No Catholic should be surprised that there is filth in the Church for Our Lord Himself told us that this would be so in the parable of the weeds among the wheat (Matthew 13:24-30). AND it's no surprise that the Church is full of sinners, sinners who commit grave sin. And yes, some who claim to follow Christ commit evil and everything possible must be done to stem the evil and to make amends for that pain generated by that evil.
Furthermore, no Catholic should be surprised that the Faith should once again be attacked during Easter because this is an annual event. However, this year's annual Easter attack on the Faith has taken the form of one upon the person of the Pope, Benedict XVI, himself.
What truly saddens me, however, is that there are many within the Church herself, those who should know better, that are once again attempting to create a Christianity without Christ. 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.
To ensure that we keep our eyes on Christ and the newness He introduces into the world, Communion and Liberation (CL), an ecclesial lay movement in the Church, has written a beautiful editorial - Greater than Sin (Greater Than Sin.pdf). The editorial, which will be published in the upcoming issue of Traces, CL's monthly magazine but it is now available on the CL website and I strongly encourage you to read it and to send it it to as many people as possible.
In the editorial, CL asks: "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? Something that, as the Pope writes in his Letter to the Catholics of Ireland, "has the power to forgive even the greatest of sins, and to bring forth good even from the most terrible evil"?
In speaking about the editorial in Milan, the head of the Fraternity of Communion and Liberation, Father Julian Carron, emphasized that it "is a witness of the 'being moved' about which the School of Community speaks and that it allows us to look at everything--skipping nothing--all the way to making a judgment [an evaluation]." Since the newspapers are filled with a different way of looking at things, we can't do this week's School of Community without speaking and looking at this fact in another way, helped by the witness of the Pope. Because the question that is begged, 'From where is this way of looking at things born?'
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