Religion: a Test of Faith

Many are writing about LA Times Religion reporter William Lobdell's column on his loss of faith.

The short version is that Lobdell had a conversion experience in an evangelical setting, got involved in religion reporting, then started attending RCIA (his wife was Catholic) just about the time that the most recent round of clergy sex abuse cases started coming to light. As he covered the stories, he was immersed in the pervasive and absolute denial of any problems, the protection racket afforded so many of these priests by the hierarchy and their brother priests and the rest of the church bureaucracy. Most devastating, in the end, was the role the laity played in enabling this whole thing:

I sought solace in another belief: that a church's heart is in the pews, not the pulpits. Certainly the people who were reading my stories would recoil and, in the end, recapture God's house. Instead, I saw parishioners reflexively support priests who had molested children by writing glowing letters to bishops and judges, offering them jobs or even raising their bail while cursing the victims, often to their faces.

On a Sunday morning at a parish in Rancho Santa Margarita, I watched congregants lobby to name their new parish hall after their longtime pastor, who had admitted to molesting a boy and who had been barred that day from the ministry. I felt sick to my stomach that the people of God wanted to honor an admitted child molester. Only one person in the crowd, an Orange County sheriff's deputy, spoke out for the victim.

On Good Friday 2002, I decided I couldn't belong to the Catholic Church. Though I had spent a year preparing for it, I didn't go through with the rite of conversion.

Lobdell covered other issues as well, of course, related to Mormons, TBN, and so on. It all snowballed into what seems like a complete loss of faith:

My soul, for lack of a better term, had lost faith long ago — probably around the time I stopped going to church. My brain, which had been in denial, had finally caught up.

Clearly, I saw now that belief in God, no matter how grounded, requires at some point a leap of faith. Either you have the gift of faith or you don't. It's not a choice. It can't be willed into existence. And there's no faking it if you're honest about the state of your soul.

Sitting in a park across the street from the courthouse, I called my wife on a cellphone. I told her I was putting in for a new beat at the paper.

It's a sad story, and not an uncommon one. Several thoughts come to mind. Some of them:

1) The fallibility and sin of professed believers is a powerful counter-witness, especially in a religious tradition, like Christianity - and especially Catholicism - in which "Church" is an organic thing, the Body of Christ, the presence of Christ on earth, one of the "marks" of which is indefectibility.

But the thing is, what Lobdell describes, however awful, is nothing new. Not that he's saying it is, of course. But his justifiable anguish and shock (and God help us when we are not anguished and shocked by these things) could be shared by any Christian during any era, any place.  Christianity has never been pure in the human sense, always been a difficult, challenging mix of mostly sinners and a few saints. Read Paul - when he writes to the Corinthians about their immoral behavior and their actions during the Eucharist, he's not talking to outsiders - he's talking to Christians. When he scolds the Galatians, he's talking to the baptized, those who call themselves Christians. We bandy about ancient terms like "Donatists" or "Arians," forgetting that these are not simply ideas, but distillations of reality - Donatism reflects an era in which Christians by the score found themselves unable to pay the ultimate price of loyalty, and perhaps burned some incense to the emperor or signed something or turned over some books, while some of their neighbors went to their deaths, refusing. A scandal. A sad state of affairs. But what was the end of that battle? A purging? If the Donatists had their way, sure. But Augustine had another view.

Christians as individuals betray Christ on a daily basis. Christian institutions do, as well, in small and great ways.

But it's even more complicated than that, for when you really start digging you can get even more confused - and you learn - perhaps in a more sophisticated version of Dr. Teabing's lecture to Sophie Neveau - of the politics inherent in Church life, even in discussions of church teaching and policy. It can be the equivalent of the young fundamentalist Bart Ehrman, by his own account, being exposed to the human hand in the composition of Scripture and losing his faith.

For years, I had online conversations with a friend about the current scandals. I told him over and over that I really didn't understand how the current scandals could be a deal-breaker for one's Catholic faith, and say, the papal history of the 10th century or the bad Renaissance popes was not. Or, as discussed in comments below, in my Ursulines in Montana post, the way that clergy, especially bishops, sometimes treated founders of new religious orders of women from the post-Reformation era on. Or how the Franciscans battled each other for their legacy in the middle ages.

The whole thing is pretty much a mess. And always has been.

Close exposure to this - as journalists, or as an employee of the Church - exacerbates the problem. We have spoken often here of the risk that working for the Church presents to one's faith. But one could make the opposite argument as well. The quips put it best. "I am the worst liturgical abuse at any Mass I attend," said one friend of mine. "I refuse to join any club that would have me  as a member" said Groucho Marx.

This is not (as long time readers know) to suggeste quiescence or acceptance of sin. It's simply to acknowledge a reality that is as old as the first Pope, huddled in the courtyard, denying Christ by the light of a fire.

It is easy to understand why that reality makes faith impossible for some. It certainly makes it difficult for many. Which brings me to

2) It is interesting to me that many anti-religionists (not talking about Lobdell here) accuse believers of taking an easy way out. Of embracing a sweet vision of life and reality that avoids hard questions, or, in the end, is satisfied with platitudes.

It is not so, is it? For faith is hard. Does anyone really think that faith is easy in the face of the innocent suffering of a child? Or the ravages of Alzheimer's? Or the existence of evil? Or, as we're talking about here, the ironies, paradoxes and counter-witness of the Church?

3) But in the end (at least to me) what is even harder than faith is making sense of reality without God and making sense of what happened 2,000 years ago in Jerusalem, period. It is too late at night for me to ramble on about this (thankfully), but simply put - one's faith in Jesus Christ is faith in Jesus Christ. It is more than a challenge, because that whole "Jesus Christ" thing involves this other thing called "Incarnation" which means that, nonsensically, the God became human as a baby, grew up, and was executed by those he had created out of love. The whole thing is almost impossible from the start, and once you throw in the rest of the billions of us, with all of our sins and blindess, it gets crazier still. And even more painful because of how many of us (all of us, perhaps?) use God as a cover for our sins.

Don't we?

4) It points to the great risk (again, this isn't evident in Lobdell's case, but it brings it to mind) of emphsizing "this local Catholic community" in catechesis. I'm an RCIA veteran, have been to the national workshops, worked in programs, and I know how it was - and perhaps still is, in some areas. We de-emphasize Catholic teaching in favor of the experience of Christ via the hospitality and love and acceptance of the parish. Come join us, we say. We're welcoming. Experience Christ in our midst.

Ideally, we should, yes. See how these Christians love one another. Saints are the greatest witness to the truth of the Gospel. The Catholic faith - the Christian faith - is not a set of disembodied teachings hanging in the air, waiting for our assent. The truths, the presence of Jesus Christ is, indeed mediated. He works thorugh us - that is the definition of Church. The Church is not an absraction, a Platonic ideal.  We are back to that Incarnation thing again.

But neither is our faithfulness the proof of the truth of what Jesus Christ taught and who he is. We want it to be - it seems to make sense to us to say that if Jesus is real and present there will be you know...fruit.

Well, there will be. But just as Jesus would not be tempted by Satan in the desert with a test, so it is with the Body of Christ. Again, it's not a matter of "just believe it." There must be fruit. Faith without works is dead. Love one another as I have loved you - this is my commandment. It's a matter of radically putting our faith in Jesus, in honing in on who he was and is in the Church ...despite his appearance.

In brief - as Christians, we hope that our lives and our witness encourage others to see the reality of Jesus Christ. We trust Him to work and love through us. But we would also hope that no one would look at our lives as the reason to believe or not. In fear and trembling and humility, we open our lives and hope they point to God. But no saint who ever lived would proclaim, "Look at me, and believe." No - they would say, "Look at Him."

As I said.

It is hard.

I see this acknowledged, implicitly and sometimes more explicitly in Pope Benedict's writing. A thinking man, he is not a stranger to questions of doubt. A priest for decades, the former head of the CDF, he knows, as he wrote in the Ninth Station of the Stations of the Cross in 2005:

NINTH STATION
Jesus falls for the third time

V/. Adoramus te, Christe, et benedicimus tibi.
R/. Quia per sanctam crucem tuam redemisti mundum.

From the Book of Lamentations. 3:27-32

It is good for a man that he bear the yoke in his youth. Let him sit alone in silence when he has laid it on him; let him put his mouth in the dust - there may yet be hope; let him give his cheek to the smiter, and be filled with insults. For the Lord will not cast off for ever, but, though he cause grief, he will have compassion, according to the abundance of his steadfast love.

MEDITATION

What can the third fall of Jesus under the Cross say to us? We have considered the fall of man in general, and the falling of many Christians away from Christ and into a godless secularism. Should we not also think of how much Christ suffers in his own Church? How often is the holy sacrament of his Presence abused, how often must he enter empty and evil hearts! How often do we celebrate only ourselves, without even realizing that he is there! How often is his Word twisted and misused! What little faith is present behind so many theories, so many empty words! How much filth there is in the Church, and even among those who, in the priesthood, ought to belong entirely to him! How much pride, how much self-complacency! What little respect we pay to the Sacrament of Reconciliation, where he waits for us, ready to raise us up whenever we fall! All this is present in his Passion. His betrayal by his disciples, their unworthy reception of his Body and Blood, is certainly the greatest suffering endured by the Redeemer; it pierces his heart. We can only call to him from the depths of our hearts: Kyrie eleison ­ Lord, save us (cf. Mt 8: 25).

PRAYER

Lord, your Church often seems like a boat about to sink, a boat taking in water on every side. In your field we see more weeds than wheat. The soiled garments and face of your Church throw us into confusion. Yet it is we ourselves who have soiled them! It is we who betray you time and time again, after all our lofty words and grand gestures. Have mercy on your Church; within her too, Adam continues to fall. When we fall, we drag you down to earth, and Satan laughs, for he hopes that you will not be able to rise from that fall; he hopes that being dragged down in the fall of your Church, you will remain prostrate and overpowered. But you will rise again. You stood up, you arose and you can also raise us up. Save and sanctify your Church. Save and sanctify us all.

All:

Pater noster, qui es in cælis:
sanctificetur nomen tuum;
adveniat regnum tuum;
fiat voluntas tua, sicut in cælo, et in terra.
Panem nostrum cotidianum da nobis hodie;
et dimitte nobis debita nostra,
sicut et nos dimittimus debitoribus nostris;
et ne nos inducas in tentationem;
sed libera nos a malo.

Eia mater, fons amoris,
me sentire vim doloris
fac, ut tecum lugeam.

Have mercy on us - all.

Christ was crucified on earth and the Church is crucified in time, and the Church is crucified by all of us, by her members most particularly because she is a Church of sinners...The Church is founded on Peter who denied Christ three times and couldn't walk on the water by himself. All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful. Priests resist it as well as others. To have the Church be what you want it to be would require the continuous miraculous meddling of God in human affairs, whereas it is our dignity that we are allowed more or less to get on with those graces that come through faith and the sacraments and which work thorugh our human nature...Human nature is so faulty that it can resist any amount of grace and most of the time it does. The Church does well to hold her own; you are asking that she show a profit. When she shows a profit you have a saint, not necessarily a canonized one. (Flannery O'Connor to Cecil Dawkins 12/8/58. Habit of Being, 307)