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An Ex-Catholic’s Gratitude

The treasures a Church he could no longer believe in gave him
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Mark Edmundson writes about his Catholic childhood and deep disillusionment with the Roman Catholic Church, which he left. There’s a lot in the essay about the abuse scandal, so much that I thought about not posting the essay on a day when Francis is in the country. But this ending makes the whole thing worthwhile. He’s talking about why the Catholic laity did not abandon the Church after the worst of the scandal became known:

I suspect that people stuck with the Church in part because of its commitment to forgiveness. They also stuck with it because it is one of the few powerful bodies that tries to say a resolute No to what is most distressing about worldliness.

The Church is in favor of life. It rejects capital punishment. In a time when virtually no one challenges the rich and no one fights for the poor, the Church, as Pope Francis has dramatically shown, is on their side. Sell what you have and give the money to the poor, the Savior says, and then come and follow me. No other major Western institution says this. No one else has contempt for getting and spending. No one else will befriend the condemned man, or the rapist, or the thief. As long as you are alive and in this world, the Church has hope for you. When everyone else has given up on you, the Church remains open. How many times do you forgive your brother or sister? Jesus suggests that we do this no end of times. For the Church, there is no such thing as human refuse. Everyone matters. Everyone is equal. What you do to the least of mine, you do to me, Jesus says, and sometimes the Church tries to bear him out.

Does the Church fail? Of course it does. The Vatican flows with gold; the bishop knows fine wines; the priest is still ogling your son. But the Church carries within it the answers to its own excesses. You need to examine your conscience, you need to confess your sins, you need to be sorry, you need to vow to sin no more. But if you do, the door is open. The Church may at times outrage its own highest values—blindness, denial, lies. But it will try to right itself in its own way, and it will never give those values up, no matter how large the gap between what it professes and what it achieves.

Looking back, I’m grateful for the education the Church gave me. I walked out, I dare say, with its best principles in my heart, and maybe I left its worst behind. The Church stands yet and probably always will. It tells us that our lives mean something. It tells us that an individual existence has a shape, beginning with baptism and passing to confession, communion, confirmation, and marriage all the way to extreme unction and the grave. Without that inner structure, without some moral code, without forgiveness, what is life? Something closer to the experience of animals that merely eat, couple, and sleep. That the very best wisdom in the world is wrapped up with some of the worst crime is not easy for one to reconcile. But the Church now, even under the guidance of a new and invigorating pope, is a spiritual treasure guarded by a murderous dragon—and it is no less the treasure than it is the dragon.

For a major human riddle—maybe the major human riddle—is this: the worst kind of corruption is the corruption of the highest ideals. Where there are high ideals, there will often be corruption and often of the vilest sort. But without ideals, where—and what—would we be?

Read the whole thing. It’s worth it.

The question is, though, without a living relationship to the living God through the Church, how long can an individual or a society hold on to those ideals? The Elder Zosima, in The Brothers Karamazov, says:

Much on earth is concealed from us, but in place of it we have been granted a secret, mysterious sense of our living bond with the other world, with the higher heavenly world, and the roots of our thoughts and feelings are not here but in other worlds. That is why philosophers say it is impossible on earth to conceive the essence of things. God took seeds from other worlds and sowed them on this earth, and raised up his garden; and everything that could sprout sprouted, but it lives and grows only through its sense of being in touch with other mysterious worlds; if this sense is weakened or destroyed in you, that which has grown up in you dies. Then you become indifferent to life, and even come to hate it. So I think.

How do we stay connected to the mystery, and make it accessible across the generations, if not for the visible structure of the Church? Without the physical embodiment of those ideals, and without believing in the authority of the Church, how are we to know that these ideals are good?

I really appreciate what Mark Edmundson says at the end of his essay, but I’m left wondering how he would expect his children (if he had ever had them) and his children’s children to believe in these ideals if they were not given as their birthright this connection to the Church.

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