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Last month I wrote about Catherine Doherty’s tremendous love of the Church and her deep theological and spiritual vision of same.
As I said in that article, it is so crucial for us to have that vision—the beauty, goodness, holiness, awesome gift of the Church—if we are going to live through this difficult and terrible time of public scandal and humiliating failure on the part of so many Church leaders.
Catherine never lost sight of that vision, and her love and reverence for the Church was never shaken for a moment. At the same time, she saw the reality on the ground pretty clearly. She had no illusions about the Church, its leaders, or any of its members for that matter. In her era, she probably saw these things more clearly than most.
Her own biography shows how much she suffered from the human failures of the Church and its leaders. Her first frail apostolic efforts in Toronto were “strangled in the cradle” by a hostile, indifferent, and woefully short-sighted hierarchy in that city.
This is not just her version of events. In 1981, the city’s archbishop, Emmett Cardinal Carter, publicly apologized to her for a “long-standing grave injustice,” the closing of her first Friendship House apostolate, and he invited her to open a new house in Toronto.
In her further apostolic work in the United States, she witnessed firsthand the presence of racial prejudice and segregation in Catholic parishes, religious orders, and schools.
She suffered terribly from this, seeing her beloved African-American people being alienated from the Catholic Church, even denied the sacraments at times, by this grave evil.
As years went on, Catherine had the confidence of hundreds of priests and bishops, who poured their sorrows and difficulties into her maternal heart.
While we have no reason to think she knew of the realities of sexual abuse that are so painfully exposed now, she certainly did know, deeply and with searing pain, the brokenness and degradation of the Church, long before it became the subject of saturation media coverage as it is now.
And … she never stopped loving the Church, never lost that beautiful vision I shared with you last month. But here are a few observations she made, just to give you a flavor of how honestly and simply she talked about this aspect of things:
“The Church, the people of God, what strange words …people of God. Do we really feel that we are the people of God? Do we? As such we have failed, almost as a whole, not quite.
“We have failed to do what God has left the Church to do. We have failed to love one another. And because of that, the name of Jesus Christ has not been heard the way it used to be.” (Spiritual Reading – December 24, 1975)
***
“So the Church cannot die. For Christ died and resurrected. And he is in our midst, and he is not going to die. It looks bleak … But, all of this does not change the Church. We had some popes that were fornicators, adulterers, murderers, poisoners—that’s the Church.
“The Church has gone through many tremendous and difficult periods. Do not imagine that it will not survive this period. Christ works in a strange fashion. On the one hand, he calls: Come follow me. Let us fight injustice; let us fight misery, let us fight poverty…
“On the other hand, he says: Be patient. Stiff-necked men have been working at destroying My Church for generations. Wait; don’t join them. You are the Church. Act the way you want the other fellow to act in this Church of mine.” (Spiritual Reading – Nov 8, 1974)
***
This next quote needs some context. Catherine is referring to a situation in one of our Madonna House mission houses, where a great injustice had been done by the local Church that had caused great suffering to the Madonna House members living in that house and the people they served.
Her language here, unusually harsh, is not her own, as she is quoting words used by the director of that mission, who herself had been venting freely her frustrations with the Church and its hierarchy. Catherine is addressing the woman directly, in response to her pain and struggle over it all:
***
“Regarding the Church, the ‘stinking Church,’ as you call it: Now you want to put the blame on all the priests and on the pope. Sweetheart, you haven’t realized, really you haven’t, the mercy of God. If you’re going to judge by cerebration with your head, you’re right.
“But God doesn’t judge with his head, he judges with his heart. He walked in our midst and he has met the Sanhedrin. That’s the pope of his time, the big shots, the high priests. What did the high priest say? We must crucify or kill this man so that others will be saved. And by doing so, he brought our salvation.
“I don’t think the pope is all you think he is, and I don’t think the Church is what you think it is because, look, we are the Church.
“Okay, so we’re sitting in the womb of a carcass that stinks. Well, let’s take knives and clean it. Let’s bring water and wash it. And then some strange thing is going to happen.
“Where is that in the Bible where God stretched out his hand and the bones came alive? Ezekiel. Well, if God can make people out of bones, he can take a carcass and make it clean again and holy. It comes back to faith, faith, faith, faith, faith. Whenever we touch anything, we’re always back to faith.
“You’re going to allow yourself to talk about the stinking Church and so and so and so, and pretty soon you will say, ‘God isn’t here. God is dead.’ And that would be terrible.
“God doesn’t raise up people like us when the Church is not in trouble. God raises up people like us when the Church is in trouble.
“St. Francis was there—in [a time of] trouble. So be at peace. All is well; you must believe. This is your time to believe.” (MH Directors’ Meetings, 1971)
***
Next month I will talk about what Catherine meant about “God raising people like us up when the Church is in trouble”—the response of people of faith to the crisis in the Church, and the deep healing and restoration that you, I, and all of us together can help bring about by that response.
It all does come back to faith, and this being the time to believe. So let’s believe, then, and commend our poor battered Church to the mercy and tender care of the God who called it into existence, and who loves it more than we do.
to be continued
