On the Scandal pt. 2

Honestly, when I wrote part one of my response to the Church’s sex abuse scandal, I thought it was going to be the only part. I thought that the scandal would take about a month to blow over, and that after some discipline from the higher-ups, the Church would return to her normal life.

We all thought a lot of things…

The difficulty of finding trustworthy voices in a sea of shouting is familiar to anyone who has grown up with the internet, and is certainly a familiar part of life in the Catholic Church. Religion is always this way; no denomination of any faith is as internally unified as they would like to be, and Catholicism is no exception. However, the recent and ongoing sex abuse crisis has exacerbated the pervasive dissonance within the Church. There have demands that the Holy Father resign, and demands that the Holy Father seize the reigns and take control. There have been cries for further and more widespread investigations, and cries that such investigations have devolved into witch hunts. There have been calls for the introduction of quasi-monastic discipline within the clergy, and calls to remove the discipline of priestly celibacy. There have been countless and diverging proposals for changing the role of the laity in the Church, and accusations of various forms of ecclesiological heresy directed at just about anybody with an opinion on the matter – which is everybody these days.

I don’t know how the laity’s role in the Church needs to change, if at all; and I don’t know what needs to happen regarding clerical discipline. I don’t know how the investigations ought to ensue; and I don’t know what to make of Pope Francis and how he has or has not handled this scandal. What I do know is that the Church and her mission matter (otherwise we would not be scandalized by what has occurred over the last God-only-knows-how-many years) and that restoring unity within the Church is imperative. The unity that we must restore (or perhaps, in some cases, generate for the first time) must be inclusive. It must include the laity and the clergy, victims and families, faithful Catholics of all sexual orientations, young and old, traditionalists and progressives, and people living in every corner of the Earth.

Such unity will not be easy or simple. It will be arduous and nuanced – but we must find it. While all of us (especially myself) have been guilty of offering “thoughts and prayers” in lieu of real, necessary action in past crises, I believe that genuine and disciplined personal prayer must be the foundation this unity. If and only if Catholics can humbly lay down our brokenness at the throne of God, then the Church might find herself blessed with the strength to limp forward into the hazy future. Our prayer cannot be a replacement for renewal, but it can be the seed of renewal. Lay and ordained Catholics must return to (or, for some of us, begin for the first time) the discipline of daily prayer. Our story will end if we make ourselves the main characters; this world is God’s story. If we fail to recognize this, then we will crumble under a lethal existential lie – the very lie that led to mankind’s fall and has generated the most twisted heresies: the lie that man’s free will and God’s grace are incompatible opposing forces.

The clergy cannot save the Church. The laity cannot save the Church.

Only God can save His Church.