sickening sin than the man we now call Pope Benedict XVI. The dramatic progress that the Catholic Church in the United States has made — documented again just last week by the report made by independent forensic auditors — could never have happened without the insistence and support of the very man now being daily crowned with thorns by groundless innuendo.”
Maybe fairness is too much to ask in the face of this kind of crime, which engenders such pain. Each time a clerical abuse case is exposed, we’re traumatized all over again, and it is hard to keep a clear head against the tide of emotions: compassion for the wronged; disgust with abusers; anger at their abettors, and simultaneously with opportunists who seize on suffering to advance personal agendas; shame, sorrow. These and other feelings can threaten to overwhelm our faith.
But that is not the whole or even the most important part of the truth, and the spirit urging us to believe that evil is stronger than good and bad priests more numerous than good ones is not the Holy one.
The truth is that there is no safer place for children in the world than the Catholic Church. The crisis that now appears to engulf us is a small piece of the plague of child abuse that afflicts every facet of Western culture today.
“Why” is the topic of a different column. For now, I can’t help but think there is some providential significance in the fact that these matters are coming to a head during Holy Week, when the Church celebrates once again the mystery of redemption.
That repentance and renewal are always necessary is a humiliating but perpetual reality for us Christians. Isn’t Judas a bishop’s name? Isn’t Peter?
As Fr. Ronald Rolheiser writes: “To be a member of the church is to carry the mantle of both the worst sin and the finest heroism of soul because the church always looks exactly as it looked at the original crucifixion, God hung among thieves.”
If we want to penetrate the mystery of Christ’s love, we could do no better than to allow ourselves to feel the full burden of shame, disgust and pain at abuse and our seeming helplessness to make things right.
If we reflect that God, purest and holiest, in compassion for all of us sinners, deliberately chose to associate himself with all of us and our self-induced messes, then perhaps we can better understand how much we are in need of a Savior, and how beautiful is that Savior’s love.
It is the one thing that has the power to lift us out of the ugliness of sin and into the glory of holiness. The beauty of our faith is precisely that it is not a faith in the sinlessness of men, but in the power of the one, true God to sanctify us all. We have his promise that the Church he founded would never fail, even when its members do. He awaits us in the sacraments; no matter how broken the instruments imparting them are, precisely in order that he would be with us always.
That is his gift to us, no less now than on that first morning of the Resurrection.