<p>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 <a href="http://www.saintaquinas.com/mortal_sin.html">mortal sin</a> will be eternally lost in the age to come.</p>
<p>The Catholic Church (at least prior to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Vatican_Council">1965</a>) has been acutely aware of perdition, damnation, and moral recompense. Can a Church that today has constituent congregations filled <a href="http://www.patheos.com/blogs/inebriateme/2014/04/stop-comparing-the-communion-line-with-the-confession-line/">unapologetically</a> with <a href="https://www.americamagazine.org/issue/james-martin-and-ross-douthat-pope-francis-synod-and-demands-law-and-mercy">long communion and short confession lines</a> adequately deal with a sex abuse crisis that challenges the moral foundations of Church authority?</p>
<p>The Catholic Church isn’t broken, insofar as it has yet to renege on its <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+16%3A17-19&amp;version=DRA">guarantee of perpetual existence</a>, 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.</p>
<p>It nevertheless demoralizes religions everywhere when the world’s largest Church fails so spectacularly to <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/pope-francis-no-comment-catholic-church-sexual-abuse-cover-up-vigano-letter/">speak plainly</a> 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.</p>
<p>The Jesus of the Bible, who <a href="https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/the-uncomfortable-subject-jesus-addressed-more-than-anyone-else/">spoke more often of Hell than Heaven</a>, 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, “<a href="http://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0015/__P67.HTM#$211">fear of the Lord</a>” 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 <a href="https://chicago.suntimes.com/news/cardinal-cupich-some-of-greatest-christians-have-no-faith-system/">said</a>, “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?</p>
<p>Comments like those, and the Cardinal’s <a href="https://www.nbcchicago.com/news/local/cardinal-cupich-interview-questions-cardinal-mccarrick-allegations-491926591.html">ones</a> 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.</p>
<p>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 <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/33888/walsh-no-jesus-not-even-close-socialist-matt-walsh">personal</a> 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.</p>
<p>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</p>
<p>John Hirschauer is an award-winning essayist with work at National Review Online, The New York Times, and The Federalist. He is on Twitter<a href="http://twitter.com/johnhirschauer"> @JohnHirschauer</a>.</p>

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HIRSCHAUER: A Church That Won’t Talk About Hell Stares Evil in the Face