There Is No Forgiveness For Them

Related to a post I wrote last week on the feast of Blessed Edmund Rice,  I see an article in the Catholic Herald on the future of the Christian Brothers.  The Superior, Br Philip Pinto says the future looks bleak, and financially they are broke.    Some of the comments in the combox are interesting. I presume they are written by Christians, though by the attitude there seems to be little Christianity in any of them.  One commenter puts it well -

By what I see from the comments, that this order has done nothing good at all. Then this order should be put down/disbanded because it seem that the sin of some is the sin of all. Yes, there is no forgiveness for them. They have betrayed the trust of the people and the faith, we never sinned at all, that's why we should hurl rocks at them... Remember... Jesus came down, much for the sinner than for the just.

That hits the nail on the head.  There is so much self-righteousness out there, there is no mercy.  I see the same with the reaction to the Mass for Osama bin Laden - it appears we must all consign him to hell.  Yet, if we remember what the Lord teaches us in the Gospel, and even in the prayer he taught us:  "Forgive us our trespasses AS we forgive those who trespass against us."  God's mercy is conditional  - it will be given on the condition we forgive others "from the heart".  Many of us seem to forget that.  But we need to take that seriously, our salvation, literally, depends on it.

That said, with regard to the Christian Brothers and the abuse crisis in general, I agree with Baroness Nuala O'Loan.  The Catholic Church is a scapegoat for a greater problem in Irish society, and in the world in general.  The vast amount of abuse is committed by the non-celibate, by the laity, yet to point that out is to bring condemnation on your head.  At the moment society is not willing to hear that fact, perhaps because, among other things, there are many in society who want to distract attention from their crimes and concentrating on the Church takes the heat off them.  But it also means that their victims are forced into silence: they are the silent majority who suffer abuse and neither governement nor media are interested because it is too dangerous for either party to try and scratch the surface of that problem.  There are a number of reasons for that, and I suspect one of them may be that when you start looking you never know who you will find among the guilty. 

No doubt you have read it already, but Archbishop Timothy Dolan's airport encounter is worth reading with regard to this.