SCANDAL: Dappled Things excerpt:

I had a professor in seminary, a Dutch Jesuit who was an excellent Church historian, who always regaled us with the most embarrassing and shameful episodes of the Church’s history — torture chambers, simony, Popes with their mistresses and bastards, Cardinals who spent fortunes on parties and loose living — two thousand years of scandals, in other words. The gentler souls in the university hall — innocently pious seminarians and third-world nuns — were frequently shocked by the things that the professor lectured on. It eventually became clear what his aim was with these digressions: our Faith is placed in God alone, and the better acquainted we are with the seamier side of the Church’s history, the fewer dangerous illusions we’ll be carrying around to trip us up during the next set of scandals. God is perfect, and the Church is holy, but those of us who make up the Church are seriously flawed and won’t fail to disappoint. If I’m a practicing Catholic because Fr Schmidt is a saint and Sister Cecilia hasn’t committed a venial sin for thirty years and the parish secretary is always so kind, then my Faith in Jesus is in sorry shape. When another secretary embezzles a hundred grand, and Sister Lucy starts running guns for the Sandinistas, and Fr Murphy runs off and joins the circus, where’s my Faith then?

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