Amid all of the noise about the seemingly endless abuse scandal in the Catholic Church, John Bentley Mays gives a message of the hope of the Gospel and the promise of the Kingdom despite our very human failings
Nothing that has happened in the past 10 days, or in the past 10 years, has made me regret my decision. But the current controversy over Benedict has made certain things about the sex scandals in the church perfectly clear to me.
One is that the time of face-saving, image management and avoidance in the Catholic Church – I mean everyone, including the Pope, the bishops and the rest of us – is well and truly over.
Another is that a new time is dawning for all Catholics, one full of danger for the tired, self-protective, bureaucratic culture of the church, and thus full of hope. It is a time of listening, with renewed rigour, to all victims of clerical abuse, and a time of affording love and justice to each of them.
It is a time of the Kingdom of God, opening into history, as it always does, in the voices of the oppressed, the excluded and sick and weak, those crucified by violence, exploitation and lies. Woe to any church or any Christian that ignores, because of fear for the weary structures of this dying world, the always radical appearing of God's Kingdom.
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