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abuse, Catholics Do What?, current events, Evangelization

2 things I believed about the Catholic Church that were totally wrong (and why anyone would stay Catholic)

February 12, 2019

How about a little remedial ecclesiology today? (Trigger warning: if you don’t like going past 1200 words, this piece might stretch you 5 uncomfortable minutes past your limit. I know, I know. Same! I tried my best to rein it in.)

The summer of shame is well in the rearview now, and we’re underway into a whole new calendar year. As 2018 waned, the days shortening and the nights darkening, it seemed that there would be no end in sight for the rage and pain felt by faithful and lapsed Catholics alike; how could this vile evil be seeping forth from the Church we knew and loved?

For survivors of abuse – men and women who knew all too well the evil that often lay hiding in plain sight – this pain was compounded by perceived silence and cowardice from high. Where were our pastors and shepherds back at the height of the summer’s scandalous and widely-splashed headlights?

Little by little we began to grapple with the ramifications of too few pastors speaking out due to, perhaps, their own lack of credibility. It’s awfully hard to condemn the log in your brother’s eye when you’ve got a telephone pole sticking out of your own retina. Others held back out of fear, perhaps at the advice of legal counsel. Still others felt – rightfully – personally horrified and enraged by the failures of their brothers when they had themselves been struggling heroically, often with little support, to walk the walk.

Many Catholics left. Some had distanced themselves eons ago, but made their separation a public affair after ingesting the wretched evil laid bare in the Pennsylvania report.  

Others quietly stopped trusting, stopped believing, and stopped attending.

For those who stayed, each of us have had to answer, if only for ourselves, why we did.

Peter, do you love me?

God knew that each of us who profess a faith in Jesus Christ and the Church He founded would need to dig deep in these days “to give an explanation for the hope we possess.”

It’s not like this was a curveball to the Almighty. He tells us plain, “Whatever is done in the dark will be brought into light.”

In other words, truly private sin is a human fantasy. Maybe it’s one of the oldest fantasies – I wonder if Eve thought, somehow, that the same God who had fashioned her from nothing, breathed life into her lungs, would somehow fail to notice her small act of rebellion? Like He was super busy checking on the mountains and fish and stuff.

Anyway, I’ve had numerous conversations with Catholics and non-Catholics alike over the past 8 months. Answered hard questions from strangers about why we’ll stay, about why we’ll never, ever leave.

But I can’t say I haven’t considered it. Back in July when revelations were coming to light seemingly faster than the Internet could link to them, I was daily overcome with rage and sorrow. And confusion. What I knew about the Church, the papacy, and the gates of hell all seemed, well…wrong. And I felt adrift.

I am a JPII Generation Catholic, as they say. I fell in love with the mystery and the history of Catholicism during the early years of Benedict’s papacy, called home by a mysterious grace seemingly wrought just for me in the final hours of St. John Paul II’s life. My conversion solidified and matured at Franciscan University of Steubenville where I encountered the word “theology” for the very first time. I probably know more about Catholicism than the average Sunday Mass-going Catholic, if only because of the Aquinas and Kreeft and Hahn and DeLubac I was assigned to read.

And I still considered leaving.

It turns out you can’t reason your way into continued belief. Faith is, at the end of the day, a gift. And an act of the will.

I am becoming increasingly aware that faith is both gift and choice. And that, having been handed the gift, I will be asked over and over throughout my lifetime to reaffirm my choice, and to continue to grow both in love and in knowledge of the Faith with a capital F.

Catholicism isn’t mine to interpret or define as I see fit. A radical notion for a postmodern mind, but one that we all fall prey to from time to time. My impoverished philosophical foundation led me to believe some fairly common fallacies about the Church which greatly intensified my pain and confusion this past year. Here are two of the errors I didn’t even realize I was carrying around in my brain; consider this a sort of “Ecclesiology 101” (ecclesia = church, ology = study of).

Myth 1: The Holy Spirit picks the Pope.

I don’t know that I literally thought this was what happened, but I certainly behaved as if I did.

Standing in a sodden St. Peter’s Square and breaking into wild jubilation with a hundred thousand strangers while watching that white smoke billow out of the Sistine Chapel chimney on the night of Pope Francis’ election didn’t do much to help dispel this myth. The papacy has always felt big and kind of magical to me. Probably because of the circumstances of my awakening to the Faith, and because of the big moments we’ve shared as a family with different Holy Fathers.

Nevermind that the Church, in 2,000 years of Petrine ministry had numbered in her ranks countless ineffective popes, weak popes, mediocre popes and outright evil popes. Because my Church history was an inch deep and my love for the modern popes was a mile wide, I was primed to be deflated by any shortcomings in a Roman Pontiff, either perceived or actual.

Reality: The Holy Spirit inspires the actions and deliberations of the College of Cardinals, assuming they are actively seeking His Will and living lives of virtue. (If I could double bold that last line, I would.) And then the Holy Spirit guarantees that whomever is elected can’t make a fatal mess of things.

As best as this armchair theologian can figure, the Holy Spirit really does this heavy lifting when it comes to preserving and protecting the Deposit of Faith:

The apostles entrusted the “Sacred deposit” of the faith (the depositum fidei),45 contained in Sacred Scripture and Tradition, to the whole of the Church. “By adhering to [this heritage] the entire holy people, united to its pastors, remains always faithful to the teaching of the apostles, to the brotherhood, to the breaking of bread and the prayers. So, in maintaining, practicing and professing the faith that has been handed on, there should be a remarkable harmony between the bishops and the faithful.” CCC 84

…And in preventing heretical or erroneous teaching being promulgated “ex cathedra” or “from the chair” of Peter. Translation: The Pope cannot err when proclaiming, with the full weight of the Magisterium and in keeping with the revealed Tradition of the Church, the truth of something pertaining to faith and morals.

Can the pope have a mistress? Father illegitimate children? Be a heretic, privately? Give dumb answers to questions journalists ask? Believe wrongly that the superior flavor of gelato is crema? All yes. Which is so freaking hard to believe. But bear with me. Because myth number two which I believed was:

Myth 2: the Pope is the head of the Catholic Church

I mean, we do have a hierarchy, do we not? As an American who lives in a society of rules and laws and order, familiar with the organizational structure of human institutions, this is another one which I, frankly, sort of took for granted. Hence the outraged tweeting for the Holy Father to DO SOMETHING. FIRE SOMEONE. WHAT IN GOD’S NAME IS ACTUALLY HAPPENING??? last summer.

But, um, guys…the Church is not just a human institution.

Protects, defends, and transmits? Occasionally, when it suits, and sooner or later.

He is the leader of the Church on earth. The head of the Church’s hierarchy, the shepherd of the Universal Church on earth. But it isn’t Pope Francis’ Church, any more than it was Pope Benedict’s, or Pope Innocent’s, or Pope Gregory’s, or Pope John Paul II’s. 

Reality: Jesus Christ is the head of the Church.

“Christ is the Head of this Body:” Christ “is the head of the body, the Church.”225 He is the principle of creation and redemption. Raised to the Father’s glory, “in everything he (is) preeminent,”226 especially in the Church, through whom he extends his reign over all things. CCC 792

Jesus died for us, for His Church. Jesus had to forfeit His life in exchange for ours, hot mess that we were/are. And in an interesting throwback to myth number one, Jesus only personally chose the first pope: Peter.

So why have a pope? Why have a Church? Why have a Bible? Why not start from scratch every generation and do archeological and anthropological research to try to piece together anew what the OG Christians of Corinth circa 67 AD must have practiced and believed?

Is that what Jesus willed for us? To have to start from zero every time the saving water trickles over the brow of a new Christian, “I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son…”

The Trinitarian formula for baptism, by the way: how are we sure that’s a thing? Should we each be researching and verifying and making sure for ourselves way out here in 2019 that we’re practicing Christianity as Jesus Christ intended? If that’s the case, thank God for Google, rising adult literacy rates, and the printing press, right?

But the Church is for all people, for all times. The Church is not only for moderns with internet access and small group Bible studies. The Church is not only for white people with comfortable sanctuaries and good youth programming. The Church is not only for prisoners in need of mercy, for orphans in need of fatherhood, for prostitutes in need of conversion and redemption.

The Church is for all of us, for all of humanity, past, present, and future. The God who promised “I will not leave you orphans” has not abandoned us to our own devices.

We do not have to rely on our own wisdom, our own clever understandings of theology – or our not-so-clever understanding, for that matter – or even on the goodness of one particular person who holds a position of power at a given time in history.

St. Jerome says “ignorance of Scripture is ignorance of Christ.” The words of the Old and New Testaments wash over me every time I go to Mass, whether I’m sitting in recollected silence or wrangling an nasty toddler. I am steeped in Scripture when I sit in the church, which is mysteriously both a building and the Body of Christ, of which I am mysteriously a member and an essential physical component. I am brought into deeper relationship with Jesus Christ through the ministry of His Church and the encounter of His Word. The Church is both guardian and guarantor of the written, living Word of God.

I cannot turn away in solitude from the Body of Christ while clutching the Word of Christ to my heart.

What I read in Scripture casts new light in what I practice on Sundays. The liturgy is rooted in – not added on to – the Bible. Without the Church, we’d have no Bible.

Without the Church, we’d have no Sacraments. Without the Church, we wouldn’t know what to believe- we need the Church’s authority to teach, lead us, and sanctify us.

Because we can’t live without Jesus.

No matter how badly we humans behave. Perhaps because of how badly we humans behave; we need Him all the more. Come hell or high water – and perhaps the water will come right up to the gates…we need Him.

abuse, advent, Catholic Spirituality, Culture of Death, current events

The “smaller church” is already here

November 30, 2018

Yesterday morning over coffee I sat down and read a news analysis piece published on our site, and a report from the National Catholic Register.

Both left me with a roiling stomach and an aching head. I fired off a message to a coworker thanking him for his excellent reporting and also confessing that I would very much like to commit murder after reading it.

Just when I think I can’t be shocked any further by the level of depravity and corruption within some leaders of the institutional Church – within the human soul – I am naively shocked anew.

I was raging about this to my husband this morning at the breakfast table and he asked me, kindly but frankly, “did you really not think this existed? Does this really surprise you?”

No. And yes.

And each time I read about another child’s life destroyed and another diocese or parish deceived by and forced to endure a predator in their midst, the rage bubbles up anew.

“You have to understand,” I began frustratedly, “that for an almost pathologically self-disclosing choleric like me, this level of duplicity is unfathomable.” I made the point that to live a similar level of deception would involve, for example, my obtaining regular secret abortions and having an IUD while continuing to publicly blog about the sanctity of life and the immorality of contraception.

“Give me,” I said dramatically, “all the gay pride marchers in the Tenderloin over a single, closeted gay bishop committing child abuse or sodomizing seminarians. At least they’re living in reality.”

How someone can preach the Gospel on Sunday and destroy a young boy’s life on Monday is beyond comprehension. I feel such impotent maternal rage. Dave made the comparison to Mary Magdalene; I snapped back that she wasn’t masquerading as a Pharisee while making her living as a prostitute.

Give me all the St. Mary Magdalenes throughout all of history over a single Judas. (Also, aren’t you glad you’re not living in a household headed by two adults who both work for or around the Church right now?)

I have no idea the point I’m making here, just that every time I read a new report or hear about another facet of the scandal, the rage boils anew. I made my long-suffering husband list off with me the number of good and holy bishops we knew personally. Maybe there are lots more, we don’t know all that many in the larger scheme of things. It was a modest list.

For all my adult life I’ve imagined that then-Cardinal Ratzinger’s infamous line about “a smaller, holier Church” would involve social collapse and government persecution. Now I feel quite certain that here, in the US at least, the smaller Church has already arrived.

It consists of Catholics who profess, believe, and live out the teachings of the Catholic Church. And who get their asses to Confession when they fall short, again and again. Clergy and laity alike.

It’s tempting to stay here, in a self righteous pique of rage. Every time I read another story of a cover up, a failure to act, a man who was entrusted with representing the fatherhood of God acting like another satan instead, I want to throw in the towel.

I won’t.

Especially considering this: that even within the embrace of holy Mother Church, I am still basically a miserable human being. I would be dead without the grace of the Sacraments. Spiritually, yes, but possibly physically too. I was reflecting on this as I was alone in my car yesterday afternoon, a rare moment of solitude. I turned off the radio and forced myself to reflect in the silence; there is precious little of it in my life in this present season.

I’m being a hypocrite. I was Catholic in name only in college. I was a miserable, wretched, pharisaical sinner.

I’m still a sinner. But back then, if somebody held me and my selfish, sinful, degenerate lifestyle up as a model of what Christians are like, my God, they’d lose their faith in an instant.

It’s not a perfect comparison. I never took vows of chastity or poverty or obedience. I wasn’t presenting myself as the public face of the Church. Not institutionally, at least. But I was, just the same, a public witness to the person of Christ.

What would someone who encountered Jenny of 2003 think of Catholicism? Of Jesus? Of His Church? It makes me acutely nauseous to consider.

And yet in my wretched poverty, He didn’t turn His back on me.

People within the Church who were pursuing lives of holiness and integrity welcomed me with open arms and refused to be scandalized by my sin.

Who am I to judge now, then? (And I’m not saying that the sinful and illegal actions in each of these cases should not be judged and prosecuted when they do come to light – just that perhaps it’s not my particular job to do so.)

I have to put aside my natural rage and the deep, deep desire for justice to be served and submit these impulses over and over again to Christ. Everything I’ve dragged to the confessional for months now has been this, and almost only this: that I cannot stomach another abuse report, cannot stand to read about one more instance of inaction from Rome, struggle mightily to rein in my imagination from making leaps to judgement.

But I must not leave. We must stand firm no matter how dark the days become. And I do believe they will become much, much darker.

I read this piece from Elizabeth Scalia this morning with tears springing to my eyes in public, hardly caring if the guy on the treadmill next to me saw.

Yes, Lord. It felt like I was reading words from the depths of my own heart, spilled out in someone else’s words.

Strengthen my faith, Lord. Don’t let me turn away when it becomes even darker.

Maranatha, Lord Jesus.

abuse, current events, Homosexuality, Living Humanae Vitae, Pope Francis, prayer, Rome, scandal, Sex, sin

Disillusionment with the Church

November 12, 2018

Remember believing in Santa? Shhhh, my kids still do. Maybe that’s a bad analogy. Maybe you never believed in Santa. What about this: maybe you believed your mom or your dad to be invincible. Kind of superhuman or untouchable. And then you weathered your first big blow up between parents and an adult child. Or a shocking cancer diagnosis or the revelation of some kind of massive failing. I’m reaching for that feeling of deflation and just raw sorrow, of sort of coming unmoored and feeling unrooted. That has been the past 5 months for me, as a Catholic laywoman.

The Church whom I trusted implicitly, all my life, has broken my heart. Every morning there is a new story about some scandal, a message in my inbox about a parish whose pastor went on “administrative leave,” was arrested following – or at least incriminated by – some new allegation come to light.

The weight of it has ceased being a conscious burden; now it just feels like a sort of lingering heaviness, not unlike the way a clinical depression blurs the edges of reality and tamps down the colors and delights of daily living. I don’t mean exactly that I feel depressed about the Church, but that my perception of the Church has been shattered.

Even writing “the Church,” I’m not longer entirely sure what I mean. Do I mean the Roman curia? The Pope? The local bishop, who is technically my reference point for the authority of the hierarchy? Do I mean the parish down the hill where we worship? Our wonderful priests there who hear hundreds of confessions a week?

In many ways living here in Denver with such a vibrant Catholic community we have been isolated from much of the pain and scandal on an immediate level. In another sense, this makes things very strange when I feel “safe” in my own parish but feel utterly ill at ease in “the Church” at large. The Universal Church.

Our time in Rome this Fall, however beautiful, was also painful. Walking on a tour through the Vatican gardens, for example – what should have been a thrilling opportunity – was marked with sadness. “Here is the monastery where Pope Benedict retired to. There is the place where he used to like to pray, when he was more mobile.” My heart clenched painfully as I wondered, not for the first time, why God has allowed this season in the Church to come to be.

Why are we here? What does God, in His Providence, plan to accomplish with this wreckage and chaos?

And what can I possibly do, a mom with five kids, a little bit of internet real estate, no theology degree and no real position of influence within the Church?

Pray, obviously, which I have been. But I want to be transparent with you guys about how much I’m struggling with this. Every other week or so I try to make it to confession (see above: amazing parish) and one of my predictable recurring sins right now is one against charity towards the Holy Father, towards the bishops.

My choleric and justice-oriented mind does not comprehend that while I have been hustling and doing my level best to hold up my end of the bargain with God (and failing over and over and over again, naturally, bc sinner) there have been predatory priests preying on children. Homosexual bishops grooming and raping seminarians. Company men more concerned with promotions than with the people whose souls they signed up to shepherd. (And yes, I know there are good priests. And mediocre priests. And priests who are struggling manfully with heavy habitual sins. These aren’t the guys I’m thinking about.)

Priests hearing the confessions of ordinary Catholics who come to the sacrament of absolution struggling to live chastely, who are wrestling with any kind of addiction, who are trying to get their temper, their lust, their appetite for whatever in check; who are failing, crying out to the Lord for mercy, asking for absolution, who are coming back again and again and swimming upstream in this miserable culture of death, priests who meet up with an illicit lover later that same night, who shuffle an abusive priest to another assignment, who turn a blind eye to the failings of their brother bishops and keep on keeping on…

It boggles the mind.

And so while the surprise has abated and the rage has cooled, the lethargic sorrow remains. I thought I knew what the Church was. I never believed the clergy to be above reproach or without sin, but it didn’t occur to me that there would be priests leading double lives. Why not? I don’t know, I guess I’m an idiot? An idealist?

I don’t have a good wrap up. And it’s not like I’m over here wallowing in sorrow and questioning the existence of God or anything. But I am wrestling with what it means to be Catholic right now. Not because I would ever walk away, but because I am so angry that none of these guys did.

I know so many good priests. Good bishops too. As a parent, this is probably the most frustrating part of the whole crisis: are my children safe in the Church? Can we trust the men who we do know and love, going forward? I trust our bishop, and our parish priests. I love and respect and believe the religious community who we share so much of our lives with. Is a personal relationship going to be the necessary litmus going forward? Trust but verify?

I hate this place for our family. And I hate it for our Church, even more. There is no such thing as a personal sin. All sin is corporate. And everything that is done in the darkness will be, eventually, revealed in the light.

(p.s. This was written last Friday. How much more appropriate it seems today.)

abuse, Catholic Spirituality, current events, Family Life

Go to Joseph

August 28, 2018

“May you live in interesting times.”

This purported ancient Chinese proverb is usually ironically bestowed as more curse than blessing. We are certainly living in them, we Catholics in these waning days of the summer of 2018.

I feel an almost crushing burden of confusion, more than anything else, when I spend too much time going down rabbit holes and clicking over to related content, my mind swirling for somewhere firm to land. I told a friend this morning that I’ve had the sensation of my brain, not unlike an airplane, circling the airport looking for an open runway and, finding nowhere safe to land, being forced to remain in a frustrating holding pattern. I feel like I’m running out of fuel, to add insult to injury.

But when I ponder these days of crises with a more sober and serious disposition, I am forced to admit that my lived reality, my day-to-day tasks and struggles and responsibilities, remain almost maddeningly the same: deepen my own interior life. Be faithful to my vocation – and to the sacred vows I made. And teach my children the Gospel.

All else is, as they say, vanity.

And perhaps if I spent overly much time before July of this year letting priests and bishops and “the hierarchy” carry water for me, spiritually speaking, that time has passed. I cannot rely any longer on my own nasty little habit of clericalism, assuming the best of men of the cloth.

Are there good and holy priests? Of course. Real saints among us. And devils, too? Yes. Aren’t we finding out how very many…

And yet, what is this to you, and to me? Will a holy priest get me to heaven? Not if I don’t avail myself of the Sacraments of which he is a humble custodian, pursuing my own path of holiness with the aid of the mysterious sustenance Christ left for our earthly sojourn. A wicked priest is, too, only a humble custodian of God’s mercy, no matter the delusions of grandeur or murderous arrogance he may harbor.

I keep coming back to the thing I know to be true in these difficult times: Jesus.

Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. As I am not without sin like the first two, I find myself wanting to cling to the best practices of that last guy and live as closely by his example as possible.

How did Joseph become a saint?

He lived with Jesus and Mary.

He was probably rarely outside of their physical presence, and he carried their spiritual presence with him like a flame in his heart at his work table. How often he must have paused in his necessary, earthly, mundane, exhausting work to take a cool drink offered by the little boy Jesus, to share a quick visit with Mary and feel the consolation of her gentle hand on his aching back. His sole concern as their provider and protector was to do his work to the best of his ability so that they would be fed, clothed, and sheltered for the glory of God.

Are my responsibilities as a mother much different? Can I push aside my immediate responsibilities to fret over what more I should be doing besides working quietly to the absolute limits of my human frailty to provide for the family whom God has entrusted me with?

Maybe you’re not a parent. Maybe your current vocation is to a classroom full of children or a conference room full of employees, or even an auditorium full of fellow students. But I feel certain that we are each being called to emulate Joseph to the best of our abilities, executing our work on earth with as much care and humility as possible.

I cannot hope for Mary to hand me a cool drink of water or offer a clean cloth to wipe the sweat from my brow while I toil in the laundry room downstairs, fighting spiders and acedia to fulfill my daily duties, but I can turn to her in the rosary. I can align my heart with hers, praying for her Son to intercede in the lives of those other sons of her heart, her priests, that they would become more conformed to His passion.

I can’t open my arms for toddler Jesus to come running full tilt to leap in after a long day in the woodshed, but I can open my arms to my own children, pulling them into my lap to pray through the Scriptures, or bringing them along for the world’s fastest and least reflective visits to Jesus, fully present in Eucharistic Adoration.

I can go to Joseph. The first disciple of Jesus Christ in so many ways. I can love what he loved and live for what he lived for: the Mother, and the Son.

St. Joseph, terror of demons, pray for us.

abuse, Catholic Spirituality, Catholics Do What?, Culture of Death, current events, Pope Francis, scandal, sin, Suffering

Flipping tables in the temple

August 22, 2018

I have fielded countless emails, Instagram messages, comments, and texts from faithful Catholics these last few weeks. Most carry the same tone of concern and horror for what is coming to light: an egregious lack of transparency and honesty in the hierarchy, a terrifying lack of integrity where it comes to matters of sexual morality, and a smug assumption that the average Joe – or Jane – in the pew would never find out.

We’re finding out.

I shared my frustration with a priest friend yesterday, a faithful man who is valiantly struggling to lead his religious community in holiness. He shares my rage. He sent a letter to the parents of the young men who are in formation in his community, outlining the steps their community takes to ensure that chastity is the rule and not the exception. It gave me some ideas for what I can do as a parent to ensure that my children are safe and well-informed, as it becomes necessary and age appropriate, of the current crisis we face in the Catholic Church.

My oldest is not yet 8, so thankfully we are not having detailed conversations or answering horrifying questions about the current news coverage. We have done an okay job of shielding them from the details. I could probably be more careful with my phone conversations or dinner table talk when the kids have scooted off to play.

We have always instructed our kids openly about body safety and boundaries, encouraging them to tell us if anyone ever makes them uncomfortable or asks them to do something that scares them or makes them feel funny.

We’ve given them the real names for the various components of the reproductive system, and have emphasized repeatedly that only mommy and daddy and the doctor (with a parent present) ever have the right to touch their genitals, and then only to help them if they are sick or to wash them in the bathtub or at diaper changing time.

We’ve talked about grown ups or older kids or even age-group peers who make their tummies feel funny, who hug too hard or touch in the wrong places. We’ve had a couple incidents with our kids being put in uncomfortable positions by other children, and as we’ve navigated the fallout we’ve refined our family rules and our best practices as parents.

We don’t do sleepovers. We don’t do overnight camps or send our kids on out of town trips with other families. We have certain family members and friends whom we trust to baby-sit, and we politely decline other offers or avoid situations where we are not 100% confident in the sexual and moral integrity of the adults in question. We don’t send our kids to the neighbors’ houses to play for the most part, and we don’t allow them to play with their friends in our own home with their bedroom doors closed.

It sounds overprotective, but from our experience, it is basic common sense. Our kids are not smothered. They ride their bikes unescorted around the block, they run wild and free in playgrounds and parks and at parties and barbecues with our friends, they speak confidently to adults when they are in our presence, and they climb as high as they are able to in the trees of their choosing.

We do not want them to have a stilted childhood, but we do want them to have a safe one.

As they get older, we will increase their freedom. We will let our boys serve at the altar if they feel so called, and we will ensure that any altar server training or trips include parent volunteers. We will continue to welcome our priest friends into our home, providing concrete examples of holiness in religious life to our children. We will bring our kids to the sacraments, particularly reconciliation, trusting that our pastor and associate pastors are beyond reproach, and also insisting on confessionals with see-through doors or confession in an open pew in the main sanctuary. We will begin having the painful conversations about bishops who hurt seminarians, about priests who hurt children, about men who pledged their lives to God, but who lived their lives for satan.

We will do this in conjunction with instructing them about healthy sexuality. About the good and holy gift of marriage, and of sex within marriage as a bonding and creative force for holiness and sanctification and new life.

We will teach them about the complementary nature of men and women, explaining that some people struggle in their sexuality and have wounds that cause them great difficulty in their lives. We will teach them about the inexhaustible mercy of God in the Sacrament of Reconciliation, and the life-long struggle for chastity and sexual integrity that is the responsibility of every baptized Christian.

So my question to you, dear fathers and bishops, is this: what will you do to help us?

Will you continue to turn a blind eye to sexual deviance in your seminaries? Will you turn a blind eye to homosexual activity in your ranks? Will you shuffle the bad apples around from assignment to assignment, destroying the lives of children and entire families in the process? Will you own up to the mistakes that have been made in the past, and commit to taking immediate action when predators strike in the future? Will you hold yourselves to a level of purity that is beyond reproach as an example to those who are subordinate to your authority?

Will you overturn some tables with us, now?

Will you rage with us against the evil that stalks our institutional Church like a demonic predator, rooting out the perpetrators and helping bring them to prosecution to the fullest extent of the law?

Will you link arms with us in fasting, in penance, and in prayer; in calling for and facilitating the criminal prosecution of the men who have ruined lives and snatched away souls?

Will you bring to bear on the problems we face the full weight of your priestly authority, performing exorcisms as necessary and demonstrating with your own example a model of

penance and purification that we can all emulate?

Will you wage war with us?

We, the parents of those who are the greatest in the kingdom of God, the children, await your answer.

And we won’t accept “no”.

I have linked here to a letter I drafted to the US nuncio on behalf of mothers, in particular, calling for a full criminal and ecclesial investigation of the US bishops, initiated by Pope Francis. Feel free to adapt and copy for your own use, or to respond to have your signature included with my letter. I plan to send it on August 31, the final day of a novena of penance that our local religious community is leading.

abuse, Catholic Spirituality, Catholics Do What?, Culture of Death, current events

A letter of petition to the Nuncio for the Roman Catholic Church in the United States

August 22, 2018

Most Reverend Christophe Pierre

Apostolic Nuncio to the United States

3339 Massachusetts Avenue, NW

Washington, D.C. 20008

Your Excellency,

We are Catholic women, baptized members of the Body of Christ. Mothers, wives, sisters, and daughters. We are faithful to the Magisterium and reliant upon the mercy of God which is poured out upon us in the sacrament of penance when we fail to live up to the demands of Jesus Christ who is the only way to the Father. We are filled with sorrow and rage at the accusations and allegations, the cover ups and controversies, all the vile and demonic filth that has spilled forth in the news in recent weeks.

We weep for the victims, for the shattered lives, the broken bodies, and the tortured souls. We turn to His Holiness Pope Francis, and we beg, we implore, and we demand that he take action against any credibly accused predatory priests, bishops, and religious. These men and women to whom the children of God were entrusted with the most precious gift a human parent can offer – his or her child’s physical and spiritual safety – have failed utterly in their mission from God Almighty to defend the least of these. We demand that he as pastor of this universal flock take swift and severe action against those who committed heinous crimes against children and against adults over whom they held positions of power.

We also ask Pope Francis to proclaim boldly the universal call to chastity for every baptized believer, to condemn unequivocally all sexual acts outside of the holy bond of matrimony between husband and wife. We humbly submit ourselves to this same standard and beg the mercy of Christ when we fall short. We must be able to trust that our chanceries, our rectories, and our seminaries are submitting likewise to uncompromising purity and fidelity, and that there is zero tolerance for homosexual or heterosexual activity of any kind.

For the sake of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, our Savior and our Judge, we implore you to take action now. Do not delay where justice and mercy demand a cleansing by holy fire. Do not withhold the least authority of the law, both civil and canonical. Root out this duplicitous and satanic rot which compromises the integrity of the very foundation of our One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church.

In the name of Mary, Mater Ecclesia and Theotokos, we entrust our petitions to you,

Signed:

(your name here)

(All content is available free for use and reproduction in its original form for the use of the Catholic faithful. You may change the pronouns and references to suit your station in life.)

abuse, Catholics Do What?, Contraception, Culture of Death, current events, Parenting, prayer, scandal, sin, spiritual warfare, Suffering

What’s a faithful Catholic to do?

August 16, 2018

There is a tremendous – and warranted – outcry of rage and betrayal in the Church right now.

I’m not talking about the usual suspects in the media and the voices coming from the cafeteria line, either. I’m talking about the men and women who have sacrificed and stood steadfast, serving the Church with their professional lives, settling for smaller salaries and raised eyebrows at cocktail parties when they disclose their line of work. The little old ladies who are daily communicants. The blue collar workers who pray a Rosary on their lunch breaks and fast on bread and water on Wednesdays. The underpaid Catholic school teachers and the harassed Catholic healthcare professionals.

In other words, the faithful.

The ones raising larger than average families on smaller than average budgets. Refusing to cave to the extraordinary societal pressure to relieve the emptiness of their wombs at any cost, and opting for adoption or even childlessness over IVF. Bearing patiently the slings and arrows of public opinion when it comes time to defend the Church when her ways are not the world’s ways. Tossing aside the contraceptives and using NFP instead. Forgoing the “pleasures” of pornography and honoring their marriage vows. Remaining celibate and suffering in loneliness as an abandoned spouse or a same-sex attracted person. Sacrificing to educate their children in the Faith in the face of extraordinary difficulty. Refusing to reduce the immutable dignity of every single human person to an object to be used or discarded.

And defending Holy Mother Church with the ultimate gift – one’s fidelity to the Faith – even as the world around us spins farther into secular materialism.

Fathers, these children of your flocks are suffering. Suffering over the grievous injuries done to those other children, the ones named in the Pennsylvania report, the ones whose innocence was shattered, whose dignity was spat upon, who suffered in their very bodies the wounds of Christ tortured and crucified.

We cannot sleep for weeping over these images, crying out to heaven that men ordained to act in the person of Christ at the altar could also rape, pillage, and destroy the most innocent.

We need to hear from you.

We need to hear lamentation and rage, resolution and public penances. We must know that you stand on the side of Christ, crucified and risen. That even if your diocese is beyond a shadow of suspicion in August of 2018, your father’s heart breaks and your stomach roils in anger over what happened in our Church – no matter which diocese and no matter what year.

Many of us carried heavy hearts into Mass for the Feast of the Assumption of Mary yesterday, lifting red and swollen eyes to heaven during the readings and beseeching God for any answers, any explanation.

Too many of us – not all, but many – were met with deafening silence from the pulpits when the time for the homily arrived. The silence tore deeper into the wounds rent by the horrifying grand jury report; there was scarcely time for a scab to form over last month’s McCarrick revelations.

We need to hear from our fathers. We need to hear your anger, your shame, your outrage, your sorrow, and your profound and sincere resolution that this evil will be purged from the ranks of the Church hierarchy, no matter what the cost.

When someone intentionally injures or violates my child, even if – and perhaps especially if – I am not the cause of the injury, he or she can count on my swift and unapologetic rage.

We need to see your hearts, fathers. We need to see and hear our bishops doing public acts of reparation and penance, or resigning the privilege of office if the circumstances warrant it.

We need to hear our priests – especially our pastors – speaking uncompromisingly and unceasingly about what is happening, about the war zone we American Catholics find ourselves in, about the corruption and satanic violence within our own ranks, and about what is being done to bring about justice.

If your bishop hasn’t issued talking points yet or the diocesan-level HR department is cautioning restraint, damn the restraint. Your people are suffering, and they need to know their spiritual fathers are mad as hell and they aren’t going to take it anymore.

What can we, as lay people, do at a moment such as this?

Pray. Pray as you never have before. Pray a daily Rosary with your family, if you have one. With your spouse or significant other or roommate. Alone or with a recording, if you have nobody else to pray with. Ask especially for the intercession of Our Lady of Fatima, St. Charles Lwanga (Google his martyrdom story) and St. Catherine of Siena.

Fast. Give up social media one day a week, or limit it to a few minutes a day. Get rid of one of the three or four platforms you’re using entirely, maybe. Offer up those pinpricks of dopamine denial for the cleansing of the Church, and for the souls of the victims living and deceased.

Purge your home of anything that is complicit with this culture of death. Vaguely pornographic media. Explicitly pornographic media. Showtime or HBO DirectTV or maybe even your high speed internet, if it’s an occasion of sin for you. Go through your library and destroy anything that is influenced by the occult. If your right arm causes you to sin, cut it off. We must be beyond reproach as Catholics going forward if we are to have any credibility with this world and, more importantly, with Christ.

Throw away your contraception. Your mind altering drugs. Your habit of gossip, of masturbation, of criticism, of getting drunk, of cheating “just a little” on your income taxes, of cheating on your spouse, of ignoring your children.

In other words, be a saint.

Our times call for great sanctity to counter this grave evil. And sinners like us, myself first and foremost, are the only material Our Lord has to work with.

Other practical suggestions:

Email, call, and write to your bishop’s office (and while you’re at it, to the Holy Father himself.) Be respectful and unrelenting in asking for a public meeting or an explanation of what your diocese is doing to address these evils. Ask your bishop what his plans are to clean up your local church if housekeeping needs to be done. Find out what measures are in place to protect youth and children and seminarians and old people and not so old people. Ask what standard of sexual integrity is set and maintained by the diocese of X. Do the same with your pastor. Be persistent. But love your Church enough to not stop until you get a satisfactory answer.

Tell your priest, once you’ve finished asking when his next related and excruciatingly clear homily will be preached, that you are praying for him. And then do so. Offer a specific act of penance every day for your priest. For any priest you know. Give up your daily coffee, your nightcap, your nighttime pleasure reading, a workout, salt on your food, etc. Do not leave our courageous priests and bishops unarmed in this time of agony for the Church. They are suffering as Christ did in the Garden of Gethsemane, and they need our prayers.

We have decided for our family, that to avoid even the appearance of scandal and to protect all parties involved, it is best to avoid ever putting our priest friends – or any priest – in a situation where they are alone with a child of ours. I’m not talking about casual one-on-one talks with Father on the playground during recess, but being alone in a car, in a closed room, in a private home, etc. We are also exceedingly cautious about whom we leave our children with, and take into consideration the circumstances of any home or place they’ll be visiting. Most abuse takes place within the context of the extended family or trusted circle of friends, and we have chosen to err on the side of potentially giving offense by being “too careful.”

May Christ Jesus in whom we place our trust and confidence convict in our hearts a profound sorrow for all who suffer, and a firm resolution to spend ourselves utterly in striving to prevent future evil.

St. Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle.