Holy Saturday Thoughts

This post due to technical difficulties and the technical ineptitude of the author could not be posted Holy Sat. Muthah+


I feel sorry for the people of Ireland today. Perhaps it is my Celtic roots, but I feel close to them because they have come under such criticism simply because some church leaders were asleep at the wheel. Pope Benedict has blamed this pedophilic scandal on the Irish Catholic Church. The Archbishop of Canterbury challenged the Irish Church’s credibility.


Thousands of children were abused at the hands of those who called themselves ‘Christians’ while many of us chose to look away and live our “sweet Jesus” theology. However, we can’t blame it all on the Church of Ireland. Ireland has always had a rather ingenious relationship with its Church. They pushed off onto the Church the work that the society didn’t want to address: the teaching of children with special needs, delinquents, children of alcoholics, etc.

I am talking not just about the Catholic Church of Ireland. I am talking about Church, with a capital C, the Universal Church. All too often society depends on the Church to guard and care for those they choose to ignore: children, teens, seniors, the people with special needs, the mentally ill, the misfits, the poor. And yet the larger society provides little funding to do the difficult tasks of life. Thanks be to God, there have always been people of great hearts who have been willing to do this work for the love of Christ and damned little pay.




But our church leadership should have been awake. We hear of Cardinal Ratzinger’s complicity in moving priests around in Germany before he got kicked up to the Vatican under “Saint” J2P2. We hear of Irish bishops moving pedophilic priests from one venue to another because to admit that the Church had such persons in the clergy would be too scandalous.



No longer can the Vatican just blow pedophilia off as an “American anomaly”. And Cardinal Bernard Law, formerly of Boston continues to serve in Rome. Just more evidence that moving people around in the Church is still going on under the egis of the Vatican.

The Archbishop of Canterbury cannot cast aspersions when there have been men in the C of E that have done the same. The ABC cannot dismiss the Church of Ireland as incredulous when in the Church of Uganda and the Church of Nigeria supports wholesale abuse and even the murder of LGBT Christians in the name of Jesus.

Can we in our diocese cast any stones? We allowed priests to serve and molest among us. We have looked the other way and blamed those who would blow the whistle on these priests. We are more afraid of scandal than we are of the damage done to those children. We are willing to spend more money on lawyers to keep us safe from scandal than we are in paying for the rehabilitation of the victims.

At the end of my career, I grieve for the state of the Church this Easter. I grieve for the loss of truth. I grieve for the loss of credibility; I grieve for all the saints who have given their lives for the faith of a Christ who endured Evil in this world so that we might be freed of it. But this Easter I do have hope that the Barque of Peter will right itself from the Evil in which it has participated and the apathy of those who have led her. Alleluia, Christ is Risen.