Scandalized by the Church

Pray for me. I want to serve God but I see my Church going in another direction. I lack serenity. These words were spoken to me humbly and sincerely by a dear friend, a decent, generous man who has given his life to the work of the Church, especially among the poor. He is scandalized by the Church. He is in torment. His pain is genuine, innocent and childlike. I had nothing to say. But I pray for him. He is, I realized, emblematic of so many others who are scandalized by the Church. The representative of God on earth, this Church seems to them to desecrate what is most worthy and holy. It is not so for me. Through no effort or merit of my own, I have always seen the Church as a society of sinners, loved onto death by our Lord. Every new abominable revelation pulls me deeper into the heart of the Church: identification with miserable sinners and desperation for the Mercy of Christ. Lucidly, I see unveiled in the economies of Church dogma, worship and morality, the inexorable logic and irrepressible dynamism of Christ's love for us sinners. As I pray for my friend and so many like him, I urgently need to humble myself, in the Church, before this adorable Mercy; and honor the sensitivity, fragility and earnestness that lends itself to such painful spiritual trauma.