God Love Him

Pope Benedict is a plain as can be:

In terms of what we today can discover in this message, attacks against the pope or the church don’t come just from outside the church. The suffering of the church also comes from within the church, because sin exists in the church. This too has always been known, but today we see it in a really terrifying way. The greatest persecution of the church doesn’t come from enemies on the outside, but is born in sin within the church. The church thus has a deep need to re-learn penance, to accept purification, to learn on one hand forgiveness but also the necessity of justice. Forgiveness does not exclude justice. We have to re-learn the essentials: conversion, prayer, penance, and the theological virtues. That’s how we respond, and we can be realistic in expecting that evil will always launch attacks from within and from outside, but the forces of good are also always present, and finally the Lord is stronger than evil. The Madonna for us is the visible maternal guarantee that the will of God is always the last word in history.

This, by the way, refers not primarily to his own sufferings at the hands of a hostile press or the average comboxer at the Reporter over the past two months. It refers first and foremost to the sufferings of Holy Church in the persons of the victims of sexual abuse, who are every bit as much the Church as somebody with a mitre or a collar. When Jesus tells the parable of the sheep and the goats, he does not say, “Inasmuch as you did it unto the bishop, you did it unto me.”