"The Crisis" or "The Situation?" Steve Mattson wrote me the following in response to my email.
Whenever there's a problem in the Church, it's dubbed
a "crisis." The "vocations crisis" is just the most
famous example. People use the term about social
problems all the time, so it loses its value--at least
that's my sense.
Maybe I don't hear the word "crisis" as much as he does. If that's the case I'm stunned because I am a lay person living in the Washington DC metro area and he is in the seminary.
This mess we're in is just too complicated to be called "The Situation." For decades some of the abuse and priest-shuffling went on. Certainly for decades the notion of a maleable, relativistic truth has been part of our culture and infected the Church in this country. A billion dollars has been paid out to victims already, most of it quietlyd. Take Archbishop Weakland for example. He turned a beautiful Cathedral into a modern "worship space" contrary to explicit directives from Rome to do otherwise. He had one homosexual affair that we know of. He paid 450 large to keep it on the down-low. His lawyers squashed someone who brought a lawsuit against the Archdiocese and then went after them with statutory verve to get $4500 in legal fees out of them. Take all those things together and they were more than a situation, they were a crisis. This is The Crisis. The culmination of a whole lot of things like what Weakland did. The scale of it boggles the mind and the heart. The weight of it has crushed the spirits of many, many people. We must put our trust in Jesus. We must glorify Him by accepting His love and mercy. We must pray for our shepherds with all our hearts and trust that Christ who founded the Church will restore it.
