Hurting in the Church. Fr. Thomas Berg
your own parish priests.
• You are a bishop who feels you have no strength left to continue under the weight of loneliness and emotionally draining responsibilities.
• You were sexually abused by a member of the clergy as a child.
The wounds could be relatively superficial; the wounds might be deep and overwhelming. Some wounds heal quickly; others take a lifetime. And in our hearts we ask: Why does this happen? Why does it have to be this way?
The word “scandal” comes from the Latin scandalum, meaning a stumbling block, obstacle, or trap. In the Vulgate Latin version of Matthew 16:23, when Jesus rebukes Peter, saying, “Get behind me, Satan,” he adds, “you are to me a scandalum”—a stumbling block. The hurt inflicted upon us in our experience of the Church can be a stumbling block that trips us up, beats us down, knocks the wind out of us, disorients us, and can even shipwreck our Christian faith.
I have written this book because I, too, have been hurt in the Church. I’ve struggled with the agonizing bewilderment and the emotional and spiritual pain that can threaten to upend a journey of faith, rock our spiritual edifice to its very foundations, and bring us to the brink of spiritual collapse—even leading us to the unthinkable: to walk away from the Church and even to abandon the Christian faith altogether. And I have accompanied many of my brothers and sisters in the Faith through such experiences.
In reality, it doesn’t take much for even a small hurt to become a major stumbling block to someone’s Catholic faith. At the core of any degree of hurt occasioned in the Church is a kind of profound indignation—the gnawing sense that “this should not be happening!”
Our failures in love also cause scandal outside the Church. If the Church has ever succeeded in her mission, it was every time she was able—in the lives of faithful and committed Christians—to embody the self-sacrificing love exemplified by her Divine Spouse. What has always confounded her mission and identity—to the scorn and derision of non-Catholics—are the times her members have failed in that great task, the times we have failed to correspond to the mandate of our Savior: “Love one another as I have loved you.” At the heart of our unholiness and brokenness, we discover our all-too-frequent failures to respond to the world and to each other with radical Christlike love.
Is there hope for wounded Catholics? Certainly—and that ultimately is what this book is about. For Catholics who may have already walked away from the Church, this book is an invitation to reconsider. It’s also meant for Catholics who, because of a powerfully negative experience, find themselves on the brink of walking away or of losing their faith, or who find their struggles to make progress in the faith very difficult. It’s a book for those whose daily bread is doubt about the Church, recurring bitterness and inability to forgive, numbness and distaste for things spiritual, the loss of joy, tedium in slogging on in a ministry that now seems meaningless, the loss of affection for the Church.
For them and for anyone else who hurts in the Church or knows someone who hurts, I hope my book can serve to forge a way ahead and a way beyond the pain, to help readers understand—as I had to come to understand—that it is possible, in Christ and with the grace flowing from his Heart, to discover all of our hurts as a wellspring of graced living, and as a source of holiness and wholeness.
Part I explores in greater depth, although not exhaustively, some of the myriad ways we hurt in the Church today, beginning with my own personal story and weaving in the stories of others. It explores as well one of the most heinous forms of hurt—clerical sexual abuse—while also addressing the unique sufferings of priests, as well as the sufferings of those who feel alienated from the Church by her teachings, particularly those dealing with marriage and sexual morality.
Part II aims at offering wounded Catholics several avenues by which they cannot only enter more fully into a process of healing, but also discover anew the radiant and untarnished beauty of that same Church in which they have been so deeply hurt, and in which they can become—precisely because of the hurt they have endured—better human beings, and more committed and loving followers of Jesus Christ.
Part III turns our attention from our individual wounds to the wounds of the Mystical Body of Christ, the Church. Inspired by the teaching of Pope Francis, and still in the afterglow of the Year of Mercy, the final chapters invite us to a collective examination of conscience as to our living of radical, Christlike charity, and suggest some key actions and commitments that are essential in order to heal a hurting Church.
Part I
The Ways We Hurt
Chapter 1
My Story
“She had the feeling that somehow, in the very far-off places, perhaps even in far-off ages, there would be a meaning found to all sorrow and an answer too fair and wonderful to be as yet understood.”
— Hannah Hurnard, Hinds’ Feet on High Places
So, why did I start writing this book?
Let’s back up a ways.
I reached young adulthood in the mid-1980s. As a freshman at Marquette University in 1983, I had an experience—I called it a “conversion” at the time—that led me to a more lucid and deliberate commitment to my Catholic faith. These were still the years of considerable pastoral and liturgical upheaval following the Second Vatican Council. Now in college, I had emerged from that upheaval not only with my Catholic faith intact, but intensified by a newfound zeal. I had great hopes for the future of the Church and for my life in it. As time went on, it became clear that those hopes were anchored in a particular way in the person of Pope—now a saint—John Paul II, and in the Church’s renewal movements.
Indeed, the experience in the United States and elsewhere, from the late seventies into the eighties, was that the Church was precisely in a time of renewal, a reality seemingly captured in the multiplicity of renewal movements across the globe, from Renew International (born as a program for parish-based Catholic spiritual renewal in Newark, New Jersey, in 1976) to Catholic charismatic renewal and many more. “Renewal” was the spiritual buzzword of the 1980s.
This momentum took on an added dimension of urgency and excitement as a dominant theme began to emerge in the thought of Pope St. John Paul II: that we were actually protagonists in a great, new, noble, and holy endeavor, the “New Evangelization.” The pope used the phrase for the first time in a significant and public manner on March 9, 1983, in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, in his opening address to the general assembly of the Latin American Episcopal Conference (CELAM).
In that speech, John Paul directed the bishops’ attention to the upcoming fifth centennial of evangelization of the New World to be commemorated in 1992. That coming commemoration would attain to its full meaning, asserted the pontiff, only if the bishops, along with the clergy and lay faithful, were to embrace that anniversary with a renewed commitment, not to a project of re-evangelization, “but to a New Evangelization, new in its ardor, methods and expression.”
By 1986, I was fully committed to that project and convinced that—just as Jesus wanted me to be—I was on the road to becoming a real player in this effort: I had joined a new religious community, the Legionaries of Christ, whose entire ethos was seemingly