LOS ANGELES (CA)
Los Angeles Times
March 3, 2019
By Ruben Martinez
To write that now seems to beg an explanation. How can I continue to profess the faith within the bounds of an institution so thoroughly corrupted by the gravest of sins? How can I accept the host from the hands of men who themselves may have abused, or covered up for those who did?
I owe my faith to my grandmother and the Virgen de Guadalupe. In her American life, my Mexican grandmother rarely set foot in a church, but she hung a huge, sepia-toned print of the virgin in her living room, a votive always aflame before it. It was the heart of the house, the image of a mother who would never waver in protecting her child. I am struggling to hold on to that image amid the nightmare of predator priests betraying the Mother Church.
Roman Catholics who lapsed long ago — and certainly many survivors of sexual abuse — may ask why it took me so long to reach this moment of reckoning.
The answer is I don’t know what my faith would be without my church. I don’t know what my life would be like without my faith. And despite the onslaught of scandal after scandal, I’ve held on to the hope that the crisis would somehow open up the possibility of a profound conversation about the church’s identity — including priestly celibacy, gender and sexual orientation. Indeed, there were hints at the beginning of Francis’ papacy that such a dialogue could take place. But the conversation — such a complicated one, among more than a billion faithful on every continent — never seems to gain momentum before another scandal hits.
When the pope and cardinals speak, they never seem to address the laity’s confusion and deep spiritual turbulence.
As I came of age and ran up against the moral conservatism of the church, I was still able to find a community among kindred spirits in the faith who fought the good fight — many of them members of the Jesuit order, which was at the forefront of social movements in the United States and Latin America in the 1970s and ’80s. There were plenty of moralizing homophobes in the church, but so too were there figures who followed the radical spirit of the Gospels, like Father Gregory Boyle, the famous “gang priest” of Boyle Heights, or Father Michael Kennedy, who was instrumental in establishing a sanctuary for refugees from Central America in the 1980s.
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