UNITED STATES
Waiting for Godot to Leave
Kevin O’Brien
Rod Dreher at The American Conservative has written about the Scandal in St. Louis and mentions me and some of the things I’ve posted recently here.
Rod’s concluding sentences speak directly to the spiritual turmoil I now find myself in …
It is very, very hard to walk the tightrope between cynicism and credulity; I struggle with this every day. The problem is when you don’t struggle at all. Hardcore cynicism is a different kind of Big Lie.
Rod says this, speaking as a man whose faith took a direct hit from the horrors he discovered when investigating the Sex Scandal in the Catholic Church – which is something he did as a journalist, in depth and at length. Learning the truth that he learned – a truth that most of us are unwilling to face – separated him from the true-believers who commit themselves to clericalism at all costs (a Big Lie), but also put him in the dangerous position of giving in to something that was cynical and bitter – “a different kind of Big Lie”.
In fact, one of the commenters in Rod’s post makes the very natural Protestant claim that if Catholic Bishops are, in most cases, either cowards or scoundrels, and if the people they shepherd are generally no better, then why would any Catholic believe anything the Church teaches? How can a Christian leader – a successor to the Apostles – teach infallibly on Faith and Morals if he’s buggering the altar boy or covering up for priests who do? Or – even worse – if he’s complicit in such crimes, and then cooperating with lay Catholics who shame and ostracize the victims when the victims come forward, sacrificing children and families for personal status and position. (Which may or may not be happening in the Fr. Jiang case, but which has certainly happened again and again in the Church during the course of this past decade.)
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