H/T Evan
The Church is about Jesus Christ and Him crucified. The Church, being the Body of Christ, can expect to be on the Cross, century after century, in this world. Christ was sinless and “became sin” for us. The Church, being the People of God, hangs on that Cross in Christ. At the Last Supper there was Communion. The Church hangs on that Cross mystically born in the heart of Christ. We are humiliated by our sins, the sin of people, and the sin of the world for which Christ is dying.
Resurrection comes after the suffering and the Passion. Our sinfulness is not the end. Our sinfulness is not the end. It’s the reason Christ died and now lives in His People, including His pope and His clergy. We are still learning how to be Christlike.
The Anchoress posted “No one wants to see pope prostrate.” In light of the grandiloquence surrounding the issue of sex abuse in the Catholic Church, getting the facts out is more important than ever to the Church, but with the wizardry of Presentism, the smoke and mirrors of time employed by The New York Times, distortions rule. Presentism, “a mode of historical analysis in which present-day ideas and perspectives are anachronistically introduced into depictions or interpretations of the Past, or as Webster states it, “an attitude toward the past dominated by present-day attitudes and experiences,” is itself a distortion. It is illogical and unreasonable. It is important to note that newspapers like the NY Times sell newspapers; sex and scandal sell.
An appeal to Benedict XVI as reported by the Catholic Herald‘s Anna Arco:
“I wish to speak on behalf of those young people who, like me feel they are on the outskirts of the Church. We are the ones who do not fit comfortably into stereo-typed roles. This is due to various factors among them: either because we have experienced substance abuse; or because we are experiencing the misfortune of broken or dysfunctional families; or because we are of a different sexual orientation; among us are also our immigrant brothers and sisters, all of us in some way or another have encountered experiences that have estranged us from the Church. Other Catholics put us all in one basket. For them we are those “who claim to believe yet do not live up to the commitment of faith.”To us, faith is a confusing reality and this causes us great suffering. We feel that not even the Church herself recognizes our worth. One of our deepest wounds stems from the fact that although the political forces are prepared to realize our desire for integration, the Church community still considers us to be a problem. It seems almost as if we are less readily accepted and treated with dignity by the Christian community than we are by all other members of society. Continue reading
Be Holy! 