My heart breaks

I am taking a bit of a detour from my usual humorous posts about misleading depictions of Jesus to discuss something that I viewed this week that absolutely broke my heart. I heard on the radio today that a 90 year old former Catholic priest admitted to the molestation of several boys back in the 50's and 60's. He is currently serving time in jail for another conviction of the same nature. Later on today I read an article about another Catholic Cardinal who is apologizing for sexual conduct.

I know this is not a new issue, this is something that has been widely publicized for a number of years now. There is endless amounts of jokes told about Catholic priests and their sexual failures. When hearing these reports today I had a different perspective then I usually do. I wondered what this does to the image of Jesus. The church are Christ's representatives on this earth and many men have abused the trust that comes with the position and hurt people in unimaginable ways. That mistrust that exists for the church impacts people coming to Christ. It could also give people the impression that Jesus tolerates that kind of behaviour.

Evangelicals have in some ways participated in the criticizing of the Catholic Church and deemed it a purely Catholic issue. I don't want to speculate but I'm sure evangelical ministers have been guilty of the same offences. Sadly, being a member of clergy does not exempt you from having dark issues in life. Another reason evangelicals cannot simply ignore this issue is that many people make no distinction between Catholic and Evangelical. So when people hear of a Catholic Priest abusing a child they lose trust in all forms of Christianity and even Jesus Himself.

Now that we have ourselves in this big mess, how do we get out of it? Another unfortunate truth that as long as people are in the church there will be people making mistakes and people will be hurt. This does not mean we cannot take measures to help prevent this from happening. Over the past number of years many churches have began to implement a program called Plan to Protect. This program makes churches make policies and practices on the interaction of adults and children in ministry at the church. It is meant to help protect both the child and the adult.

The next obvious thing is prayer. In many ways the church is sick and in need to healing from Jesus. As Scripture promises, if we humble ourselves and pray Jesus will heal us. This healing also needs to take place for those hurt by the church. The prayer is that Jesus would reveal who He really is through us.