It Is Your Choice

Here is an interesting juxtaposition. On the one hand, we have Hendrik Hertzberg writing in the New Yorker magazine.

And on the other hand, we have Bevil Bramwell, OMI, writing at The Catholic Thing.

Time was, I would have trusted the former for truth ... if not goodness and beauty. But over the years and with time, I realized that the latter speaks much more truth AND goodness and beauty. Why? Because the latter can understand the former, and not vice versa.

That is to say, Hertzberg criticizes the Catholic Church for a silence surrounding the sex abuse scandal, and rightly so. But he neglects to point out that the sex abuse going on prior to steps to alter those nefarious actions was no more likely than sex abuse going on just about everywhere else, including Protestant churches, public schools, and other places in the public square.

Since Benedict XVI's pontificate, sex abuse in the Church has dropped exponentially.

But who cares when you want to reduce to rubble an "institution" that is protected by "a nimbus of mystery, pomp, holiness, and, in the case of the Pope, infallibility," to use Hertzberg's turn of phrase?

I don't know much, but this I do know: Hertzberg and his ilk have nothing - absolutely nothing - to offer human beings in terms of soteriology, not to mention epistemology, or anthropology.

The Catholic Church, on the other hand, knows it is comprised of sinners - the Holy Father goes to confession too. And the truth, faith, reason, and morals vouchsafed by the Catholic Church are worth giving your life for and, in some instances, going to your death for.

Who, after all, are you going to trust? As Carlyle Marney once said, "If it don't play in the cancer ward, it ain't the gospel." Amen and amen.