G.K.Chesterton said <\/a>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.<\/p>\nThe 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 \u2018secret archives\u2019 but if they were really secret why would we call them \u2018secret archives\u2019?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
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 \u201cresearch\u201d). It\u2019s like people who say things like \u201cNobody ever talks about America\u2019s racist past.\u201d Heavens to murgatroyd! We\u2019ve 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 \u201cI 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\u201d my response is to think, \u201cI don\u2019t believe you.\u201d 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 \u201cThey lied to me about how perfect the Church was\u201d 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\u2019s 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\u2019s something emblematic in the notion of a communion that has \u201csecret archives\u201d everybody knows about. The Church is incorrigible about living out loud. They put the \u201cpublic\u201d in \u201cpublic revelation\u201d.<\/p>\n