In Solidarity

This week has been such a difficult week for the church, I have cried a lot sometimes I wonder if I am taking things too personally, but I love Pope Francis so much that I hurt thinking he might be involved in a cover-up.  What will it mean to me as a Catholic if a man that I have placed in such a high pedestal, a man I’ve admired and gotten to know as my Spiritual Father is guilty of the accusations that so many without concrete evidence are desiring to see him pay.  I feel like it’s the Salem Witch Trials again and some without requiring a full investigation are ready to burn him at the stake.  This quick to judge mentality is what makes me most sad, I feel a great division in our church and it’s scary because I have always naively thought of the church as a utopian society that leads us to God.  This week, I have seen the imperfect humanity that makes up the church and I wonder if both God and imperfection can coexist? Can we have a future together?

Per Thomas Traherne:

“Love can forbear, love can forgive… but Love can never be reconciled to an unlovely object… He can never therefore be reconciled to sin, because sin itself is incapable of being altered; but He may be reconciled to your person, because that may be restored.”

From the moment we were created we have been courted by sin, all of us at times falling to its entrapment.  I think that’s why the narrative of Jesus drawing a line on the ground and saying, “he that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone,” resonates as deeply as it did two-thousand years ago.  We are all sinners, Pope Francis has continuously admitted that even a man of his position is still not without the stains of sin and in need of God’s mercy.  It is these genuine declarations that have attracted me to him and to think that he was living a double life, one where he didn’t practice what he preached seems to me like a grave and terrible contradiction -even betrayal.  I am a truth seeker and want to find the truth behind Archbishop Vigano’s accusations, but in doing so I don’t believe we prematurely need Pope Francis’ head on a platter.  He has the right to due process.

I have this weakness, sometimes I see God in people and make them into little gods.  Through my admiration, I have done this with Pope Francis.  He has become my face of God, the tangible presence of my Savior because I can be a materialist needing physicality to see God.  I still hope that he will speak and share his side of the story, because we truly need to hear it.  However, God has reminded me that He is bigger than the pope, bigger than sin.  God restores when things fall apart and while the Church seems to be hitting rock bottom, when one is at the bottom there’s only UP to go.

I have been praying for my pope and I hope the truth will come to light but I won’t unjustly condemn him, after all who am I to judge?