A reader grapples with despair

courtesy of our scandalous bishops. He writes of faith in Jesus:

It’s all cerebral—it’s all supposed to be on faith. “Blessed are they who have not seen and yet believed,” and all that. All we have, and all we will ever have, are the leaders of the Church saying “trust me on this.” And they are turning out to be utterly untrustworthy. The actions of so many Bishops, those “princes of the Church”, show that they don’t believe a word of it themselves. Why should I?

Because our faith does not depend on the quality of our bishops. It’s just not true that the sole source of our faith is the bishops. Nor is it true that none of the bishops believe a word of the gospel. Nor is it true that the gospel is mediated to us solely through bishops whether good or bad.

Even a brief reading of the gospels or the early history of the Church demonstrates that the apostles are people who quite obviously believe every word they are saying. Bishops are people passing on a tradition. Apostles are people giving an eyewitness account and paying for it with blood. You want guys who not only preach it but practice it, look at them. They go to martyrdom for it and they are honored by others who do likewise. The problem of the time-serving bureaucrat doesn’t even *start* to arise until bishops stop being persecuted outlaws and start functioning within a bureaucracy centuries after the apostles. And even then it is grossly unjust to say that all bishops did that.

In addition, of course, is the fact that our faith is mediated to us as much (indeed more) by *saints* as by bishops and that these saints (think “Joan of Arc”) do not abandon their relationship with Jesus merely because a bishop is a scoundrel.

Also, there is a rather large assortment of private revelations, heroic deeds, supernatural events and miraculous phenomena which do not depend on ecclesial permision for God to have accomplished. The bishops come limping in well behind the Miracle of the Sun or the healings at Fatima and all they really do is say, “Um, looks like God sure enough did do something amazing here”. But the testimony comes from ordinary people, not from an episcopal fiat. God is not the prisoner of the episcopacy.

Don’t reduce your faith to mere trust in bishops. Nor, by the way, should it be a mere “cerebral” phenomenon. God is not result of a logic problem. He is God. Stay, I pray you, and ask Jesus to reveal himself, help you obey him, and help you find him as Mary did after he seemed to vanish for three days. He is where he has always been: in His Father’s House doing his Father’s business. He is not gone and you will find him if you seek him. He is still there in the sacrament.