Catholic and Enjoying It!
G.K.Chesterton said somewhere that one of the most refreshing things about the Catholic faith is that it teaches us that usually things really are the way they appear. There are usually no obscure theories, vast conspiracies or secret plans.
The Catholic Church is just as it appears, for better or for worse. We have sinners and saints. Some of the sinners try to cover up their crimes. They usually fail. We have ‘secret archives’ but if they were really secret why would we call them ‘secret archives’?
I recently spoke to somebody who was complaining about the alleged white-washed history of Catholic anti-semitism. I find this bizarre. I literally cannot think of a soul who is not aware of the Catholic history of anti-semitism (except ultra-fringe kooks like Sungenis who deny they are anti-semites while regurgitating Nazi literature and calling it “research”). It’s like people who say things like “Nobody ever talks about America’s racist past.” Heavens to murgatroyd! We’ve done nothing *but* talk about it for the past 50 years! Catholics are told *incessantly* about the sins and failings of their Church. When I meet an ex-Catholic who tells me “I was raised as a devout Catholic and told all my life how perfect the Church is, but when I became a man I put away childish things and discovered to my *horror* the truth that Catholics did Terrible Thing X” my response is to think, “I don’t believe you.” Nobody raised in the Catholic Church in the United States can go until adulthood never being told by anybody that the Church has some big skeletons in the closet and that Catholics have done heinous things. Nobody. The whole “They lied to me about how perfect the Church was” meme is a piece of agitprop believable only to people who are looking for a sort of cosy conversion story that affirms them in their prejudice. It’s not a reflection of lived reality for any normal person in the English-speaking world. The sins (and virtues) of the Church are like sins of a big, brawling, noisy Irish or Italian family. It is not a communion that has ever had a knack for keeping its thoughts and feeling under wraps. It may try (as with the priest scandal). But it never suceeds. There’s something emblematic in the notion of a communion that has “secret archives” everybody knows about. The Church is incorrigible about living out loud. They put the “public” in “public revelation”.
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