UNITED STATES
Bilgrimage
William D. Lindsey
Well. This is amazing news to have awakened to this morning. Even as His Eminence Cardinal George Pell was saying the following in Rome after his security guards had strongarmed Australian journalists,*
I can’t remember
I’m struggling to remember
I can’t clearly recall
I have no clear recollection of my knowing
It’s difficult to answer that absolutely
My memory is not infallible,
“Spotlight” was winning the coveted top-picture Oscar, and its producer Michael Sugar was telling the world,
This film gave a voice to survivors, and this Oscar amplifies that voice, which we hope will become a choir that will resonate all the way to the Vatican. Pope Francis, it’s time to protect the children and restore the faith.
Talk about prophetic juxtaposition! As if the Cardinal Pells of the church are precisely what Pope Francis needs to restore the faith from — as if they have so brutally and sinfully betrayed the faith that it can be restored only by removing such men from the center of the church, and building it anew on a sounder basis, one that, can we possibly dream it?, might include women at the center, and which would actively welcome survivors and what they have to tell us about their experience of the church.
Poor Cardinal Pell can’t remember. And yet remembering is front and center in the Christian tradition, since Jesus enjoined his followers to break bread and share cups of wine in memory of him. He enjoined his disciples quite precisely to pass memory on as a living and not a dead thing — not to forget; always to remember; to find him and the entire significance of his life in bread that’s broken and wine that’s poured out.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.