How to rebuild the Church marked by sin?

In a Church marked by the sin of its members, the forgiveness of a few is not enough, believes Father Benoist de Sinety, parish priest of Saint-Eubert de Lille. Is it not towards those who have felt rejected that we must now, all together, turn?

Nearly thirty-five years ago, I entered the seminary. Becoming a priest was still a recognized and possible commitment for a certain number of young people, rarer than in the past but all the same. Tutelary and reassuring figures in the continuity of the Church of France comforted us in the hope that the future, if serious, was no less promising. The Pope often came to visit our beautiful country and the cardinals still flourished there in Paris as in the provinces: with a few theologians and Christian intellectuals, they were received on the sets and fed the public debate.

Alongside the Lustigers, Decourtray, Frossard, Rémond, there was Lubac and Congar, aged but still there, and many “founders” who promised us with a big smile that they had found the martingale to remake Christians our brothers. Every Sunday morning, each “peripheral” radio station gave the floor to its religious columnist. Strong minds made fun of this Catholic Action which they willingly described as bloodless and many claimed to ensure the future missionary by themselves.

A Right Church

We knew that the face of the priest of tomorrow would surely be very different from that of today, and we still had difficulty accepting that he could be so far from that of yesterday. We were crying out for a “spirituality of the diocesan priest” to be presented to us. We talked about it a lot among ourselves and everyone put in what they dreamed of: type of prayer, community life, organization of the days, inspiring mystical figures… We were often sent, in the summer or the rest of the year, once a week, with children and young people: colonies, camps, catechesis, patronage. To be a seminarian and tomorrow a priest, and to play with minors was still neither suspect nor culpable. Our formators explained to us that tomorrow we would have to work with the laity under cover of this concept of “co-responsibility” which was difficult to define and which we felt as we progressed, that it was not so easy to live with on a daily basis.

Here we are witnesses to a drama for which our self-esteem was not prepared.

The reassuring image of the “priest who decides” remained, however, and seemed impassable. We thrilled to the stories of some distant provinces of our Paris ring road, which related the way in which, in a parish, the faithful had “seized power” while not being very comfortable either with the few macho remarks or a bit contemptuous that came out of our mouths when we commented on this. The first moral scandals of debauched clerics were beginning to be revealed, but it was across the Atlantic, or even in Austria, but in no case here. With us the Church was poor, she was faithful, she was upright. The time passed.

The coming winter

And here we are witnessing a drama for which our self-esteem was not prepared. All around, there is hecatomb: a crowd of victims and a few handfuls of Pharisees who want to diminish its importance at all costs, resolutions taken in haste, decision-makers whom we discover, upset, that they can also sometimes behave like sex offenders, miserable and not always oblivious accomplices, of those on whom, as bishops, they had to investigate… Of these new communities which rose up, proud standards of a promised reconquest, what remains -he ? what fruits are still possible for the Legion of Christ whose founder refused, as a last provocation to Heaven, to receive the last sacraments on his bed of agony? And the theological renewal promised by Br. Philippe? What promises for the future, prophesied yesterday in the euphoria of this Renewal can still be kept? And by whom?

After the promised spring, here is now the coming winter. It falls on our shoulders, heavy with the weight of our blindness, frozen by our illusions of achieving by our own merits the building of the Kingdom. It comes when many are no longer there, rejected from our triumphant high masses because they are too sinners to be undoubtedly one. But isn’t it precisely there, the little shoot of Hope which pierces under the snow and which prevents it from covering everything? In these men and women whom we looked upon yesterday as poor and as sinners, to whom we thought we had to learn to live, even to whom we thought we were explaining Life: yes, there, aren’t there the germs of something ?

Let each baptized take his walking stick

A pardon has been sought from the victims of rape and sexual abuse committed by clerics or lay leaders over the past fifty years. But is it not also towards all those who have had the feeling that they were not welcome in the House of the Father that we must turn today? By telling them not so much to return, but to agree, with us, to rebuild this Church which, if it remains sanctified by Christ, is nonetheless marked here below by the leprosy of the sin of each of its members.

Let us not delegate the power of this forgiveness to a few of us, however eminent they may be. Now is the time for us to be its bearers for all those around us who have felt hurt or rejected: “Come, friend, and let’s talk. May the Spirit inspire us to one and to the other how to take up what has been brought down through the fault of our pride and our refusal to see…” The stakes are too great for only some to seize upon. No one alone has the required competence, in any parish, community or diocese. Let each baptized take his walking stick and put on his sandals: we have to move forward in this desert where God tells us to go. Nourished by the sanctifying presence of the Lamb, each with our strengths and our talents, we have nothing to fear. Let’s talk, discuss, dialogue, pray and thus, let’s build!

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How to rebuild the Church marked by sin?