I’ve been a Catholic for well over forty-five years. In my time I’ve seen a lot of stuff going on in the church. Some good and some bad. Many times such things can leave my soul very troubled. I’m not the only one. I’ve seen, at times, good people threaten to leave the church over it. Or at worse follow though.
If you spend enough time on social media. You would think that everything in the church is rotten to the core. On top of it you have people who are taking advantage and are making money off the outrage. In some cases taking things out of context and twisting it to such a degree that it is no longer what was intended. It doesn’t help that some in leadership have brought about their own controversy. A lot of wiggle room to generate scandal on their own.
When you look in the church though the broader history. You realize that this kind of stuff isn’t really anything new. The church by and large tends to move from one crisis to the next. Every generation has had to deal with something that troubles them at some point. The age of social media makes this even more apparent. We have access to a lot more information than we did generations ago. So people are more informed. Yet many of us simply do not know the history of the church as we should.
Another element in all of this is that people have forgotten the words of Christ as he spoke to Peter that “the gates of the netherworld shall not prevail against it." It would be worth it to many of us to reread Matthew 16: 15-19. If you look at the entire history of the church. You soon realize that we have been trying to destroy ourselves from within for well over two-thousand years. Yet we still remain.
Being Catholic is who I am. It is an extremely important element of my life. Even with all the issues, controversies, and at times grave scandals. I trust and accept the teachings of the church because I know they are the truth. The words of Christ speak to my soul as it relates to the Eucharist. That Christ is present Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity. In fact Christ makes it extremely clear that with out it [The Eucharist] that we cannot cannot have life within us. Christ is the Son of God who has been risen from the dead! That fact alone gives me hope in a world that is always trying to find ways to destroy itself.
The older I get the more I understand that stuff will go on in the church that troubles me. I could easily spend my entire life worried about it. But what would that do for me? Nothing good. All it would do is generate even more anxiety on top of what I deal with on a daily level. It’s not that I don’t care. It that I have issues and challenges closer to home that I need to focus on. Instead I put my trust in God. I put into prayer and into God’s hands all that troubles my soul. Trusting that the words of Christ as recorded in the Bible are truth. I focus on the issues closer to me. Areas, thanks to my work, that I can hopefully make an impact on. Not sure about everyone else. I believe what Christ said to Peter. Even if the news these days isn’t always that grand.
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