Cri du Coeur

Last updated on: January 31, 2017 at 3:06 pm by Kate Cousino

Cri du Coeur 2017-01-31T15:06:07-04:00 Kate Cousino

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There’s a particular kind of heartbreak that comes from being exposed to the all-too-human failings of a man of God. I don’t think there are many believers – of any stripe – who are not familiar with the intense betrayal that comes when someone you look to as a spiritual guide and counselor disappoints you with their pride, or foolishness, or weakness.

And so it is not uncommon to hear stories of leaving the Church that begin with a tale of priestly incompetence, sin, or insensitivity. Before having my own experience of being let down when I most needed a pastor, I tended to write off these stories as evidence of a kind of weak-mindedness. What kind of faith could be driven out by the actions of a single man, or even several men?

Until I felt that betrayal, and felt in myself the desire to hide and avoid all of those things that reminded me of how much I needed and how little I was given.

It was only my stubbornness that kept me attending mass during that time. And after a while, my consciousness of my own need for mercy opened my heart a crack to the need to show mercy. When I was in college, years before, I studied history, with a particular emphasis on Church history. I know that this priest’s faults don’t even come close to touching the level of some of the horrible ways that priests and leaders – and lay people – have failed over the last two millennia.

And yet, the Church stands, and teaches virtue that She rarely exemplifies fully, and points to Christ.

And yet, I am Catholic.

Here’s the bit where I, as St. Paul would say, “give reason for the hope that is in [me].”

I believe the Holy Spirit resides in the Church and protects her from errors in teaching – it’s hard to find any other explanations for the Church surviving and maintaining such incredible continuity despite the sins and failings of Her vicars. I believe God uses Her much in the same way as when He chose incredibly flawed men for prophets in the days before Christ – so that it would be all the more obvious that the graces transmitted through her sacraments are Divine in origin and not credited to any virtue on the part of the vessels He chooses to use.

And I need the Eucharist. I need the Sacraments. I am a flawed and broken person and I belong to a Church that is a ‘hospital for sinners, not a sanctuary for saints.’ The inmates run the asylum, but if that’s where the heavenly Doctor chooses to practice, than that’s where I’ll be, with all of the other broken, grace-hungry people, tares and wheat growing up together.

That’s not to say we shouldn’t hold priests and bishops – and the Pope – to a higher standard than we hold ourselves to. We should. They should wake up each day in fear and trembling and awe over the privileged position they hold in people’s lives and the price they will pay in the end for every soul they fail to treat with justice and mercy. I don’t envy them that reckoning because I know I wouldn’t be equal to the task.

It’s just that I will not sacrifice two thousand years of wisdom, teaching and practice over the clay feet of a bunch of people who are, in the end, just as human as I am and just as in need of redemption. Not because I am better than anyone who chooses in the end to shake the dust from their feet and leave the visible Church – I am sure that in many ways I am worse. But because there is no where else I can see to go. Immersed as I have always been in the poetic and passionate documents, lessons, scriptures, rites, sacraments and dogmas – the whole and holistic Deposit of Faith – I cannot imagine breathing the thin and inadequate air of modern secularism.

Where else can I go? Here are the words of Eternal Life and the waters that quench everlastingly.

Here I find the Healer for my wounded heart.

Faith

Hope

Striving for Holiness

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