Endurance

At Sunday Mass, we hear St. Paul pray that the Lord would direct our hearts to the endurance of Christ. And we hear a passage about the endurance of the Maccabean martyrs. Not to mention the poor widow we hear about in the gospel reading. She had to endure not just one husband, but seven. [Spanish]

Last Sunday morning, they ran the New York City marathon. It’s a hard one. Involves all five boroughs of the city. In Boston, they have Heartbreak Hill. In the New York marathon, the hardest hills are the bridges—over the Verrazano Narrows, over the East River, the Harlem River.

Sometimes people reach a phase of foggy, desperate fatigue, at the outer limits of their strength. Muscles simply refuse to continue to operate in the usual manner. “Look, buddy, you have depleted every reserve of cellular oxygen I have. I cannot carry you any further. You own this cramp, my friend.” Or normal digestion and water absorption cease. I don’t mean to get too graphic here, but they line up a lot of porta-potties at Mile 20 for a reason.

We hear the Lord Jesus speak of the patriarchs–the original fathers of the nation of Israel, with whom our covenant with God began. Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob endured. They made some huge mistakes, to be sure. Chapters 12-50 of Genesis tell their story, and that part of the Bible hardly reads like a moral instruction manual.

But the patriarchs of Israel endured in faith. They never gave up on the original divine promise. Wars and famines came their way, confused them, and obscured God’s plan from their eyes. They struggled with dishonesty and treachery in their own families—and in their own souls. Jacob lost his beloved son Joseph, apparently forever. Jacob nearly despaired.

But one thing remained a given, through every ordeal. Almighty God has a plan. The patriarchs of Israel knew that God had chosen them as instruments in His mysterious plan to send a Messiah.

Now, some of us old people can remember back as far as 2002. The Boston Globe began exposing the hypocritical corruption of the Catholic Archdiocese of Boston in articles published almost 18 years ago. And those weren’t the first articles which an American newspaper had published on the topic.  People in Louisiana had known about it for fifteen years before that.

We old people remember how, in 2002, the bishops said, “Zero tolerance!” “Child protection!” And we remember how much we wanted to believe. We wanted to believe that our bishops knew how to shepherd the flock.

VA Attorney General Mark Herring

We wanted to trust “the corporation,” so to speak. Our company, American Catholic Church, Inc. After all, the company had such a charming spokesman back in ’02. The avuncular New York Irishman with the twinkle in his eye. Newly minted Cardinal. Theodore McCarrick.

Then, the summer of 2018. Turns out, McCarrick himself: guilty. And they published a report in Pennsylvania. 900-some pages. The bishops’ promises turned out to have been: more of a cover-up than anything else. Another cover-up.

We endured. We’re still here. Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob endured, believing in the living God. Through deserts, through wars, through famines. They found the strength somehow. Us, too. We’re still here.

Guess what? Priests and bishops in states other than just Pennsylvania did grievous wrongs. We will have a report here in Virginia, too. The Attorney General’s office has worked on it for well over a year now. Investigating the clergy files of our diocese, and the Diocese of Arlington. Interviewing survivors. Following threads of evidence. The report will come out, sometime relatively soon. I think we can reasonably assume: the greater the level of conspicuous silence about this report from our diocese, the worse the report will be. Which means: another tidal wave of painful truth will soon crash down on us. Because the diocese basically acts like it isn’t happening.

How can we continue to endure this? Where can we find the strength?

1. Daily prayer to maintain a supernatural point-of-view. Decades of catastrophic incompetence at the highest levels of authority in the Church: Yes, and soon to be proved yet again, here in our state. But it doesn’t touch the realities of faith. God is still Our Father in heaven. Jesus is still the Christ. The Mass is still the Mass; all the sacraments are still the sacraments.

2. Rejoice in the good involved. When the truth comes to light, that is good. When victims have the clarity and courage to call evil evil, Jesus triumphs in them. When a whole community faces facts and longs for justice, the Kingdom of God gets fortified.

Our Virginia Attorney General’s office is actually in the process of doing us Catholics a great service. The investigation is not our enemy. Getting the facts out, to be faced soberly: that is exactly what we need, what the Church needs.

3. One more. I for one will no longer defer to ecclesiastical authority, without an expressed reason. I promised obedience to my superior; I have given it; I will continue to do so, when there’s a clear reason. The bishop sent me to Rocky Mount-Martinsville. Twice. For good reason. I thanked him both times.

But, in my opinion, we have to change one of our American Catholic customs. The custom of assuming that bishops and their staffs are knowledgeable and competent. We have learned the hard way: that ain’t true.

Our Church will endure. The Son of God promised that. But whether or not it will endure in the United States depends on our endurance. Endurance in faith. And endurance in standing up for what is right.