Make Straight the Way
The last dozen years have been tragic; now we have work ahead of us.
It is so much easier to destroy than to build. It takes barely a second and hardly any effort to tear something down; it requires no imagination, dedication, or moral perseverance.
Watch a young child carefully build a crenellated castle out of blocks, an all-day labor of love, then proudly display his work to his parents. Watch another child eye the enjoyment and casually kick the castle down in an instant. The ratio of time and energy is 100 to 1.
A man can start his own business with a product he invented, building up something useful to the community—and a destroyer can come along with no expertise at all and burn the business down, physically or through commercial dirty tricks.
A parent pours all of his or her heart and life into raising a child, but a malefactor can come along and damage or destroy that child in a single moment. The ratio is incalculable.
It’s so easy to destroy.
It requires character, vision, and energy to build something, but absolutely anyone can destroy. The ratio is so overwhelming in favor of destruction that it’s a wonder we build anything at all. It’s all so fragile.
Pope Francis destroyed. I don’t speak to his intention, only his actions.
The destruction is not irrevocable, but there are a lot of gaping bomb craters and tumbled walls in the structure that took thousands of years to build. And it will require people with intelligence, virtue, and especially unshakable faith to rebuild what we have just witnessed being so cruelly and systematically destroyed.
When the surviving remnant of Judah came back to Jerusalem from Babylon, around 540 B.C., the Holy City was in tumbled ruins, a blackened, rotting, boneyard of shattered memories. It wasn’t just brick and mortar that had to be relaid; it was the moral capacity of the people to be willing to invest themselves all over again. How could they sink themselves into the work of rebuilding when the memory of what was once glorious was still a stinging sorrow in their souls?
It required constant encouragement from the leaders to put steel into the backbone of the returned exiles. They’d made the journey, they had permission, the materials lay ready, but the people were easily frightened into abandoning the work. It could be destroyed all over again, after all.
Will we have the heart and courage to rebuild the Church after the devastation of the recent past?
Perhaps the most grievous and insidious destruction, besides the people, communities, dioceses, and institutes, is a great intangible: the honor of Christ’s Church. After the twelve-year pontificate of Pope Francis, the Church is not taken seriously any more.
Christ’s own Church. Not taken seriously. That is damage of cosmic proportions.
Does the Church still teach that homosexual acts are a grave evil? Most of the world no longer knows. Can women be priests? The Synod on Synodality managed to convey a hopeful uncertainty. Does the Church even believe that Sacred Scripture is divinely inspired and inerrant? The rot has eaten away to the very foundations.
The Church was once perceived to have definitive teachings about certain things, flowing from the deposit of faith left by Jesus through the apostles. Those teachings may not have been universally popular, but they were clear. Now all we have is a shrug and a weaselly, “Who am I to say?” about critical, life-altering, eternal questions.
I remember leading a group of young adults to World Youth Day 2011 in Madrid. They were twitterpated, as any youth would be, at the prospect of an overseas trip to see one of the most recognized and significant men in the world. I was slightly concerned about how they would react to Pope Benedict’s soft-spoken, scholarly demeanor. Pope John Paul II had a rockstar persona that shone brilliantly at World Youth Days, but Benedict? I was afraid he’d bomb.
As pope, Benedict would never take the chance of accidentally misstating some article of faith or morals by speaking off the cuff, so he read his remarks. And the kids hung on his words like puppies begging for a Snausage. It didn’t matter that reading gave him a somewhat monotonous delivery; they wanted to hear every word he dropped, like baby birds in the nest. They jostled (mostly politely) to get closer to him. That is the power of the deposit of faith. It calls to the heart and mind, no matter how it is delivered.
Pope Benedict’s serious delivery was received in a serious manner. A person speaking casually is received in a casual manner.
Abusers (abusers, for goodness’ sake) have enjoyed papal protection and promotion under Pope Francis. Agreements that concern millions of Catholics have been negotiated by scurrilous, defiled men. We saw a convicted embezzler requesting to be allowed to vote in the conclave, when the ungodly tangle of Vatican finances has not even begun to be unsnarled. Could the image of our beautiful Church be any more sullied? (A risky thing to say, since Satan takes it as a challenge.)
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