Hard questions and hurts, honestly

01Before anything else

If you were harmed

Some people drift away. Others got hurt: by a priest, by a parish, by family, by the news. If that’s you, your pain is real. You don’t have to pretend otherwise here.

Back in the courtyard, Peter has just locked eyes with the Friend he denied.

02The look

Peter failed too

“The Lord turned and looked at Peter. Then Peter remembered the Lord’s word, how he said to him, ‘Before the rooster crows you will deny me three times.’ He went out, and wept bitterly.”

The Catechism calls that moment “Jesus’ look of infinite mercy,” and it breaks Peter; he weeps.⁷

The guy who’d lead the Church started by failing in the worst way, at the worst moment.

Which raises the hardest question of all. If people in the Church can fail that badly, how can anyone call it holy?

03The honest answer

A holy Church with sinners in it

The Church doesn’t hide this. She says: “All members of the Church, including her ministers, must acknowledge that they are sinners.” She calls herself “at once holy and always in need of purification.”¹

The Catechism is blunt: priests aren’t protected from “human weaknesses, the spirit of domination, error, even sin.” Some of what they do leaves marks that have nothing to do with the Gospel.⁸

And it says what a priest is supposed to be: someone who, like Christ, makes himself “the least and the servant of all.” When that doesn’t happen, it’s a betrayal.⁹

Even so, it’s Christ who acts in the sacraments, and a bad priest can’t stop Him.²

Some people didn’t leave over a person. They left over a question nobody would answer.

04The questions

“Will you also go away?”

Those questions deserve a real conversation, not a bumper sticker. Read what the Church actually teaches in the Catechism, and talk it through with a priest. If your hurt involves one priest or parish, you’re totally free to go to a different one.

Once, after a hard teaching, lots of Jesus’ followers “went back and walked no more with him.”¹⁰ He turns to the Twelve and asks if they want to leave too.¹¹

“We have come to believe and know that you are the Christ, the Son of the living God.’”

Peter said that before he failed. What happens after he fails is the real ending.

05The ending

A second fire

After the Resurrection, the disciples drag their boat in after a long night of fishing and find “a fire of coals there, with fish and bread laid on it.”¹³ Jesus says: “Come and eat breakfast!” Breakfast first.¹⁴

Another charcoal fire. He feeds Peter before He asks him anything.

“He said to him the third time, ‘Simon, son of Jonah, do you have affection for me?’ Peter was grieved because he asked him the third time, ‘Do you have affection for me?’ He said to him, ‘Lord, you know everything. You know that I have affection for you.’ Jesus said to him, ‘Feed my sheep.”

Three denials, then three questions: do you love Me?¹⁵ The Catechism calls Peter’s answer “a threefold affirmation of love.”⁷

Peter wasn’t asked to pretend nothing happened. He was asked one question. Jesus is still asking it.