Amy Welborn answers the question of how perception of the sins of Church leaders impacts faith. Actually, she answers the two questions that make it up: how does it impact the beliefs of outsiders regarding Catholicism? and how does it impact our own?
[I]f the minority who flagrantly fail are an argument against the truth of what they say, what about those who spectacularly succeed? Wouldn’t they be an argument for it? Is it necessary to privilege the witness of the former over the latter? Not for an honest person, I would think…
We don’t hear too much about the ones who spectacularly succeed, although we may be lucky enough to meet some of them, even if we do not realize it.
A good reason to become knowledgeable about the lives of the saints and the times they live in. It’s an antidote: Sometimes the contemporary pickings can seem pretty thin.
I don’t mean that in past times there were more living saints than there are now, so we have to look to history to find heroes. What I mean is that, in their times, the pickings were just as thin. And yet, there they were.
Another point of Amy’s:
[An interviewer] asked me how I would talk to my own kids about shortcomings of church employees. I really didn’t know what to say because you know, for most of their lives, I was a church employee, and my shortcomings were blindingly clear to them….
Forget other people’s failures. What about mine? Do my own failures invalidate what I believe to be true?
And finally, an eloquent argument for a sense of history:
…I tend to see things across time, culture and space. If the alleged events really did occur, Monsignor Clark’s sins don’t impact my faith in Christ any more than do the sins of a 14th century bishop or a 19th century abbess. It’s all exactly the same to me.
How can I co-exist with sinful leaders? Even if every single person in a leadership position in the Church was instantly purified, right now, I would still be co-existing with sinful leaders – 2000 years worth of them.
Amy also has some advice for people who are going to be "out there railing about morality." Read the whole thing.
As an aside: This is a perfect example of the ability of bloggers—writer, editor, publisher all together, communicating directly with the reader without the intermediaries of professional journalism—to get beneath the surface of a topic, concisely and conversationally.
I mean, compare Amy’s short piece to this by Robert Anglen at the Cincinnati Enquirer, from two years ago, which is the first newspaper story I hit on with a Google search. There’s nothing wrong with the journalist’s piece per se: it reports on declining church donations and attendance, and interviews a few folks. It’s a news piece, not an opinion piece. But it makes no points that are really worthy of a great deal of thought.
(One point that struck me about that random article: A drop in donations doesn’t alarm me or seem like a crisis in faith; a drop in attendance would alarm me, since attendance at Sunday Mass is obligatory. But is there really a drop in attendance? How do you think the parish tracks attendance? Typically no one is standing at the door with a clicker, or taking tickets. Answer: They do it via the collection envelopes. So if people stop giving money it may look like a drop in attendance.)
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