Will the Church in general and the clergy in particular be composed of sinners cease to surprise Catholics?
At the very end of the 19th century, in her Carmel of Lisieux, Thérèse Martin laughed at her own candour as a little girl: “
Praying for the souls of priests, which I believed to be purer than crystal, seemed astonishing to me!…
” is a pilgrimage to Rome which had shaken her at the age of 14: the worldliness, the tepidity and the mediocrity of a good number of cassocked people in her diocese had jumped out at her, and had convinced her to pray more earnestly for priests to convert and become saints.
A hell of a job.
Because a good century later, in 2010, Pope Benedict XVI still declared to the press: “
We have always known this, but today we see in a much more terrifying way that the greatest persecution of the Church does not come from external enemies, but arises from the sin of the Church.
Such discourse is Catholic.
There is neither…
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