All Catholics sin (some, like myself, are intimately familiar with the experience), and are taught as a matter of doctrine that anyone, Catholic or non-Catholic, who dies conscious of unrepentant mortal sin will be eternally lost in the age to come.
The Catholic Church (at least prior to 1965) has been acutely aware of perdition, damnation, and moral recompense. Can a Church that today has constituent congregations filled unapologetically with long communion and short confession lines adequately deal with a sex abuse crisis that challenges the moral foundations of Church authority?
The Catholic Church isn’t broken, insofar as it has yet to renege on its guarantee of perpetual existence, but it is wounded. And there are certainly those who delight in a wounded Church — there are those harbingers of atavistic grudges about the First Council of Ephesus’ censure of Nestorious (a censure he well deserved) and those whose lives are but a perpetual rebellion against the preferences of their middle-class parents.
It nevertheless demoralizes religions everywhere when the world’s largest Church fails so spectacularly to speak plainly about the behavior of its leaders. On matters of abuse and accountability, some in the modern Church have suffered from an utter impotence — their larger theological project of remaking Christ in the image of an amalgamated Elizabeth Warren and Mahatma Gandhi doesn’t include a chapter on moral rot. When a matter of grave evil like the abuse scandal hits, such clergy are left without an adequate theological vocabulary to speak about it.
The Jesus of the Bible, who spoke more often of Hell than Heaven, would scantly recognize the milquetoast sermons on “self-help,” religious pluralism and “peace” that dominate the modern homilist’s lexicon. In many parishes around the country, “fear of the Lord” is but a quaint relic of our unenlightened ancestors. It is little wonder, then, that some parishioners are dejectedly considering leaving the Church over the sex scandal — if, as Cardinal Blase Cupich said, “some of the greatest Christians I know are people who don’t actually have a kind of faith system that they believe in,” why not stick a “Coexist” sticker on the back of your car, berate national immigration policy, and forget the tedium of Sunday Mass and the Sacraments altogether?
Comments like those, and the Cardinal’s ones in which he defended the Pope’s decision to not answer questions about abuse by mentioning Francis’ commitment to a “bigger agenda” on “the environment … and protecting migrants,” force many Catholics to wrestle with the perception that there is a fundamental lack of seriousness among some of their leaders in the clergy.
My Church, that I treat with the reverence one owes a divine institution, has shifted its locus of teaching away from the salvation of individual souls and onto amorphously defined conceptions of “social justice” and tolerance — both ostensibly noble goals that concurrently alleviate man of his personal duties to aid the poor and save his brother’s soul. This Church, whose parish priests often preach Hell as more of an embarrassing doctrine of antiquity than a possible destination for themselves or their parishioners, is poorly equipped to deal with allegations of the gravity of the ones they currently face.
Any saccharine vision of reform that includes more acoustic guitars and theological imprecision, in lieu of returning to a message of capital-T Truth and things eternal, will fail of its own accord
John Hirschauer is an award-winning essayist with work at National Review Online, The New York Times, and The Federalist. He is on Twitter @JohnHirschauer.