– Michele Brambilla
The true scandal of the Church is not the pedophile priests (which remain the zero point), but the priests who have stopped believing in God (much more numerous).
The real scandal is not the silence on sexual abuse – of which we have been talking about for some time now, and how we are talking about it – but the silence about Jesus Christ, to whom we prefer the thinker of the moment, in order not to disturb anyone, in order not to be considered old, outdated, out of fashion. In short, the real scandal is not a crisis of morality, but a crisis of faith.
In fact, behaviors always follow what is believed; the weaker the faith, the weaker the morality is. A lot of things are said and written in these days. One, for example, is that the sexual deviations of priests have always been there, so here it is again. Of course they have always been there: but once the wrong priests knew they were wrong, they feared the judgment of the “Employer” and went to confession. The escapade was so frequent (more than anything else with women, however, then) that it was called “peccato di pantalone pronta assoluzione” (a sin of the pants, quick absolution). But between sin and absolution there was, in fact, confession. Today it is no longer clear what a sin is, so much so that among the silly things we have read these days there is also the following: if a priest sodomizes a 17-year-old seminarian, it is very serious; but if he is 18, there is nothing wrong. We are not joking, there are [certain] fathers at the top of consideration in the “Church of Change” who write books to support, the view that tells us that the old sexual morality of the Magisterium is just old and need to be scrapped. The family consists of a father and a mother? But we want to joke? And chastity, and celibacy… but we want to joke there too? So, if there is an obsession with pursuing the current morality, according to which everything is allowed, why should not a priest have relations with a seminarian?
Priests sin as they have always sinned, but they have stopped realizing what is right and what is wrong: here is the new situation.
The real scandal is not pedophile priests, but a Church that is ashamed of her history, of her traditional teaching, ultimately of herself. When we were not ashamed, we were able to distinguish between “the men of the Church” and “the Church”: the former are sinners, but the second is impeccable in announcing what she considers to be the truth. In short, if a priest, for example, made a woman pregnant, it was said that he had made a parishioner pregnant; it was not said that he was living his vocation in a more adult and modern way. Christians were wrong like everyone else, but they had the courage to call things by their own name, and to stay in the world with a judgment that was different from that of the world. Today, however, there is a Church that pursues the world, in search of applause, diabolical temptation. And it is now judged and condemned by that politically correct nemesis.
(From Il Giornale, August 31 2018. 2017©AP)
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