I am not a saint. I have been to confession enough times over my life to prevent my forgetting that. I still try to go every month or so which is probably not often enough. Somebody told me that the late Pope John Paul II went every day!
I have had the experience of confessing a particular sin to one priest who accepted it in stride along with my other sins and gave me some helpful advice. Another priest flipped on the same sin. He told me I was going straight to hell.
I tell you this not for the sake of making any public confessions although it does no harm to establish that it is not my intention to take a holier-than-thou attitude on this blog. I doubt that any of my readers consider themselves without fault or sin. Even the meticulous pharisees had the integrity to walk away when Jesus suggested that the one without sin should cast the first stone.
My purpose is rather to give an example of someone having a sense of outrage at sin. Not meaning to say one priest's response was better or worse than the other, or less or more appropriate. My comparison is rather with that of the response of the leader of the Roman Catholic Church in Belgium, Archbishop André-Joseph Léonard, to the release of a 200-page report on September 10, compiled by an internal commission set up by the church to document charges of sex abuse. Two hundred pages!
According to a New York Times article headed, Belgian Church's Response to Abuse Lacks Specifics, ( http://mobile.nytimes.com/article?a=659343&f=110 ), the report included harrowing testimony from victims and said that one had been abused from the age of 2. Thirteen people are thought to have committed suicide as a result of abuse, the report said.
FROM THE AGE OF TWO!!! THIRTEEN SUICIDES!? What the ....?
According to the New York Times, Archbishop Léonard said at a news conference that suffering had caused a "shiver" to run through the church, but that it was too soon for a detailed response to the crisis. A shiver through the church? A SHIVER? Which church is the archbishop talking about? He and I must be in different churches. His church might be experiencing a shiver but my church is vomiting in disgust. If my confessor blew an indignation valve over what I had confessed then the poor man must be suffering one serious meltdown if he is aware of this report out of the church in Belgium.
Why do I get the impression that lay people are more outraged and disgusted by this stuff than are bishops and priests?
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