whatever your situation in life, know that I am praying for you—and asking God to touch your heart and bring you his peace through these pages.
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
