I’m an Angry, Bad Catholic Writing a Catholic Blog.

My attempts at blogging have been few and far between for quite some time now. 

The reason is simple.

This is the Catholic venue at Patheos, and my blog is called Public Catholic. But I haven’t been a particularly good Catholic. 

Instead of finding comfort in my faith, it has been a source of angst. Instead of bringing me to Jesus, the behavior of my religious leaders sent me back through the fundamental questions of what do I really, all the way through, believe?

My answers, it turned out, were simple. I believe the Apostles Creed. I believe it right down to the ground. I believe what the Church teaches when it is being the Church. I trust in the graces of the sacraments. I am committed with all my heart to politics based on the sanctity of human life and the ultimate preeminence of the common good. 

My problem is that I don’t believe that many of the bishops and our “star” priests with their little rogue ministries believe these things. 

I don’t believe — as in absolutely do not believe — they care if women are raped and murdered. I do not expect them — ever — to stand up for human rights for women. In fact, I expect them to make pretty speeches and then to oppose human rights for women in actual practice, just as they did when they opposed the Violence Against Women Act, and backed politicians who oppose equal pay. 

I think their concern for women’s human rights is as thin as their opposition to racism. They issue a “teaching” that sounds good. Then they support a politician who kills the anti-lynching bill. 

The bishops have a nasty habit of fine-combing legislative efforts to help people until they find something in it somewhere that supposedly “contradicts” “Church teaching.” Then, as in the case of the Violence Against Women Act, they oppose it. 

Of course, these are the same “pro life” bishops who fire unmarried pregnant women who work for the Church — while leaving the men who got these women pregnant untouched. Their “pro life” politics seem to begin and end at making abortion illegal. They’re not “pro life” enough to back the Child Tax Credit, mandatory paid maternity leave, equal pay, or any one of the many things that would make it possible for women to chose life for their babies. 

I do not believe that the bishops give one whit for their much-ballyhooed “preferential option for the poor,” and I could lay out a long list of their positions on issues and politicians to back that statement. I think they never met a rapist or sexual predator they didn’t like and support.

As you can see, I’m angry. And I do not consider my anger healthy for seeking people who are trying to work out their salvation. I do not want to persuade anyone to follow me down this path of anger and outrage that I am walking. This is my path, wrought of my own life’s experiences. I have backed away from blogging because I can not, with any integrity, claim to be speaking as a faithful Catholic.

I would walk away from this Church and end the angst. I would do it, even though I believe in its teachings, except for one thing. 

I love it.

I love the Catholic Church, and I can say in the midst of my angriest rant that the Catholic Church has been to me the most forgiving and loving institution I have ever encountered. The grace and love the Church poured out on me was balm to my battered soul. 

The Church is a conduit of grace, the Eucharist a direct connection to Christ. We can all be like the woman with the hemorrhage, who reached out and touched Him and was healed, just by taking the Eucharist. 

The miracle — among the many miracles — of the Eucharist is that this ability to touch divinity is not limited, diluted, or expunged by the priest who proffers it. The Church is a conduit of Grace. But it is not that Grace. 

I never doubted that, but it has become a living reality to me in the dark times I’ve been enduring. Many of our priests and bishops have fallen personally. Several of them are giving a pretty good imitation of flat-out crazy. We have rogue priests and a few of our bishops — crazy Bishops Strickland of Tyler Texas and any-right-wing-billionaire’s-dance-partner Vigano come to mind — who appear to be little more than right wing political operatives. 

These bishops are fallen. And yet the Church sails on. Good priests lift up the Chalice and Host every day. They hear confessions and listen to our gripes and anoint us when we’re sick. They visit us in hospitals and hold our hands as we die. I don’t know how they keep it up, day after day, year after year, in an endless liturgical cycle. But they do, and we count on them to do it. We trust that they will do it. We trust them, because when we need them, they are there. 

Nobody ever wanted the Church to be what it says about itself more than me. I know all about regret and remorse from mistakes I have made, and I wanted the Church to rescue me from the perils of my own moral judgements. I wanted it to save me from ever being that wrong and having to feel the searing pain of that remorse again. 

I came to the Church and laid down my ability to make critical moral judgements with relief. I wanted the Church to be right. I wanted the bishops to be good. I welcomed the safety of the guardrails the Church puts up. 

Then along came the scandals of he past 8 years and Me Too. The bishops did what they’ve always done. They left the victims of sexual assault to be pilloried and attacked, and they backed the sexual predators.  

From that moment to this, I have not been a good Catholic. 

My appetite for blogging about the Church was gone. I had nothing edifying to say to anyone. 

Now, I’m putting touching my toe to the blogging waters again.

I am not writing as a good Catholic. I am writing as one of the walking wounded who needs and loves the Church but grieves its failure to be the Church to the least of these. When the Church walks past rape victims, it is walking past Lazarus. When it attacks rape victims and backs the rapists, it is one of the whip-wielding Roman soldiers who scourged Our Lord.

Rape victims are Christ crucified standing at the door of the Church, asking to come in. When you defame, deny and shun them, you are doing it to Him.