Greater than sin

Traces - Communion and Liberation International Magazine - April 2010, Editorial

POPE LETTER

There would be much to discuss about the events that led Benedict XVI to
write his Letter to the Catholics of Ireland, and we could do this by
starting from the facts, the numbers, and the data that, if looked at
attentively, reveal a reality much less enormous than appears in the
ferocious media campaign. Or, we could start from the contradictions of
those who, in the same newspaper, denounce certain wicked deeds, but
after a few pages justify everything and everybody, especially in matters of
sex. We could do this, and perhaps it would help to understand the context
of a Church really under attack, whatever its errors may be. Only the
Pope’s humble and courageous gesture pointed attention toward the heart
of the question.

Clearly, there is a wound, a very serious one, one of the kind that provoked
Christ (and His vicars, too) to use fiery words (“Whoever causes one of
these little ones who believe in Me to sin, it would be better for him to
have a great millstone hung around his neck and to be drowned in the
depths of the sea.”).

There is filth in the Church. Joseph Ratzinger himself said so during the
Way of the Cross at Rome’s Coliseum five years ago, shortly before being
elected Pope and, realistically, he has never stopped recalling the fact
since. Sin is there, grave sin. Evil is there, along with the abyss of pain that
evil carries with it, and everything possible has to be done, and with
firmness, to stem the evil and to make amends for that pain. The Pope is
already doing this, and his letter reiterates it strongly when it asks the
guilty to “answer for it before Almighty God and before properly
constituted tribunals.”

This is precisely why the true heart of the question, the forgotten focus,
lies elsewhere. Alongside all the limitations and within the Church’s
wounded humanity, is there or is there not something greater than sin,
something radically greater than sin? Is there something that can shatter
the inexorable weight of our evil? Is there something that, as the Pope
writes, “has the power to forgive even the greatest of sins, and to bring
forth good even from the most terrible evil”?

“This is the point: God was moved by our nothingness,” Fr. Giussani said
in the phrase quoted on the CL Easter Poster. “Not only that. God was
moved by our betrayal, by our crude, forgetful, and treacherous poverty,
by our pettiness... It’s compassion, pity, passion. He had pity on me.” This
is what the Church brings to the world, and certainly not because of its
members’ merit, goodness, or even less because of their coherence: God’s
compassion for our pettiness, something greater than our limitations, the
only thing infinitely greater than our limitations. If we don’t start from
here, we cannot understand at all; everything goes mad, literally.

We, too, have had moments when we have dodged that compassion, and
run away from it. At times, it is in the Church itself that faith is reduced to
ethics, and morality is reduced to an impossible lonely recourse to laws, as
if the need of that embrace were something to be ashamed of. But if we
forget Christ, if we do away with the wholly different measure that He
introduces into the world now, through the Church, then we no longer
have the terms on which to judge the Church.

Then it becomes easy to mistake attention for the victims and regard for
their history for a conniving silence, and prudence toward the guilty
parties, true or presumed–perhaps accused on the basis of rumors
emerging after decades–for the will to “cover up” (sadly, this has
sometimes been the case). Then, it is almost inevitable to keep arguing
about celibacy without even touching on the real value of virginity. And it
becomes impossible to understand why the Church can be hard and
motherly at the same time with the priests who go wrong. It can punish
them severely and ask them to serve their sentence and make amends for
the evil (it has already done so in the past, and will always do so), but
without snapping, if possible, that thread that binds them, because it is the
only thing that can redeem them. It can ask its children to “be perfect as
your heavenly Father is perfect, not so as to demand of them an impossible
reprehensibility, but so as to remind them of a tension to live the same
mercy with which God embraces us” (“be merciful as your heavenly
Father is merciful”).

This is why the Church can educate, which, in the end, is the real question
being challenged by those who are accusing it (“See, even the priests do
wrong, and badly wrong. How can we trust them with our children?”), as if
the Church’s being a teacher all depended on the behavior of her children,
and not on Christ, on that Presence which–amidst all the errors and horrors
committed–makes possible in the world an embrace like that of Chagall’s
Prodigal Son that appears on the Easter Poster. There, alongside Fr.
Giussani’s phrase, there is another, by Benedict XVI: “Conversion to
Christ ultimately means this: to exit the illusion of self-sufficiency in order
to discover and accept one’s own need–the need of His forgiveness and
His friendship.”

This is the embrace of Christ, in our wounded and needy humanity, far
greater than the evil we can do. If the Church, with all its limitations, had
not this to offer to the world, especially to the victims of those barbarities,
then we would be lost—because the evil would still be there, but it would
be impossible to overcome it.