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Introduction

A Church of the Hurting

This book has a very particular, though not exclusive, audience. I am writing for Catholics who, somewhere along life’s journey, have had a painful experience in the Church.

To suggest that a large segment of the Catholic population, including those who no longer practice, fits this description might seem an exaggeration to some. What I am proposing could appear downright suspect or at least foreign to the experience of many readers. I would wager, however, that for many other readers, this book will strike a profound, if unsettling, chord.

The reality of the Catholic Church today in developed countries, and certainly in the United States, is that we are a church of the hurting. This book is for Catholics—far more than we would care to imagine—who have endured an experience of hurt in the Church. It is an exposé of our frequent failures as Catholics to live the life of genuine Christlike charity, the self-giving, passionate, interpersonal love and caring—agapē—experienced so intensely in the first Christian communities and envisioned by St. Paul in his first letter to the Corinthians, chapter 13. My book attempts to shed a spotlight on our decades-old tolerance of an unchristian status quo, what in many sectors—in our parishes, rectories, chanceries, and Catholic ministries—can at times degenerate into a veritable culture of hurt. I offer this book as an examination of conscience following the Year of Mercy, as an invitation to reflect on those areas where we are sorely lacking in charity in our faith communities, an invitation to an essential conversion of heart, and to a renewal of the life of charity in our local churches.

Most of all, I offer this book as a source of solace, hope, and healing for wounded and struggling Catholics. Our pews are filled with them, while many have also gone missing: Catholics who have been subjected at one time or another in their experience of the Church to hurts of all shapes and sizes. Some—a percentage far larger, I suspect, than what most Catholics might imagine—have even suffered what can only be described as a life-altering harm in and through their experience of the Church. We are a Church that all too often, all too freely, all too callously and without regard, inflicts emotional wounds on its own.

Is it 1 in 5, or 1 in 10, or 1 in 300 Catholics who have had a painful experience in the Church, in their journey of faith? I am unaware of any surveys taken on the matter. But let’s consider, for example, that the U.S. bishops have received to date more than 17,000 claims of sexual abuse by priests alleged to have occurred in the past several decades. Most experts would affirm that the actual number of victims of clergy sexual abuse in the United States—including those who have never come forward—could be ten times that number.

Sexual abuse constitutes a singular, maximal, and grotesque form of hurt. And yet—in our parishes, rectories, chanceries, and ministries—an honest examination of our ordinary experience as members of the Church in the United States confirms that on a daily basis we submit each other, by the hundreds, to other forms of hurt: impatience, angry outbursts, intolerance, denigration, manipulation, prejudice, abrasiveness, harassment, humiliation, intrigue, gossip, dishonesty, deception, detraction, calumny, betrayal—and the list could go on.

Some readers might characterize my claim as wildly exaggerated; others will say I have understated my case.

How do I support my contentions here?

I can only appeal to experience: I know too many hurting Catholics. And I will leave it to you, the reader, to judge whether my claim is wildly off the mark, or all too painfully true.

One of the difficulties in writing a book like this is that in contemporary American culture, and consequently within the Church, the notions of “hurt” or “woundedness” are sometimes exaggerated. No doubt, it is easy these days to “play the hurt card.”

That notwithstanding, today we have no other choice than to take it very seriously when a brother or sister in Christ claims to have been hurt in their experience of the Catholic Church. Genuine, Christlike love demands this of us. As founder of the Catholics Returning Home program, Sally Mews observes:

Most people who have left the Church have a “church story” within which lies a big bundle of hurts. They may cite a reason for leaving which isn’t the real or “root” cause. For example, some will say they have disagreements with some of the Church’s theological positions, but after further discussion, they’ll say they tried to arrange a wedding or funeral and the parish staff was unfriendly or uncooperative. Whatever the real reason for their leaving the Church, perception is reality.¹

Perception is, indeed, reality when it comes to someone who is hurting. Hurt is very much in the eye of the beholder, in the subjective and very intimate personal experience of the one who has been on the receiving end of an emotionally painful experience.

Not to be overlooked, by the way, is that, grammatically, “to hurt” can be used both transitively and intransitively; it can mean to cause pain, as well as to experience pain. My reflections here, as it turns out, cut both ways. When we suffer in the Church, because of the Church, we are on the receiving end; there is a member of the Church who causes that hurt, who hurts us. The obvious upshot, of course, is that we are sometimes not on the receiving end; rather, we ourselves, as members of the Church, can also do the hurting. I write with the acute awareness that I too have hurt brothers and sisters in the Church.

Riding the momentum of the Year of Mercy, I offer these reflections as a necessary examination of conscience, and a clarion call to Catholics to become healers of that sickly inner culture of our Church, so anemic in its capacity to love with genuine, Christlike love. We can contribute to this necessary transformation, purification, and renewal of the Church by praying for a robust influx of the supernatural virtue of charity in our lives and in our faith communities, and by committing ourselves to collaborate with that grace in new, intentional, and dynamic ways in our everyday lives.

That examination of conscience requires us to confront with honesty the reality that we are a Church of the hurting—in myriad ways. This is a truth which comes home to me every time I stand at the pulpit in church to preach: I look out on the faces staring back at me, and I know I am speaking to hurting individuals. We hurt first and foremost because life hurts: hurting is part of the human condition. And most would agree that mental and emotional pain is often much more challenging than the physical pain occasioned by serious illness or disability. When pain experienced in and through the Church is layered on to what life itself already deals us, the suffering can be all the more acute.

The hurts I have in mind might have been suffered at the hands of a priest, deacon, educator, fellow parishioner, or bishop. I have in mind especially those who, like me, have suffered the deeper, devastating kind of hurt occasioned by the betrayal of trust. The hurts are manifold and can come in varying degrees of intensity:

• You were chewed out by a priest once when you were an altar server.

• You were horribly embarrassed by a priest’s harsh reaction to something you said in confession, and you’ve never stepped inside a Catholic church since.

• You were abruptly let go from the Catholic grade school where you taught for many years—in a manner you found cold, spiteful, ungrateful, and degrading.

• You are a priest who feels emotionally exhausted from continually having to face the criticism, gossip, backbiting, and mean-spiritedness of a group of parishioners who simply do not like you.

• You were just received into the Catholic Church at Easter but are now dismayed by the lack of fellowship and indifference of your new “parish family.”

• You feel heartbroken because a priest you loved and idealized for years was shown to be living a double-life of sexual and financial misconduct.

• You’ve turned utterly cynical about the Church because of the scandal of clergy sexual abuse.

• You are a priest suffering the public humiliation of being removed from ministry while under investigation for what you know to be a false accusation of sexual misconduct after decades of faithful and selfless ministry.

• You are a Catholic nun engaged in ministry to the elderly and homebound, and no one ever seems to notice your dedication, let alone thank you for your service.

• You are a Latino Catholic who feels treated like a second-class citizen at your predominantly white suburban parish.

• You experience same-sex attraction and feel conflicted about the Church’s teaching on homosexuality.

• You are a priest who has developed a drinking problem, and you loathe yourself for it and are considering walking away from your ministry.

• You are a woman who has experienced a Church seemingly dominated by male clericalism.

• You are an elderly Catholic widow who never receives a visit from any parishioners, much less from your own parish priests.

• You are a bishop who feels you have no strength left to continue under the weight of loneliness and emotionally draining responsibilities.

• You were sexually abused by a member of the clergy as a child.

The wounds could be relatively superficial; the wounds might be deep and overwhelming. Some wounds heal quickly; others take a lifetime. And in our hearts we ask: Why does this happen? Why does it have to be this way?

The word “scandal” comes from the Latin scandalum, meaning a stumbling block, obstacle, or trap. In the Vulgate Latin version of Matthew 16:23, when Jesus rebukes Peter, saying, “Get behind me, Satan,” he adds, “you are to me a scandalum”—a stumbling block. The hurt inflicted upon us in our experience of the Church can be a stumbling block that trips us up, beats us down, knocks the wind out of us, disorients us, and can even shipwreck our Christian faith.

I have written this book because I, too, have been hurt in the Church. I’ve struggled with the agonizing bewilderment and the emotional and spiritual pain that can threaten to upend a journey of faith, rock our spiritual edifice to its very foundations, and bring us to the brink of spiritual collapse—even leading us to the unthinkable: to walk away from the Church and even to abandon the Christian faith altogether. And I have accompanied many of my brothers and sisters in the Faith through such experiences.

In reality, it doesn’t take much for even a small hurt to become a major stumbling block to someone’s Catholic faith. At the core of any degree of hurt occasioned in the Church is a kind of profound indignation—the gnawing sense that “this should not be happening!”

Our failures in love also cause scandal outside the Church. If the Church has ever succeeded in her mission, it was every time she was able—in the lives of faithful and committed Christians—to embody the self-sacrificing love exemplified by her Divine Spouse. What has always confounded her mission and identity—to the scorn and derision of non-Catholics—are the times her members have failed in that great task, the times we have failed to correspond to the mandate of our Savior: “Love one another as I have loved you.” At the heart of our unholiness and brokenness, we discover our all-too-frequent failures to respond to the world and to each other with radical Christlike love.

Is there hope for wounded Catholics? Certainly—and that ultimately is what this book is about. For Catholics who may have already walked away from the Church, this book is an invitation to reconsider. It’s also meant for Catholics who, because of a powerfully negative experience, find themselves on the brink of walking away or of losing their faith, or who find their struggles to make progress in the faith very difficult. It’s a book for those whose daily bread is doubt about the Church, recurring bitterness and inability to forgive, numbness and distaste for things spiritual, the loss of joy, tedium in slogging on in a ministry that now seems meaningless, the loss of affection for the Church.

For them and for anyone else who hurts in the Church or knows someone who hurts, I hope my book can serve to forge a way ahead and a way beyond the pain, to help readers understand—as I had to come to understand—that it is possible, in Christ and with the grace flowing from his Heart, to discover all of our hurts as a wellspring of graced living, and as a source of holiness and wholeness.

Part I explores in greater depth, although not exhaustively, some of the myriad ways we hurt in the Church today, beginning with my own personal story and weaving in the stories of others. It explores as well one of the most heinous forms of hurt—clerical sexual abuse—while also addressing the unique sufferings of priests, as well as the sufferings of those who feel alienated from the Church by her teachings, particularly those dealing with marriage and sexual morality.

Part II aims at offering wounded Catholics several avenues by which they cannot only enter more fully into a process of healing, but also discover anew the radiant and untarnished beauty of that same Church in which they have been so deeply hurt, and in which they can become—precisely because of the hurt they have endured—better human beings, and more committed and loving followers of Jesus Christ.

Part III turns our attention from our individual wounds to the wounds of the Mystical Body of Christ, the Church. Inspired by the teaching of Pope Francis, and still in the afterglow of the Year of Mercy, the final chapters invite us to a collective examination of conscience as to our living of radical, Christlike charity, and suggest some key actions and commitments that are essential in order to heal a hurting Church.