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Note: This column will appear in the January/February issue of Eastern Oklahoma Catholic magazine. Due to the urgency and the seriousness of the current crisis in which the Catholic Church finds itself, Bishop Konderla desired that his column be released online at the earliest possible date.
Now that some days have passed since the November meeting of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops in Baltimore, I want to share some of my personal thoughts on our deliberations and what I think it means for the Church going forward. I believe that the work of the bishops and the issue of clerical abuse is unfolding between the two poles of fatalism and faith. The fatalism was aptly represented by one of the many emails that came to me during the week of the bishop’s meeting. It read:
“Proud of yourself and the papacy? Did fine work this week. God ____ you all.
Resign
I will admit that I do not blame my fatalistic brother. Depending on what he was reading about the meeting, given that so much of the reporting on the meeting was abysmally wrong, he might well have been feeling discouraged. It is certainly understandable. But for me and for the bishops gathered there in Baltimore, indeed for every disciple of Jesus Christ, fatalism is not an option. Jesus said, ““Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.” (Matt. 4:19) That was the invitation. There was no clause in it about resigning. There was no fine print. Faith is the only path forward for all of the faithful. And that faith was aptly represented to me on the first day of the meeting in a quotation that Archbishop Christophe Pierre shared with us during his opening statement. He quoted the French author Georges Bernanos who once wrote:
“Whoever pretends to reform the Church with ... the same means used to reform temporal society- not only will he fail in his undertaking, but he will infallibly end by finding himself outside the Church. I say that he finds himself outside the Church before anyone has gone to the trouble of excluding him or her. I say that it is he himself who excludes himself from her by a tragic fatalism ... The only way of reforming the Church is to suffer for her. The only way of reforming the visible Church is to suffer for the invisible Church. The only way of reforming the vices of the Church is to lavish on her the example of one's own most heroic virtues.”
This path of faith is not faith in the bishops or in their piety or in ourselves, but in the Lord Jesus Christ who promised that the gates of hell would not prevail against His Church. And can anyone doubt that the clerical abuse of the faithful is from hell? It is tragic. The people of God, including the bishops, in union with the Pope, placing our faith in the Lord who will not abandon His Church, will work together to stop this latest, diabolical attack against the Church.
Personally, I can say that I was surprised and inspired by what unfolded during that week of prayer and deliberation with the bishops.
I was surprised because many people, including I think most of us bishops, imagined, and even demanded, that we would gather together, debate a clear set of proposals, vote unanimously to pass them, and then the problem would be solved. After all, this is how we solve other problems in our “temporal society.” But then, that is not what happened.
What happened is that we first received a message from the Holy See that served to remind us we are part of the universal Church facing a global attack that will require a united solution. Still, in the United States, we came to a consensus about how we need to root out abuse in the Church.