Turning the scourge into a gift
I found it most moving to hear the Pope asking forgiveness and vowing to do everything to resolve the scandals involving priests right in the Holy Mass in the middle of the culminating activity of the Year for Priests in Rome recently.
That was a very brave act of his, full of true humility, that deserves to be emulated by other Church leaders. After all, the Church which is holy on account of Christ, is also a sinner in need of repentance and purification on account of her members, us, who still bear the weaknesses of humanity.
This business of asking forgiveness should be an ordinary, regular event in the life of the Church not only in her individual members but also as an institution.
This will reflect a more complete picture of the Church in her pilgrim way here on earth. It identifies her more closely with Christ, her founder, who on the cross just before dying asked forgiveness from his Father on behalf of all men.
This papal gesture also shows a special kind of magnanimity, a greatness of heart that is not afraid to own up certain negative elements in the Church in her human aspects, unavoidable as it were, and to go through the painful process of purification and atonement.
This helps to correct the unintended side-effects of triumphalism and other forms of religious abuse that can subtly develop through the years in the Church, again because of our many human weaknesses that can become parts of our cultures and social structures.
We should be more aware of these tendencies, and learn how to handle them. I am sure the wealth of experience the Church has gained through the years will greatly help us to form a sharper sensitivity to the bad double-effects of otherwise good intentions and efforts pursued in the Church.
This again makes the Church resemble all the more with Christ, who was not afraid to make as his own the sins and faults of men and to die for them and to them.
This is how Christ turned evil into good, the offense into a gift. The logic of this beautiful phenomenon can be found in St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans, and reiterated in several of his other epistles, where he said:
“Not like the offense is the gift. For if by the offense of the one the many died, much more has the grace of God, and the gift in the grace of the one man Jesus Christ, abounded unto the many…” (5,15)
Pope Benedict XVI applied this kind of reasoning to the issue of recent clerical scandals when he said in the homily of that Mass: “Had the Year for Priests been a glorification of our individual human performance, it would have been ruined by these events.
“But for us what happened was precisely the opposite: We grew in gratitude for God’s gift, a gift concealed in ‘earthen vessels’ which ever anew, even amid human weakness, makes his love concrete present in this world.
“The scandals should be looked upon as a summons to purification, as a task which we bring to the future and which makes us acknowledge and love all the more the great gift we have received from God.
“In this way, his gift becomes a commitment to respond to God’s courage and humility by our own courage and our own humility.”
Let’s hope that these words become a living reality in the Church in her individual members as well as in her institutional status. This will take time. But at least a good start in some attitudinal change in the Church is already made.
Sad to say, not all people appreciate this kind of reasoning. Of course, that’s also understandable, since these words have to be taken in the context of faith. Without that faith, no amount of reasoning can become convincing.
I learned, for example, that a group of victims of clerical abuse is not too happy with what the Pope has done. They want that these scandals in the Church be the reason to what they call as the need to democratize the Church.
Now this is a different issue altogether. It has strayed from its proper context of discipline to another context, more serious this time, of the very nature of the Church.
Sorry to say, but this switch of context is a foul. We can discuss this question in another occasion. As of now, I’m very happy with what the Pope has done regarding the scandals.
(Fr. Cimagala is the Chaplain of Center for Industrial Technology and Enterprise (CITE), Talamban, Cebu City. Email: roycimagala@gmail.com)
