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From a sermon given by Msgr Ronald Knox on the Feast of St Thomas à Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, on 29 December 1912, when he was still an Anglican clergyman.  His words are more relevant than ever today.

Ultimately the issue was, whether the Church should be free or under the thumb of the crown.  And when Henry VIII set about enslaving the Church, his greatest triumph was not the defying of her laws, the silencing of her champions, or the dissolution of her monasteries: it was the pillaging of the shrine of St Thomas à Becket in Canterbury Cathedral.  To this day St Thomas has never found a place in our calendar.  Why?  Because he represents the defiance of the Church of the civil power.

But the struggle between the Church and State is not yet dead.  Already people are expecting the Church to alter her laws of kindred and affinity to match the State’s laws: in a short time there will be the same demand for a change in her rules about divorce: in fifty years’ time, for all we know, the State will be sanctioning, and expecting the Church to sanction, the practice of polygamy. 

But this is not the worst persecution we shall soon have to undergo.  Do not let us blind ourselves with the fact that England is no longer a Christian country.  Our Church is a remnant of the nation, we Catholics only a handful of that remnant.  The sword will pierce our hearts too – not the bared sword of forcible oppression, but the more deadly weapons of contempt, criticism, ridicule, protest, oblivion.  Mutilated creeds, half-hearted devotions, up-to-date formularies, will be pressed upon our acceptance.  Not our bodies, but our nerves will be the instruments played on by our new torturers. 

We may disestablish the Church, and disendow it, and disintegrate it, but we shall never get its hostile critics to mid their own business.  When the crisis comes, or more probable, in the slow course of time during which our faith will be put to the test, we shall need all the prayers of St Thomas to help us in holding fast that which we have.  But we shall also need the self-discipline of St Thomas, the inward self-discipline, the hair-shirt next to the skin, to see that the spiritual crown, the crown of inward meekness and humility, is not taken away from us. 

Our religion must be a secret and sacred thing, not a thing we are always flaunting in people’s faces, or forcing down their throats.  It needs inward humility to wear properly even a crown of thorns.  

On Good Friday 2005, as Pope John Paul II lay dying in the Eternal City, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger presided over the Stations of the Cross at the Colosseum. At the ninth station, Jesus falls the third time, he paused and reflected, “How much filth there is in the Church, and even among those who, in the priesthood, ought to belong entirely to him! How much pride, how much self-complacency!” He then went on to pray, “Lord, your Church often seems like a boat about to sink, a boat taking in water on every side. In your field we see more weeds than wheat. The soiled garments and face of your Church throw us into confusion. Yet it is we ourselves who have soiled them! It is we who betray you time and time again, after all our lofty words and grand gestures. Have mercy on your Church; within her too, Adam continues to fall. When we fall, we drag you down to earth, and Satan laughs, for he hopes that you will not be able to rise from that fall; he hopes that being dragged down in the fall of your Church, you will remain prostrate and overpowered. But you will rise again. You stood up, you arose and you can also raise us up. Save and sanctify your Church. Save and sanctify us all.”

Ratzinger could never have known that his beloved mentor, John Paul II, would die within a week, and that he would become Benedict XVI. Did his own meditation during the Way of the Cross come back to him as the Gospel was chanted before him at his coronation: Amen, amen, I say to you, when you were younger, you used to dress yourself and go where you wanted; but when you grow old, you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will dress you and lead you where you do not want to go … Follow Me. 

The great glory of the Catholic Church is that she is founded by Christ with a promise that the gates of hell will never prevail against her. From Peter all the way down to Benedict XVI, the Bishops of Rome have handed down the faith, whole and entire, without change, from the LORD Himself. And so it will continue until Jesus comes back to claim His Bride, the Church. All of them, without exception, have guided the Church to be true to her Savior in her moral and doctrinal teachings. 

Yet the Holy Spirit, even as He guarantees the infallibility of the teaching of the Church, does not provide for the sinlessness of her members. Three weeks ago, on Palm Sunday, and then again on Good Friday, we heard the account of the Passion of Our LORD, and in it we heard the failings of the twelve men, the Apostles on whom Jesus Christ founded His Church: Judas betrayed Him for a mere thirty pieces of silver. Peter, James and John fell asleep as the LORD was writhing in agony in the Garden of Gethsemane, and then Peter denied that he ever even knew Jesus, to save his life. Jesus knew exactly who He was choosing when He chose these men, but He chose them anyway. Greed, lying, and immorality have been with the apostles since the very beginning. After Jesus’ crucifixion, the apostles trembled in fear in an upper room, cowards all of them, until the LORD appeared in their midst and then gave them His own power to forgive sins as He established the sacrament of confession: Receive the Holy Spirit; those whose sins you hold bound on earth are bound in heaven, those whose sins you loose on earth are loosed in heaven. Think of the fact that Jesus gave to these sinful men who had done so much to grieve Him the very power for which He came to earth: to save others from their sins. Christ uses fallen and weak humanity to redeem humanity and bring it into the fullness of grace. He establishes the Church as the hospital for sinners where fallen men who have been given the power to bind and set loose serve as vehicles for pardon and peace. 

The Church is holy, but made up of sinning members. She is a fountain of inexhaustible graces, yet mired in the messiness of human misery. She is always having an identity crisis: striving to be perfect even as she acknowledges or tries to escape her weakness. This paradox does not trouble the faithful. We know that this is the lot of the Church until the end of time. But the children of this world do not understand this. The Church is always undergoing a crisis of overcoming the limitations of her children to be the face of Christ to the world, and sometimes that crisis comes to be noticed in particularly painful ways.

The Church is going through a difficult period right now. In 2002, the Church in the United States was rocked by a series of reports in the Boston Globe which pointed to priests involved in the abuse of children and bishops who covered it up. After numerous missteps the Bishops finally began to put into place policies that would protect the defenseless and make up for their own lack of vigilance. As those policies begin to take root, Catholics in Europe are waking up the same realities in their own countries.
It is true that the enemies of God and His Holy Church have capitalized on these failings to try to neutralize the message of the Church to the world. Some of the media have been irresponsible in their reporting to blunt the sharp edge of the Word of God which was piercing the heart of the culture of death with a message of truth, hope and life. The Church is the most powerful voice in the world against abortion, euthanasia, same-sex marriage, and unjust war and a whole host of other evils. And the supporters of those evils will stop at nothing to silence the Church. And we have given them the knife with which to stab us. The moral credibility of the hierarchy has been greatly damaged by these faults.. 

False prophets are predicting the end of the Catholic Church as we know it. Have no doubts: a full-scale persecution of the Church is coming with all of the fury of hell behind it. The Church is in crisis, even if part of the crisis has been invented and part of it is directly the fault of the same bishops, priests and laity who were supposed to protect the sheep. 

Yet it is not just the Church which is waking up to the horrible story of child abuse. This is not a Catholic problem; it is happening everywhere. Many of the claims of abuse against priests are from decades ago. Last year, there were six credible accusations against Catholic priests in this country. In the past ten years, there have been 290,000 against public school teachers. There are times when I have read yet another article about child abuse and thought to myself, “Why focus on the Catholic Church, when this problem is not unique to us?” It is an important question to ask. 

Why does this crime within the Catholic Church and her priests garner so much attention, and not the same crimes perpetrated by pastors, rabbis, schoolteachers, scoutmasters and family members? Whether they realize it or not, people want the Catholic Church to be true to herself. People want priests to be loving shepherds in the image of Jesus. The reason people don’t get as upset about the same sins going on anywhere else is because they realize that there is truth in the Church, and the disconnect between preaching and practice is profoundly disheartening in a way that isn’t for other institutions.
This crisis could be the best gift the Church has ever had. She now has a chance to let the light of the Risen Son shine in every nook and cranny, so that the Body of the Church may be as transparent and glorious as the Body of the LORD. Where her pastors failed miserably to protect and defend, now they can show the way to all of the world how to protect and defend all human life. Are people right to be angry that there is filth in the Church? Yes. Don’t be afraid of that. But anger can become a desire for revenge which does nothing but destroy, or it can lead to purification, forgiveness and reconciliation. 
What is going on in the Church is very valuable for us. None of us is perfect, none of us is above the law of God and none of us can escape the consequences of our sins. Truth, humility and charity are the way to justice and peace in the Church today. The way for the Church to reform is not by accepting at face value whatever the culture of death says is appropriate. It is by being more faithful to the God-given values of our faith.

No other solution will work. I am stunned by those who have used this crisis as a weapon to argue for the abolition of the celibacy of the priesthood. They say, “See, if priests got married, we wouldn’t have this problem.” The fact that most abusers are married men and that the vast majority of the priests who were abusers perpetrated their crimes against those of the same sex points to the fact that marriage is not exactly the solution. Celibacy does not cause abuse any more than marriage causes adultery. So what can be done? Arresting the Pope and making him the scapegoat for the hatred of the world? Subjugating the spiritual power of the Church to an increasingly totalitarian vision of the state? No. We solve the crisis by being faithful to Christ. Priests and laypeople must be faithful to their God-given vocation and have the courage to call each other out when they are lacking. Like the publican in the Gospel, we must have the courage to say, “LORD, have mercy on me, a sinner,” then, in the communion of the Church we create a safe place for all of God’s children to come close to Him.

When Jesus Christ said to Peter, “Do you love Me?” he knew that only love could give anyone the strength to carry on in the face of the storms besieging us. He then tasks Peter, “Feed my sheep.” Benedict XVI has answered the LORD, “You know that I love you.” And so Jesus has given the Pope the unenviable job of finding a way to make His love shine forth purely and sweetly through our own failings. If you love Jesus and you love His Church, then now is the time to rally to the defense of the Holy Father. That does not mean turning a blind eye to what is unspeakable. But it does mean that each one of us must commit to turn away from sin, to love God with everything that is within us, and to be faithful to the hope God gives us in the midst of filth and a pain. Then, the Church may be the true place of forgiveness and hope; in her filth may once again be replaced by the radiant face of Jesus.