No.169: Intentions for the End of August

It seemed wrong not to post something in light of what’s happening in the Church right now, but articulate words have escaped me.  This Facebook post by Stephen Lenahan has made its way around my circles and while I don’t personally know him, he expressed much of what I’ve been feeling the past week:

To all my non-Catholic friends…please pray for your Catholic friends & family!
The most recent revelations of horrific abuse in our Church are gut wrenching. Right now, we don’t want to have to explain our faith or our religion because we ourselves are extremely vulnerable and raw. And most of us are asking the same questions you are when seeing headlines. Thousands have been physically violated. Some of us are friends with or related to victims. Millions of us have been spiritually violated by the scandal of it all. We are enraged at those who were supposed to shepherd us. We are devastated for the victims. And now we will have to try to root out the filth and rot that has been lurking in the shadows of our hierarchy since they failed in doing so 15 years ago.
You might ask…why don’t you just find a new church/home and be done with it? But it’s not that simple for us. Home is where the heart is and our hearts are devoted to the sacraments, scripture, and tradition we hold dear because they are where we encounter a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. Right now our spiritual home and our hearts are broken. We know our Church to be one that endures the sins of the ages and triumphs for the sake of Christ in spite of the broken humanity that surrounds us. Right now we are trying to figure out how to be like the saints who faced evils in centuries past…but it is gut wrenching and this is why we need your support!
Thank God, like many of you, our hope is in Jesus Christ…not clerics…and so we know that better days are ahead but first we have to endure repentance, shame, anger, extreme reform, and hopefully justice! It will be a purge long overdue but it will leave our Church better than what we inherited. So please…pray for us, pray WITH us, and support us in this uphill battle.
To my Catholic family & friends…saddle up y’all! It’s time to take back our Church and it ain’t going to be easy. No more apathetic Catholics. No more lukewarm Catholics. No more “cafeteria Catholics.” Entrench yourself in prayer and scripture. And be bold in your parishes and dioceses!

“From the crisis of today the Church of tomorrow will emerge — a Church that has lost much. She will become small and will have to start afresh more or less from the beginning. She will no longer be able to inhabit many of the edifices she built in prosperity. As the number of her adherents diminishes, so it will lose many of her social privileges. In contrast to an earlier age, it will be seen much more as a voluntary society, entered only by free decision. As a small society, it will make much bigger demands on the initiative of her individual members…And so it seems certain to me that the Church is facing very hard times. The real crisis has scarcely begun. We will have to count on terrific upheavals. But I am equally certain about what will remain at the end: not the Church of the political cult, which is dead already, but the Church of faith. It may well no longer be the dominant social power to the extent that she was until recently; but it will enjoy a fresh blossoming and be seen as man’s home, where he will find life and hope beyond death.” – Ratzinger in 1969 German Radio Broadcast