Bishop Barron: To the barricades

 I read Bishop Robert Barron’s Letter to a Suffering Church today. I mentioned earlier that it was the subject of the homily at my church last Sunday and will be again for the next four Sundays, and that they were handing out copies last week.

 This morning I got a nudge from one of the Dominican Associates. She said she earlier had bought copies for her group, and one of the members, a Dominican sister, gave it back to her and said it was “too dark and depressing.”

 That bad?

 I thought I had better read it quickly.

 I’d say dark, in spots, but not depressing unless perhaps to someone who hasn’t been paying attention and can be surprised.

 Yes, Barron does compare the current hierarchy to the Old Testament priest Eli, who ignored his sons’ reprobate misbehavior until they managed to lose the Ark of the Covenant in a war with the Philistines, and when he was told, he fell off his bench and – deservedly the O.T. and Barron imply – broke his neck. That might be considered dark.

 Barron divides the book into five chapters. The first is about how bad it was, with examples. And then came the case of Theodore McCarrick, and it got worse.

 But there are precedents, starting with the aforementioned Eli, and running through the New Testament. That is Chapter 2. Chapter 3, which might have plunged that Dominican sister into the Slough of Despond, considers which of the bad popes was the worst. Barron leans toward John XII, who died in mid-coitus “either from apoplexy or the murderous hand of an offended rival.” But he adds some of the other candidates.

  “The Church, from the very beginning and at every point in its development, has been marked to varying degrees by sin, scandal, stupidity, misbehavior, misfortune and wickedness,” he sums up.

  In Chapter 4 he arrives at the “stay or go” question, having provided plenty of evidence and some sympathy for readers choosing “go.” For the “yes” side, he offers “not a detailed theological treatise but rather a hymn, a poem, a celebration.” What follows is a listing of all the things regular Catholics have always liked about the Church, meaning there is no mention of canon law, dogmatic theology, papal bulls, Roman dicasteries or regulations for the reception of sacraments. It’s about sacraments and the communion/example of saints.

 If that is still worth fighting for, he leads the reader to a chapter on going to the barricades. Much of it is good, reminding readers of their rights and what they have been promised, but most of it won’t please the one-issue solvers of the current problems.

 In a neat move, he mentions that the Roman cultural order was collapsing on Europe in the Sixth Century, and St. Benedict founded the Benedictines; the clergy was “marked by corruption, laxity and worldliness” in the late 12^th-early 13^th Centuries, and Francis came along and founded the Franciscans; the Protestant Reformation brought about Inigo Loyola and the Jesuits, and:

 “Somewhere in the Church there is a new Benedict, a new Francis, a new Ignatius, a new Teresa of Kolkata, a new Dorothy Day. This is your time!”

 Waiting for the Holy Spirit to provide is not going to satisfy anyone who wants juridical reform of the installation of a trans-gendered pope. But Barron has history on his side when he treats hope as something more than waiting for Godot.

 Barron also will lose a few readers in the beginning, where he casts the devil as the playwright for what the Church is undergoing, but. But he blames the prelates and priests who learned their lines and acted out their moves; he doesn’t say the devil made them do it. And by the midpoint in the book, the devil theory doesn’t seem quite as medieval as when it is introduced.

 The Letter is a long letter but a short book. Barron wraps it up in 105 pages.

 I was not scandalized, but I knew the old stories and had been following the current one. The book probably will reassure Catholics who know only what they hear and have other sacks of rocks to carry in life.

 I was never much enthusiastic about the spotless Church of Gold, Smoke and Glory. In grade school, the pastor annually gave the school the day off on the parish saint’s feast day. One year, some third or fourth grader told him he was going to do that, and so he didn’t give us the day off just to teach us not to be presumptuous. I found the pastor unjust in punishing us all for one guilty kid, and I also sensed the sisters felt the same way. So I never swooned for popes or bishops. Or monsignori, for that matter. I say to them, put up or shut up.

That’s about where Barron ends up.