In the eighteenth chapter of Huckleberry Finn, Huck reports on one of his rare visits to church. “Everybody said it was a good sermon, and they all talked it over going home, and had such a powerful lot to say about faith and good works and free grace and preforeordestination, and I don’t know what all, that it did seem to me to be one of the roughest Sundays I had run across yet.”
Many Catholics suffer from “rough Sundays,” even if they do not hear about “preforeordestination” from the pulpit. They are forced to endure ad-libbed Masses, homilies without measurable content, and fellow parishioners who seem to have no clue about why they passed through the church door. And sometimes it is worse than that.
I had a call from a long-time friend who said he had stopped going to Mass, as had his wife and children. The problem was not lack of fidelity to the rubrics, poor homilies, or empty-headed neighbors in the pews. The problem was the ongoing priest scandal and, in his mind, the inability or unwillingness of most bishops to do anything about it.
My friend is not a know-nothing Catholic. He has subscribed to This Rock since the magazine’s inception. He has read books on theology and apologetics. He has attended seminars given by orthodox Catholic groups. He has been active in his parish and, for many years when younger, served as an altar boy.
He is not ignorant of the world’s ways. He works in a field related to law enforcement and daily sees the consequences of original sin. Not much surprises him when it comes to duplicity, cowardice, and venality. He is no innocent sequestered behind garden walls. He knows that he should be attending Mass and should be frequenting the sacraments. His problem is not intellectual. He is not attracted to some other religion. He simply has been turned off by his own.
Sometimes a strong believer is more easily injured than a weak believer. The latter has less of a stake in the Church, identifies less with Catholicism, sees religion as peripheral to his everyday life. To the strong believer, the faith is inseparable from his everyday life, as his arm is inseparable from his body. To do violence to the one is to do violence to the other. A failure at the top of the Church comes as a bigger blow to him. The systemic shock is felt more deeply.
I expect my friend and his family to return to the practice of the faith soon. His call to me was a sign that he knew what he had to do. I wonder how many other Catholics find themselves in his position. How many have been scandalized less by what some priests have done than by what many bishops have not done? How many have turned up their hands in despair rather than supplication?
Apologetics deals chiefly with the intellective aspects of the faith, but we need to keep in mind the affective aspects because sometimes it is the heart rather than the mind that estranges people from the Church.