In my first year at St. Peter in Fulton, I led a prayer service with middle schoolers that involved the use of taper candles. We sat on the floor in the front of church, right where folks receive communion. Since the Church had been recently renovated, we were sitting on brand-new carpet. (Perhaps you can see where this is going.) As I should have expected, some of the wax spilled onto the carpet. There were two spill spots, actually! Once the teens left, I grabbed a clothes iron and some newspaper, headed back up to the scenes of the crime, and tried not to panic. While I had never gotten wax out of carpet myself, I had seen it done before and felt as though I understood the process. I plugged in the iron, laid the newspaper down over the first spot, and gently laid the iron on top of the newspaper. As it was supposed to do, the wax came right up! Unfortunately, I had no such luck with the second spot. When I lifted up the newspaper, the wax was gone, and in its place was a lovely iron-shaped burn mark in the carpet, the one you see pictured here. Perhaps I left the iron on the newspaper too long.
I was thinking about that spot this morning, as I stood just a few feet from it, leading music at the Mass for the Solemnity of the Assumption. While my thoughts should have been on our Blessed Mother, I couldn’t help but think about that spot in light of the awful news that came out of Pennsylvania yesterday. A grand jury report revealed that several bishops/dioceses in that state had covered up the sexual abuse of over 1,000 children by more than 300 priests. If you combine that news with the recent revelations about former-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, these recent discoveries have put the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, and indeed the Church itself, under rightly-deserved and intense scrutiny. This scrutiny, of course, is nothing compared with the pain and suffering that the abuse victims and their families must be feeling. My prayers continue for them.
Much will be said and written about all of this in the coming weeks and months. It’s important for my fellow Catholics to realize, though, that the effects of this scandal will never go away. We are a different Church that we were a few weeks ago. We have to be. We cannot and should not view our clergy and prelates the same way ever again. There must be oversight. There must be accountability. The health and livelihood of millions of children in our care will be determined by how strongly we demand that our Church leadership submit to regular and transparent reviews of how they handle allegations of abuse. We have to be able to distinguish between the collective teaching authority of the Magisterium and the potential for grave human error, present in all of us, even clergy.
Just like my church has that iron-shaped burn spot, our Catholic Church has its own permanent blemish. Of course, forgiveness can happen. Certainly, time will pass. But, this scandal will always be a part of who we are as a Church. We need to learn from it, so the safety of our children can be assured, and we can get back to the great work of helping God’s people grow in holiness.
-Shannon
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