The universal church is impossible to defend, and extremely difficult to hang with.
I don’t know how many times a week — sometimes even a day — I feel like quitting the church and so-called “organized religion” and doing my own things with God and Jesus.
Vatican Reforms
I don’t know how many times a week somebody scoffs and looks at me like I’m a 3-headed version of Gomer Pyle when I tell them I’m a retired United Methodist deacon.
I’ve had two especially hurtful encounters in the past two weeks with American expat acquaintances who never knew I’m a retired clergyman and member in good standing of, uh, “organized religion” (i.e., a ghastly church denomination!).
Small wonder that the number of church haters expands as revelations of more atrocities in the Catholic Church are brought to light every are endless.
And now comes a similar scandal in the Southern Baptist Church, which two Texas newspapers (including my former employer of many years The Houston Chronicle) joined forces with the San Antonio Light to expose. (And good for them for their great journalism — in spite of print journalism being on life support, there is still some terrific print journalism being practiced on occasion outside of New York and Washington.)
All that said, I want to share with you something that the great Carlo Carretto wrote about his love-hate relationship with the church, reflective as it is of my own love-hate relationship. Carretto was a member of The Little Brothers of Jesus, a contemplative community of lay Catholics who lived in the desert. Read more about this joy-filled ascetic and superb writer here.
And I commend his Collected Writings book to you, still in print available for order online.
This is adapted from the book Carlo Carretto: Essential Writings, which is still in print and available online.
How baffling you are, oh Church, and yet how I love you!
“And that is where the mystery lies. This mixture of good and bad, of greatness and misery, of holiness and sin that makes up the church… this in reality am I.” — Carlo Cattetto
How you have made me suffer, and yet how much I owe you!
I would like to see you destroyed, and yet I need your presence.
You have given me so much scandal and yet you have made me understand what sanctity is.
I have seen nothing in the world more devoted to obscurity, more compromised, more false, and yet I have touched nothing more pure, more generous, more beautiful.
How often I have wanted to shut the doors of my soul in your face, and how often I have prayed to die in the safety of your arms. . .
No, I cannot free myself from you, because I am you, though not completely. And besides, where would I go? Would I establish another? I would not be able to establish it without the same faults, for they are the same faults I carry in me. And if I did establish another, it would be my Church, not the Church of Christ. I am old enough to know that I am no better than anyone else.
The Church has the power to make me holy but it is made up, from the first to the last, only of sinners. And what sinners! It has the omnipotent and invincible power to renew the Miracle of the Eucharist, but is made up of men who are stumbling in the dark, who fight every day against the temptation of losing their faith. It brings a message of pure transparency but it is incarnated in slime, such is the substance of the world. It speaks of the sweetness of its Master, of its non-violence, but there was a time in history when it sent out its armies to disembowel the infidels and torture the heretics. It proclaims the message of evangelical poverty, and yet it does nothing but look for money and alliances with the powerful.
Those who dream of something different from this are wasting their time and have to rethink it all. And this proves that they do not understand humanity. Because this is humanity, made visible by the Church, with all its flaws and its invincible courage, with the Faith that Christ has given it and with the love that Christ showers on it.
When I was young, I did not understand why Jesus chose Peter as his successor, the first Pope, even though he abandoned Him. Now I am no longer surprised and I understand that by founding his church on the tomb of a traitor… He was warning each of us to remain humble, by making us aware of our fragility. (…)
And what are bricks worth anyway? What matters is the promise of Christ, what matters is the cement that unites the bricks, which is the Holy Spirit. Only the Holy Spirit is capable of building the church with such poorly moulded bricks as are we.
And that is where the mystery lies. This mixture of good and bad, of greatness and misery, of holiness and sin that makes up the church… this in reality am I. (…)
The deep bond between God and His Church, is an intimate part of each one of us. (…) To each of us God says, as he says to his Church, “And I will betroth you to me forever” (Hosea 2,21). But at the same time he reminds us of reality: ‘Your lewdness is like rust. I have tried to remove it in vain. There is so much that not even a flame will take it away’ (Ezechiel 24, 12).
But then there is even something more beautiful. The Holy Spirit who is Love, sees us as holy, immaculate, beautiful under our guises of thieves and adulterers. (…) It’s as if evil cannot touch the deepest part of mankind.
He re-establishes our virginity no matter how many times we have prostituted our bodies, spirits and hearts. In this, God is truly God, the only one who can ‘make everything new again’.
It is not so important that He will renew heaven and earth. What is most important is that He will renew our hearts. This is Christ’s work.
This is the divine Spirit of the Church.
