Well, here it is, Good Friday, and for most of us who are practicing Roman Catholics, it is a particularly gloomy occasion. A day that we experience with sorrow has been made more bitter still with the news that reminds us how badly the Church's hierarchy failed to protect its most vulnerable members. Especially reading some of the strong opinions that are voiced in other diaries today, I feel a need to respond. More below the fold.
As a Roman Catholic, I am called to believe many things that others could consider preposterous (or downright ignorant): That God became man, that a virgin gave birth, that bread and wine become the body and blood of God, and that one man died for the sins of all humankind. And like many Catholics, I take many of the Church's teaching on moral issues with more than a grain of salt. Renewed revelations that the Church has failed to prevent the sexual abuse of children only make it harder for the faithful to endure. Certainly, the Church has not won a lot of friends with its positions on homosexuality, abortion and many other matters, as the harsh and in some respects gloating comments made in other diary entries here.
And yet....
I am a Catholic and will always remain so. Despite its flaws, the Church is a remarkable institution and it is safe to say that the world we live in would be unrecognizable -- and far worse -- if it had never existed. It was the Church that preserved the knowledge of the classical world during the long night of the dark ages. During its life, the Church has been responsible for creating thousands of universities, hospitals and charitable institutions around the world. Much of the art, archiecture, literature and philosophy that we recognize as the finest expressions of human creativity were produced by the Church, ad majorem Dei gloriam (for the greater glory of God). Millions of people around the world obtained their first glimpse of knowledge, language,culture -- and religion -- by the work of the Church over the centuries. In many respects, the Church civilized us (or at least a lot of us).
But there is something even more basic than that. What do we do here on this page -- worry about the poor, the sick, the wrongly jailed? What values do we express -- that society should be guided by compassion, by what Christians would call "agape" -- the love of your fellow human being? These are the core values of the Church, what it has been teaching since Jesus Himself walked the earth. We would not be doing what we do today, if the Catholic church, as flawed as it is, did not exist.
I am sure that many people will point to any number of deeds -- toleration for the Holocaust, mistreatment of aboriginal people, persecution of heretics, abuse of children -- to rebut what I am saying here. With sorrow, I acknowledge those thing occurred. Please understand that I am not denying that the Church is flawed, like any human institution, and has made some terrible mistakes in its past. My point, however, is that it has also been the vessel of much of what we, at dKos, cherish, and as ironic as it may seem, it is hard to imagine liberalism as we know it today if there were no Catholic Church over the last two thousand years distilling those values. I don't ask you to go easy on the Church, but just not to pass judgment without bearing more than the latest headlines in mind.