Time for Church’s painful rebirth?

I  am still thinking about Pope Benedict’s visit to Portugal last month. He said some things I have never heard. He chose his words and it was obvious the pope is deeply troubled.

To begin with, it is clear that the Church is facing its worst crisis in centuries over the handling of the delicate matter of clerical sexual abuse — in addition to the inexorable wave of new movements and secularism that is emptying churches in many places.

When was the last time anyone heard lawyers preparing lawsuits against a pope, or Christians saying they were leaving the Church because they did not trust its leadership? Or a respected newspaper reporting that part of the Third Secret of Fatima revealed to the three Portuguese children Jacinta, Francisco and Lucia in 1917 was that the Church could collapse under a pile of scandals?

The present crisis has deeply hurt the pope and the Church. He told journalists he was going to Portugal to pray before Our Lady of Fatima. A Christian’s first and most important response to a crisis is to pray. Obviously, Pope Benedict has been praying a lot about the present situation, so why go to Fatima?

The apparitions of Fatima nearly a century ago, he told reporters, had far more profound meanings than the suffering of Pope John Paul II who interpreted his shooting in 1981 as having been foretold by the Blessed Virgin.

In the visions, the pope said, “an indication is given of realities involving the future of the Church, which are gradually taking shape and becoming evident. So it is true that, in addition to the moment indicated in the vision, there is mention of, there is seen, the need for a passion of the Church, which naturally is reflected in the person of the Pope, yet the Pope stands for the Church and thus it is sufferings of the Church that are announced”.

And then the pope added something very startling: the greatest threat to the Church is from within it, not from outside. The authorities have often given the impression that the Church’s problems were the handiwork of enemies out there.

Here are the Pope’s exact words: “As for the new things which we can find in [the Fatima] message today, there is also the fact that attacks on the pope and the Church come not only from without, but the sufferings of the Church come precisely from within the Church, from the sin existing within the Church.

“This too is something that we have always known, but today we are seeing it in a really terrifying way: that the greatest persecution of the Church comes not from her enemies without, but arises from sin within the Church, and that the Church thus has a deep need to relearn penance, to accept purification, to learn forgiveness on the one hand, but also the need for justice. Forgiveness does not replace justice. In a word, we need to relearn precisely this essential: conversion, prayer, penance and the theological virtues.”

There is no mistaking the meaning of these words: the Church is on a dangerous slide due to internal institutional failings. Is this not what some Christians have been saying, that the Church needs to change and become a listening, open and participatory community of forgiven sinners gathered around Christ?

The pope told pilgrims at the chapel of Apparitions in Fatima that in our time the faith in many places seems like a light in danger of being snuffed out for ever. And in his meeting with the bishops of Portugal, Benedict said that the faith cannot go anywhere “by means of simple speeches or moral appeals”, important as these are. “What attracts is, above all, the encounter with believing persons who, through their faith, draw others to the grace of Christ by bearing witness to him.”

That is exactly why the unfortunate incidents of clerical sexual abuse and other failings are a real blow to the Church, because they deeply undermine the credibility of its Christian witness.

The pope again told the bishops of Portugal: “As you see, the pope [and one could add the entire Church] needs to open himself ever more fully to the mystery of the Cross, embracing it as the one hope and the supreme way to gain and to gather in the Crucified One all his brothers and sisters in humanity.”

In other words, the time has come for the Church’s painful rebirth. Could we please start by opening up?