Recently I became aware of the case of John Feit, a former priest credibly suspected of a rape and murder in Texas in 1960. Feit had, shortly before, assaulted another young woman, and much evidence points to his guilt in the second assault and murder.

Although I'd lived through the depressing revelations of the past couple decades of clerical crimes, for some reason this case unsettled me more than they had. Perhaps because it occurred when (so it seemed) the Church was more disciplined and aware of her divine origin and mission, not only the crime itself but the apparent complicity of parish and diocesan officials in hushing it up gave me a momentary crisis of faith.

But next minute I recovered as I reflected that a real robust Catholicism would not be surprised at this. Bishops and priests guilty of serious crimes? “I do not think there are many among bishops that will be saved, but many more that perish”—words of St. John Chrysostom, Father and Doctor of the Church, a bishop himself. It is only a watered-down Catholicism that will be disturbed by such misdeeds, a faith too timid to face the ugliness of human sin, and which perhaps assumes universal salvation because hell and damnation are not nice topics and best avoided. But this is not the robust Faith of the Church, a Faith that teaches that human acts matter, that they can have eternal significance, and that our destiny is either heaven or hell.

The kind of uncritical reverence of the clergy that is unduly disturbed by clerical sin became common in the Church only after the Council of Trent. A biographer of St. Anthony of Padua, writing in the 1930s, noted that

It is worth remembering that the policy of silence within the Church concerning abuses in the Church is purely of post-Reformation origin. What would be noticed to-day with averted gaze and a finger on the lips would be shouted about by Anthony to the four winds of Heaven. The policy of silence has introduced into the ecclesiastical atmosphere an occasional touch of unreality perhaps not wholly to the benefit of religion.

The faith of the patristic and medieval Church was strong enough that Dante could place more than one pope in hell. Nor is Holy Scripture reticent about the crimes of those dedicated to God's service, such as the sons of Eli in the Old Testament, priests who stole from the offerings made to the Lord and "lay with the women who served at the entrance of the tent of meeting." And like many bishops of today, their father Eli was guilty of doing nothing effective to stop them. Instead God himself intervened, and Eli was told by a prophet that his sons would be killed on account of their crimes.

Most of us know people who have lost their faith or stopped practicing because of the clergy sex scandals. This is understandable, but ironic in that by losing their faith they no longer see the possibility of any effective justice being brought to those erring priests or bishops. But a Catholicism as strong as that of our ancestors has no difficulty acknowledging both the reality of clerical sin and the terrible punishment that awaits those sinners who fail to repent.

The wickedness and stupidity, the temporizing and compromising, all of which mark the Church in every age, are no argument against her divine origin. They are an unfortunate, if constant, accompaniment of our journey toward an eternity of bliss or horror. As the Austrian Catholic Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn wrote in the early 1950s:

To myself as to every sensitive Catholic the Church, of course, is also a cross, not only a means to salvation but also a burden and an occasion for suffering. She consists, after all, of fallen human beings and her hierarchic stratification as a Church Militant is by no means the same as that of the Church Triumphant. Hence also the frescoes in old churches showing popes, emperors, priests, dukes, monks and nuns roasting in the fires of hell.

The Quicumque vult or Creed of St. Athanasius concludes, “Those who have done good will go into eternal life, those who have done evil into eternal fire.” That those who have done evil sometimes hold high office in the Church was no surprise to our ancestors, possessors of a more robust faith than most of us have today. This is not to say, of course, that we should take delight over the impending punishment of unrepentant sinners. Rather we should implore the Divine Majesty for mercy—for them as well as for ourselves—while there is yet time.