Okay,
Granted, Faith is ever tempted and tested, as we know “the whole world is temptation.” However, it ceases to be productive or beneficial when we become accustomed or apathetic to “crisis.” Just because crisis is perpetual never means it is something to be accepted, as in the case of scandals or scandalous behaviour especially. The soldier who ceases to be alarmed during emergency because he has been bombarded with them is not necessarily improved ; in fact, his apathy can become a threat to himself and his comrades, so soldiers are constantly drilled and alarmed, and trained into a perpetual state of readiness. Let me conclude here by saying that the crisis in the Church is part real, part manufactured ; nonetheless, we fail to learn from it if we accept it as being fate or part and parcel with the Church’s being.
Furthermore, this idea reminds me of the “perpetual war theory,” wherein power is retained and tends to increase and centralize when society is faced with a looming threat or enemy, real or imagined. This idea, formulated after WWII (in my home country of Canada, by a Toronto professor if I recall) is most dangerous : it undoubtedly is part of the reason the United States is constantly subjected to a perpetual sense of crises : from the Red Threat and threat of Nuclear Holocaust, to the War on Drugs, Global Warming and the War on Terror : all of these “threats” have ever been used or abused by government to concentrate powers or special privileges into the hands of government, and out of the hands of citizens. One great temptation faced by government is the temptation to distract the population with threats and horrors, thus shifting attention and criticism away from policy and administration to something the administration can control or combat, and thereby justify its present existence. So a national debt can, for example, over a signle generation, explode at ridiculous rates of increase without being checked or balanced, and government can spend itself into oblivion so long as there is some existential “threat” justifying it and distracting attention away from it…
To return to context, if we do not treat the current sex scandals as a genuine crisis, or the weakening of the Faith around the world (demonstrated by the loss of social morals, reflected in laws and legal rulings) then we risk accepting it, and being doomed to be subjected to its natural -and very real- consequences : in our nations, in our communities, in our families and in our own, personal daily lives.
As ever, we should hack at the root of problems, and not be distracted by the dizzying array of problems, which all stem from a common root or source ; namely, sin.
