BIBLE AND SIN / The Church as New Israel

The current crisis in the Catholic church over the abuse of children in parishes and schools across North American and Europe has been very difficult for the lay people to come to grips with. In my own case, I happened to have been living in Boston when the stories began to surface and I can testify that the effects were catastrophic. Happily in my present Diocese, the Bishop has been exemplary and the problems within local parishes have been minimized, but hardly eliminated. The question is, of course, what do we make of persons put in such positions of authority and responsibility behaving in the way they did? Not just priests who abused, but those in supervisory roles (such as Cardinal Law in Boston) choosing to look the other way.

What compounds the problem in the eyes of many is the nature of the sin. As Julián Carrón has nicely framed the matter – what amount of punishment could ever make up for the damage that has been done? Is there anything that could satisfy our thirst for justice? There is much that could be said about this angle of the problem and Fr. Carrón has done an exemplary job in calling the church to wrestle with this problem in light of the Christological mystery. In what follows, I would like to pursue a slightly different tack and ask what we are to make of this scandalous behavior in light of the promises Christ has made to his church. And to begin, let us turn to the Bible.

The tragedy of human sin is the way in which its effects linger over time. And though it is certainly true that the results of the current crisis will be with us for sometime to come, it is salutary to note that it has Biblical precedents. Last Advent, while preparing for a parish Bible-study, I was reading Fr. Raymond Brown’s fine book, A Coming Christ in Advent.His discussion of the Gospels began with a detailed consideration of the genealogy of Jesus that sits affront the opening of Matthew. The first third of this text lists the patriarchs who preceded King David while the remainder of the texts concerns the lineage of this esteemed King.

Of the fourteen kings that Matthew lists between David and the onset of the deportation to Babylon (587 BC), only two could be considered faithful to the standards of their office. The rest, Brown notes, “were an odd assortment of idolaters, murderers, incompetents, power-seekers, and harem wastrels.”

When my students pore over these texts from the Old Testament they often ask in amazement what we are to make of this odd list of characters? Should we focus our gaze on just the good guys in this list? David, Hezekiah and Josiah represent a rather high level of moral achievement and present the reader with many things to admire and mime. (Though, truth be told, David’s own life has numerous internal contradictions and is often a better witness to the power of divine forgiveness than sustained human virtue.) But if we chose only to study the saints, what do we make of the extended treatment the Bible gives of the sinners?

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