Senin, 20 Februari 2012
Very early in my spiritual life, I was brought up short by the offhand remark of a wise old priest: “You're a strange sort of Christian if the sins of others disturb you.”
Like many Catholics of my generation, I was raised to think that my faith was about achieving perfection and I should do everything I could to be perfect. In fact, I thought it was up to me to be perfect.
Wrong.
That's a heresy condemned in the early Church - Pelagianism - and it triggered St Augustine to develop our understanding of grace and its action in our lives which has been unsurpassed in 1600 years.
We are pretty undeveloped Christians, perhaps with an outstanding blindness to our own failings, if we get upset when we hear or see other Christians demonstrating vividly for us the weaknesses in all humans.
This has relevance to the flow of news from and around the Vatican this past few months.
There's an old saying that does the rounds in many variants. But they all come down to this: "Don't go to Rome if your faith is shaky."
And if your faith is shaky and you're easily shocked or surprised, there would be plenty of actual or unfolding scandals happening in Rome, or with reference to Rome, to send a shaky faith crumbling.
There are the leaked documents that reveal the misgivings of the now Papal Nuncio to the US who wanted to stay at his post as second-in-charge of Vatican governance to clean up the City State's financial and business practices.
Archbishop Vigano wanted to see through the task of reforming the Vatican's business systems and processes rather than accept an apparently more prestigious position. And, as if to compound the problem and confirm the skeptics in their cynicism, the Vatican's spokesman, Fr Federico Lombardi SJ prescinded from considering the documents and did what amounts to shooting the messenger: he lambasted the media for releasing hitherto confidential documents.
Source: http://id.she.yahoo.com/new/http://thehoopla.com.au/priest-handles-scandal//
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