Recently in Catholic Church Category

A week ago was the tenth anniversary of the controversial Declaration "Dominus Iesus" (Lord Jesus), from the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which in 2000 was headed up by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, today Pope Benedict XVI.

Anyway, I say it was controversial because it made some claims about Jesus which are often considered somewhat politically incorrect. Claims like Jesus is the only name under which anyone is to be saved from an eternity separate from God, or that the Church He founded is the one true Church.

I read the document this morning for the first time ever. I felt like most of it was pretty common sense, provided that the person reading it professed to believe in the content of Holy Writ. If the document is politically incorrect or offensive to modern ideas of religious pluralism or relativism, it is because the New Testament and the Jesus of Nazareth described therein are rather offensive to those.

But I find that the most difficult Gospel teachings to accept often turn out to be the most beautiful.

The most dominant image used to describe God's love for mankind in Scripture is matrimonial -- the love of a husband for his wife. The declaration reads:

And thus, just as the head and members of a living body, though not identical, are inseparable, so too Christ and the Church can neither be confused nor separated, and constitute a single "whole Christ". This same inseparability is also expressed in the New Testament by the analogy of the Church as the Bride of Christ (cf. 2 Cor 11:2; Eph 5:25-29; Rev 21:2,9).

That is probably the most new idea I've taken from the document, the idea that Christ and the Church are distinct but inseparable. Or maybe not a new idea, but a new and clearer expression of the idea.

Because there is often perceived a disconnect between the two. Christ is all-loving, all-affirming; the Church is cold and rigid. Christ comforts. The Church burdens. Christ welcomes. The Church excommunicates.

Why the apparent difference? I would surmise that it is because the Church is clear and unmistakable in the world today, while Christ is more shrouded in the past, more ephemeral and thus more vulnerable to wishful thinking. In other words, it is much easier for us to make whatever we want out of "Jesus" than it is to make whatever we want out of the Church. Christ isn't walking around giving interviews or writing books. The pope is.

This is not to say that Christ is not loving and welcoming. Quite the opposite. But as Christ is welcoming, so too is the Church. It is the Church's job to preserve a proper understanding of Christ in the world today. The farther one gets away from Christ's teachings as propogated by the Church, the more one's understanding of Christ becomes contaminated by one's own wishful thinking. The Christ in our heads is then not Christ at all. Just a repository of our own opinions, costumed up to look like a 33-year-old bearded Jewish carpenter.

If any of the Church's teachings strike us as cold or unloving, like (and I hope this does not upset anyone too much) her teaching on marriage, then it is not her teaching but a teaching of Christ himself that we find so cold and unloving. Does that mean Christ is cold and unloving? Or might it mean that our understanding of the issue needs to be corrected or sharpened?

Anyway, I think that is what Cardinal Ratzinger was getting at. Just throwing it out there.

Speaking of marriage ...
as I read the declaration this morning it got me thinking about my future married relationship. St. Paul makes clear that the mystery of marriage actually points to the mystery of Christ and the Church -- distinct but inseparable entities. Beginning on that fateful day in late September, T and I will continue to be distinct individuals, but we will be inseparable. As one body.

Mind blown.

John Allen at the National Catholic Reporter writes that one of the most serious American lawsuits against the Vatican has been dropped:

In a rare stroke of good news for Rome vis-à-vis the sexual abuse crisis, attorneys for three alleged victims in Kentucky have said they're dropping what many analysts regarded as the most serious civil lawsuit against the Holy See in American courts.
Louisville-based attorney William McMurry gave two reasons for abandoning the case of O'Bryan v. Holy See, one legal and the other practical.
As a legal matter, McMurry told media outlets in mid-August, the Vatican's sovereign immunity under American law set the bar too high. More practically, McMurry said, he couldn't find additional victims willing to come forward who haven't already been part of a lawsuit against the church. Without more plaintiffs, it's unlikely that any settlement or verdict would have been sufficient to offset the costs of litigation, even if the lawsuit had prevailed.
The O'Bryan case was originally filed in 2004, and McMurry had hoped to turn it into a class-action suit on behalf of thousands of victims nationwide.

...

The Vatican's American attorney, Jeffrey Lena, welcomed the decision to abandon the Kentucky case.
"This development confirms that there has never been a Holy See policy requiring concealment of child sexual abuse," Lena said in an August 9 statement. "Bringing this case only distracted from the important goal of protecting children from harm."
Likewise, Vatican spokesman Jesuit Fr. Federico Lombardi said Aug. 10, "It is good news that a case ... which has had strong negative effects on public opinion has ultimately been proven unfounded."
In comments to Vatican Radio, Lombardi added that he didn't mean to "minimize the horror and condemnation" of child sex abuse, or the compassion due to victims

Just as interesting as the story is the veritable Vatican slamfest in comments section.

How does Lombardi pronounce this case "unfounded?" Unfounded means without merit. This case had merit it was just stymied by the various legal impediments making it nearly impossible to litigate.
Lombardi doesn't understand that when he uses situations like this to claim innocence of the charges [rather than the good fortune of dodging a bullet due to a technicality] it only infuriates people and further erodes their confidence in the governing arm of the Church.
Makes you wonder how stupid they think we really are.

Whoa, man.

Really really stupid.That is how Church Officialdom sees us.
I think Ann Rice stated the feelings of many, many catholics when she made her public leaving of the Church last week. That they are still making like they do not get it when it comes to the disgust of the person in the pew regarding the COVER UP. Pederasts are sad , sick people but Church Administrators who leave children to the vultures to protect their velvet covered butts are reprehensible indeed. These people are not fit to lead.

Good heavens.

And it makes all of us realize what total unfeeling idiots they
are in the Vatican. Sorry for generalizing but they keep showing the world what backward Medieval people they really have become. Also their lawyer, Mr.Lena, says similar things...anything for money right Mr. Lena? Love to know the fantastic amount he is getting paid to litigate the Holy See out of their cover ups and lack of moral courage.
The heirachy needs to do the right thing and admit to what they did and step down from their positions. I think maybe the Holy Spirit is at work and She wants the church to open the windows like John XXIII suggested and have some serious house cleaning done.

And that's just the first three.

Lower down is a clearly less jaded, less bitter Catholic who observes that most of the abuses occurred in the 1960s and 70s, attributes them to the "Spirit of Vatican II," which he apparently considers an erroneous perversion of the letter of the Second Vatican Council itself, and says that the younger, more committed generation of the Church is now "rebuilding."

He is then promptly compared to Adolph Hitler. Sad when people who are actually interested in building up and restoring the Church as the Body of Christ are compared to genocidal dictators. But that is how the crisis has affected some people, including, apparently, some readers of the National Catholic Reporter.

To my fellow Catholics and others of faith reading this: Let's keep all those whose faith has been negatively affected by the abuse crisis in the Catholic Church and elsewhere in our prayers.

No, not me.

The New York Observer reports that New York Post reporter John Wilson is leaving the profession at 25 years old to join a Catholic seminary and begin formation for priestly ministry.

Wilson compared the journalistic profession with the ministry of the Catholic priesthood: "In very different ways and in front of very different audiences, you are trying to sniff out the truth and communicate it."

The headline of the above-linked article reads "Post Scribe Leaves Paper For Priesthood." A little known fact about seminary is that seminary does not necessarily mean that priest is undoubtedly in a man's future. It does not constitute a final decision to become a priest. People go to seminary all the time and choose to leave some time later, because they have discovered that the Catholic priesthood is not for them. That is of course what I did. It may be what this gentleman does. Time will tell.

The Washington Post reports that in Salt Lake City, Utah, at Temple Square and Brigham Young University, Mormons seem to be working with Catholics on marriage prep.

"Mormons have a lot to teach Catholics about emphasizing marriage as a God-given vocation," writes Anthony Stevens-Aroyo, a Catholic.

Whether Catholics must learn from Mormons about the holiness of marriage is up for debate, as far as I'm concerned. But there is no question that many of us Catholics certainly can learn about the holiness of marriage from someone.

It is sometimes believed in Catholic circles that the celibate priesthood is the way to go if one is "holy" like that, while marriage is more "natural" and "normal." On the other end of the spectrum the celibate priesthood (or religious life) is considered the really honorable thing for a person to do with one's life, while marriage is considered somehow more worldly and less righteous. I will sometimes hear people pray for "vocations to the priesthood and religious life." Nothing wrong with that of course.

But Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York has said most aptly:

"That's where we have the real vocation crisis. We have a vocation crisis to lifelong, life-giving, loving, faithful marriage. If we take care of that one, we'll have all the priests and nuns we need for the Church."

He is absolutely correct.

The joining of one man and one woman in holy matrimony is just as much God's idea as is the priesthood.

Stevens-Arroyo continues:

In Catholic America, I fear, we don't advertise often enough that the Sacrament of Marriage is a vocation. While the LDS and a host of Protestant churches function as places to meet "good wives" and "reliable husbands" for believers seeking worthy marriage partners, Catholic churches pray more often for celibate vocations to the priesthood and religious life. Certainly, celibacy is an essential gift to the church and should be maintained, but there are far more Catholics who are married than those who are celibate. If we need priests to function as Christ's Church, we also need married people to fill the pews and take on lay ministries.

But the American bishops are paying attention, Arroyo goes on. They wrote a pastoral letter in November 2009, "Marriage: Love and Life in the Divine Plan." And they've recently launched the website "For Your Marriage."

Been thinking a lot about the Holy Spirit lately. Fr. J said in his homily last Sunday said that the Holy Spirit "makes the difference." It makes the difference between a loving church community and a cold and distant one. It makes the difference in a generous and giving person and a miser. It makes the difference between a person who is ready to change and a person who is stuck in his old ways.

David Mills of "First Things" magazine wrote this week about "Spirituality without Spirits," or the modern popular concept and lifestyle of "spirituality" as opposed to supposedly cold hard "religion."

He writes about Lady Gaga -- who may not be so celibate after all -- telling a newspaper that although she was raised Catholic, she now prefers a more "spiritual" type of God.

"There's really no religion that doesn't hate or condemn a certain kind of people, and I totally believe in all love and forgiveness, and excluding no one," she says.

Mills debunks the whole "spirituality" myth -- which is that one can be spiritual without the actual relationship with the kind of Spirit that one encounters only in religious practice. To be religious is to be spiritual -- to engage with and encounter a true spirit that is beyond us, that challenges us, and that can change us.

I'm presently reading a book by John Paul II on the Holy Spirit: Dominum et Vivificantem: The Holy Spirit in the Life of the Church and the World. That first Latin part means "Lord and Giver of Life," which is what we Catholics call the Holy Spirit every Sunday at Mass.

Because every human heart desires God, I think it can certainly be said that persons who subscribe to these sorts of popular, ephemeral, non-substantive types of "spirituality" are looking, objectively, for the Holy Spirit. In other words, everyone wants life, and the Holy Spirit stands ready to give it to them to the full. But their perception, often received from popular media, is that the Holy Spirit, and the Church to which He gives life, will not give them the kind of happiness that they seek from living spiritually.

Why? Because of the moral claims that they make. It's that "Holy" with a capital "H" that some of us find so unnerving. That's what, I suspect, Lady Gaga is talking about. She thinks that religion is about hating and condemning people. That's her concept of morality. If it was my concept of morality, I would agree with her. A lot of people would, and that I suspect is why the concept of "spirituality" is so appealing, why so many characterize themselves as "spiritual but not religious."

But religion, at least the Christian religion, is about loving and accepting and including people. But therefore it must be about hating and condemning certain lifestyles and practices, both in our own lives and in the world writ large, that are fundamentally incompatible with loving our neighbor the way Christ loves us. If certain sexual practices -- and let's be frank, the vast majority of objections people have to the moral claims of the Church come down to sexual practices -- are condemned and excluded by the Church, that is the reason.

The reason why certain practices must be excluded may not always be clear to us, but many things regarding God are not always clear, and nonethless true. My purpose here is not to make the case for these teachings. That would take many more blog posts. I simply say the basis of these teachings is not hate and exclusion, but love and inclusion -- of all people.

The concept is rooted in scripture, as John Paul II notes in his book. In John Chapter 16, Jesus tells his disciples that when the Holy Spirit comes, He will "convince the world concerning sin and righteousness and judgment."

Well there's the rub. All you have to do is watch a few episodes of "Intervention" to know that we human beings do not like to be convinced of our own sin -- of our imperfections and our need to change. Religion -- Holy Spirituality -- does that. Spirituality does not.

Came across an interesting article at the website for Crisis Magazine, a lay Catholic publication, by a guy named John Zmirak, whom I've never heard of but seems pretty insightful.

His argument: the theological virtue of love (or more clearly charity) cannot be properly understood or properly practiced without a proper understanding and practice of the "merely natural" virtues of justice (moral righteousness), temperance (moderation, avoidance of excess), fortitude (courage), and prudence (smart thinking).

Without the clear understanding and proper practice of those virtues, we cannot fulfill Christ's commandment, that we love one another as He loved us. For Jesus Himself was a model not only of the theological virtues (faith, hope and love), but of those four natural virtues as well.

The Christian message of Love, Zmirak writes, is not that only our conception of "love" by itself is sufficient without anything else to place it in context.

The example upon which he draws is indeed Benedict's comments regarding the abuse scandals, when he said:

"Forgiveness is not a substitute for justice. In one word we have to re-learn these essentials: conversion, prayer, penance, and the theological virtues."

Love without respect for justice is not really love, but a corruption of it. In modern popular culture, there are many conceptions and practices of "love" that do not include justice, or temperance, or courage, or prudence. They may involve strong emotional attachments and warm-fuzzies, but a strong emotional attachment and warm-fuzzies are not a foundation for a loving relationship in the Christian sense.

Some may argue that this makes it appear that God's Love is not enough, that we devalue God's Love by saying that it needs other virtues to make it work.

But I would say it is precisely by practicing these simple, ordinary human virtues that we place the value in Love that it truly deserves. Without these ordinary virtues, we strip Love of its identity. Love becomes merely an undiscerning affirmation of everyone, even those who need to be called to conversion, and everything, even the most heinous crimes. Love is challenging. As Zmirak put it:

Grace builds on nature, but it cannot simply replace it. If we're unjust, rash, intemperate or irresponsible, it won't simply cripple our attempts to practice faith, hope, and charity -- it might actually render them evil.

It's been all over the news since he said it. Here and here for starters. Pope Benedict XVI has said that it is sin "within the Church" that has led to the sex abuse crisis the Catholic Church now faces.

Sounds pretty terrible and scary. But it is good news.

It looks like Vatican Radio broke the story and everyone else ran with it. Said the pope:

... attacks against the Pope or the Church do not only come from outside; rather the sufferings of the Church come from within, from the sins that exist in the Church. This too has always been known, but today we see it in a really terrifying way: the greatest persecution of the Church does not come from enemies on the outside, but is born from the sin within the church ...

His words are getting billed in the press as the "strongest comments" on the sex abuse scandal, that he is dismissing the idea that the whole sex abuse crisis has been ginned up by a press that hates the authority of the Vatican, the celibate priesthood, and him.

But his comments aren't surprising. He is essentially saying what those who follow the pope, and what many faithful Catholics, have known since the sex abuse scandals first started to break in America.

The crisis in the Church is a crisis of fidelity to Christ. It is rooted in the steady departure of the Church from fidelity both in preaching and in practice to the New Covenant in Christ. Components of this departure include a watering down of solid theological and moral teaching, and thereby a de-valuing of the admission of personal imperfection and penance before Christ. But at the root of it is a departure from prayer. At some point, Benedict seems to believe, the Church lost her prayerful soul. All the other ills flowed from that. Benedict continued:

... the Church therefore has a deep need to re-learn penance, to accept purification, to learn on one hand forgiveness but also the need for justice. Forgiveness is not a substitute for justice. In one word we have to re-learn these essentials: conversion, prayer, penance, and the theological virtues.

Bad or inaccurate media coverage, or slanderous accusers, or anything else external, could not create the crisis the Church now faces. Could they in some way contribute to it? Probably. But what could have prevented the crisis from becoming the cancer that it is on the body of the Church is and has always been prayer.

Again, this is good news. Why? Because the illness can be cured with prayer. Our prayer.

It has long been understood that the Church is not limited to the clerical hierarchies and religious celibates. The Catholic Church is all the baptized Catholic faithful. We can hardly affect what detractors and critics on the outside say about the Church and about her faithful. We are quite in a position to strengthen the soul of the Church itself, which is the Body of Christ.

If a man's body is bleeding because of what someone else is doing to him, then he faces the tall order of defending himself and changing the behavior of another. But if a man's wounds are self-inflicted, what he must do is simply change his own behavior. Unlike if his wounds are inflicted by an outside agressor, if he and he alone is responsible for his wounds, then the choice of what to do now is entirely his.

What happens to the Church now has nothing to do with the kind of press she gets. As the Holy Father has said, it requires conversion. In other words, it is our free choice.

The pope had a few words for, well, me, a couple days ago. He asked bloggers to basically make the internet less machine and more human being. Less Matrix, more Neo.

From Vatican Radio:

The need to give the Internet a soul and humanize the dynamics of the digital world was at the heart of Pope Benedict XVI's message Saturday to participants in a conference on modern means of mass communication.

Promoted by the Italian Bishops Conference, "Digital Witness" draws together experts in information technology, social networking, web journalism and blogging to focus on the language we use and the way we communicate as Christians in the online society.

Pope Benedict told participants that the task of every believer who works in media, is to ensure the "quality of human contact, guaranteeing attention to people and their spiritual needs". "This is increasingly urgent in today's world", he said, at a time when Internet appears to have a "basically egalitarian" vocation, but at the same time, "marks a new divide", the "digital divide" that "separates the included from the excluded"

And this is my favorite:

"The dangers of homologation and control, of intellectual and moral relativism are also increasing, as already recognizable in the decline of critical spirit, in truth reduced to a game of opinions, in the many forms of degradation and humiliation of the intimacy of the person"

This continues his theme of actual truth, not just cleverer opinions. He also addresses the viral nature of the internet. Which reminds me of this movie I watched the other day with my fiance called "Untraceable." It's about a psychopath who creates an elaborate system whereby his victims are killed live via the internet -- and more quickly the faster the hit count rises (in other words, more quickly the more people log in to watch).

The film comes to a pretty cynical conclusion: that tens of millions of people would log on to watch a live homicide, driving the victim that much more quickly closer to death, if given the chance.

I don't know if that's true, but it speaks to the voyeuristic nature of some of the stuff you can find on the internet. Not just porn, but hardcore wipeout stuff. And I don't mean stuff like Fail Blog, which sometimes is pretty funny and to my knowledge has never shown anyone getting fatally wounded. There is, aside from the sex trash, some pretty violent stuff out there that can just further desensitize the population. The pope is wise to address this.

But basically, he's inviting bloggers to bring a little more God into the blogosphere. Hope I can help a bit.

Just in case you missed it: Newsweek reports:

The Catholic sex-abuse stories emerging every day suggest that Catholics have a much bigger problem with child molestation than other denominations and the general population. Many point to peculiarities of the Catholic Church (its celibacy rules for priests, its insular hierarchy, its exclusion of women) to infer that there's something particularly pernicious about Catholic clerics that predisposes them to these horrific acts. It's no wonder that, back in 2002--when the last Catholic sex-abuse scandal was making headlines--a Wall Street Journal-NBC News poll found that 64 percent of those queried thought Catholic priests "frequently'' abused children.

Yet experts say there's simply no data to support the claim at all. No formal comparative study has ever broken down child sexual abuse by denomination, and only the Catholic Church has released detailed data about its own. But based on the surveys and studies conducted by different denominations over the past 30 years, experts who study child abuse say they see little reason to conclude that sexual abuse is mostly a Catholic issue. "We don't see the Catholic Church as a hotbed of this or a place that has a bigger problem than anyone else," said Ernie Allen, president of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. "I can tell you without hesitation that we have seen cases in many religious settings, from traveling evangelists to mainstream ministers to rabbis and others."

The upshot: no empirical evidence to show that sexual abuse happens more often in the Catholic priesthood than in other situations, in fact it's possible that it happens less often.

This is not a cause for celebration, obviously. But the problem, again, is not a uniquely Catholic one.

Pope Benedict XVI preached a homily at Mass with the Pontifical Biblical Academy yesterday, in which he addressed, in off-the-cuff, non-scripted remarks, not just the ongoing sexual abuse scandals plaguing the Catholic Church in various parts of the world, but the errors of modern thought that made such crimes possible, and the fresh opportunity for the Church to open herself to God's transforming power.

So far there is not a complete transcript, just notes taken by Vatican Radio and others. But if the notes are any indication, it was a brilliant teaching moment from Benedict.

Because so much of this is so great, I'm going to quote it a bit at a time and intersperse my comments. If you, dear reader, wish not to be interrupted by my inferior thoughts, please skip over them. You won't offend me. He's the freakin' pope.

Vatican Radio reports:

Speaking without a prepared text, the Holy Father said that in modern times we have seen theorized an idea of man according to which human being would be, "free, autonomous, and nothing else."

This supposed freedom from everything, including freedom from the duty of obedience to God, "Is a lie," said Pope Benedict, a falsehood regarding the basic structure of human being - about the way women and men are made to be, "because," he continued, "human being does not exist on its own, nor does it exist for itself."

I'm not sure there's a man alive on the planet today who better understands the errors of modern thought than Pope Benedict. He understands that the error is based on something that appears on the surface to be a good, which is freedom. When he says that this particular idea of freedom is a "lie," he is not saying that there is no freedom. He is saying that what many in the modern world mean when they say the word "freedom" is not freedom at all. For God is the source of freedom.

In the modern mind, to be free means to be unencumbered by, often by means of separation. For example, being free from homework by being separated from school, or confinement by being separated from prison. Or morality by being separated from God. But to be separated from God is to be separated from the only source of freedom available to man. Therefore, "freedom" from God in the modern sense is actually the opposite of freedom.

He continues:

The Pope said it is a political and practical falsehood, as well, because cooperation and sharing of freedoms is a necessary part of social life - and if God does not exist - if He is not a point of reference really accessible to human being, then only prevailing opinion remains and it becomes the final arbiter of all things.

Citing the Nazi and Communist regimes of the 20th century as examples, Pope Benedict said such dictatorships can never accept the notion of a God who is above ideological power - and he also stressed that in the present, there are subtle forms of dictatorship like that of a radical conformism, which can lead to subtle and not-so subtle aggression toward the Church.

In the modern world quite often people think there are no facts that cannot be disputed -- only opinions that can be rhetorically cleverer than others, and thus more highly valued as "right." Particularly in the area of morality and politics it is the one who can be funnier or more charismatic who wins. That is not to say that such qualities are bad. They can be very good, but only if they are used to advance truth rather than falsehoods. Those who possess good humor and charisma may be right, or wrong. But in the modern world they are admired regardless as being worthy of our agreement. And on the flipside, those who come off as angry or humorless are dismissed as unworthy of our attention, regardless of whether what they're saying may be true.

The Holy Father also stressed that for Christians, true obedience to God depends on our truly knowing Him, and he warned against the danger of using "obedience to God" as a pretext for following our own desires.

If we don't know a person, we can't know what he wants. We may think that perhaps we know what he wants. But if the thing that we think he perhaps wants coincides with what we certainly know we want, how likely are we to make sure we understand him rightly?

That is the awkward position in which many Catholics finds themselves. We have a Church that professes concrete teachings on the principles of Jesus, many of which impose on us what at times appear to be profound inconveniences -- unreasonable prohibitions. Often, it is not simply that we do not know, but that we would rather not know.

But again, only by summoning up the courage to know the truth -- about ourselves and about God and what he wants -- can we be truly confident in God, and only then can we be truly free.

"We have," he said, "a certain fear of speaking about eternal life."

"We talk of things that are useful to the world," continued Pope Benedict, "we show that Christianity can help make the world a better place, but we do not dare say that the end of the world and the goal of Christianity is eternal life - and that the criteria of life in this world come from the goal - this we dare not say."

How true is this! We hear this a lot these days, and not necessarily always in a bad way. But it's very popular to talk about "What Christ's sacrifice means for me," and "How does this impact my life here and now," etc. But there's a certain self-centeredness there when we think of Christianity only in terms of this present world, and my present life. It's important to do that, of course. But have we perhaps lost sight of our ultimate and final end? The complete happiness that we cannot have in this life, no matter how much money we earn, how many friends we make, and how holy we are? Christianity -- Christ -- is much bigger than this world, and will remain long after this world is gone.

We must rather have the courage, the joy, the great hope that there is eternal life, that eternal life is real life and that from this real life comes the light that illuminates this world as well.

And here we have the flipside of that coin. Part of the problem is, I argue, a certain self-centeredness on the part of man. But the other side of it is simply fear. What, really, is going to happen to me after my heart stops beating? When I lose consciousness for the last time? It is simply the scariest question that human beings can ask themselves. And we are the only species on the planet that fears death on more than just an instinctual level, more than just when death seems uncomfortably near. We worry about it in the comfort of our own homes. Am I ultimately going anywhere besides in the ground?

As with virtually every question that weighs on the human heart, the answer is Jesus. We have in Him a demonstration that death is not the end, that we are heading for something greater. Don't just cling to that when you're afraid. Own it always. Believe and know that eternal life is waiting.

The Catholic News Service quotes him near the end of his remarks.

Recognizing the sins of priests who have sexually abused children, performing penance and asking for forgiveness, the Catholic Church trusts that God will purify and transform the church, Pope Benedict XVI said.

"I must say that we Christians, even in recent times, have often avoided the word 'penance,' which seemed too harsh to us. Now, under the attacks of the world that speaks to us of our sins, we see that being able to do penance is a grace."

Like death, we fear penance. Penance is a kind of death because we put to death our perverse desires. And Benedict is pointing to the recent terrible offenses of abusive priests, but also takes this as an opportunity not just for those perpetrators, but for all the members of the Church to really examine ourselves. If we truly possess the truth of the Jesus Christ, if we receive Him fully, then we should be the least afraid of the change it would make in ourselves.

That's the amazing thing about what Pope Benedict is doing here. He's taking the recent egregious crimes of the priests as an opportunity for the whole Church to be an example to the world of the change that Christ can make if we open ourselves to Him. There are many calling for change in how the Church operates as an institution. Such suggestions are worth considering. But Benedict understands that even more urgently needed is the transformation of hearts -- those of the Church's shepherds and their followers.

* * *

When I think of people going off the cuff the way Benedict has, I often picture them launching into rants against this person or that person, angrily speaking and wishing ill. None of that here. He attacks no individual person or group of persons. He simply invites people to examine the prevailing ideas of the modern world. And he does it with love, motivated by the love of Christ and the fire of the Holy Spirit. As his five-year anniversary approaches, I am thankful for this pope.

* * *

Reuters reported on the pope's words here, and the New York Times here.

Hat tip to the First Things blog and Rocco Palmo's Whispers in the Loggia.