Yesterday's Post

brought some unhappy reaction, and I want to clarify one or two things. First, I'm not endorsing gay conduct. On the other hand, no one since the Saviour and His Mother has been without sin. The Church deals with sin in several ways, in this life and the next. Exactly what happens to Christians who commit sexual sins, combine that with scandal, and then repent in however imperfect a way is something we don't know in this life. St Augustine fathered a child out of wedlock, his repentance from that and other sins appears to have been a matter of struggle throughout his life, yet the Church made him a saint, which as I understand it means that the Church is as certain as it can be that he's in heaven.

Last year I read a fasincating life of Christ by a peculiar Catholic figure, a Dominican priest named Raymond Leopold Bruckberger. I appreciate good writing, and I learned as much as I could about him via web searches. Here's part of an obituary:

He was both a revolutionary and a traditionalist, an iconoclast and a devoted believer. It must be added that he was at one and the same time a legendary, heroic figure and a ridiculous exhibitionist. . . . when the population of Paris first rose against the Germans on 19 August 1944, [he] became a familiar sight, cycling in his white Dominican robes which soon became black with smoke and dirt, going from one site of fighting to another, carrying out his missions as chaplain. . . . he tried to appease some of the more ferocious aspects of the settlement of accounts that was an inevitable part of the Liberation. Notably, when his old friend Darnand was condemned to death by the High Court of Paris in 1945, he attended him in his cell at Fresnes every morning until the day of his execution. . . . There were many quarrels: with the Pope over the Second Vatican Council, for example. There were many scandals, notably the presence of an American mistress named Barbara, or his holiday on the Greek islands with Albert Camus in 1958, when he dressed as a check-shirted cowboy. For some he became known as "the good-time monk".

I'm not endorsing mistresses, I'm not endorsing gay conduct. I'm not endorsing scandal. On the other hand, none of us is without sin, and even people of strong faith clearly have complex lives. It seems to me that one point of the Gospels is that we can't have certainty about how sin, repentance, and forgiveness operate. If we're forgiven when we repent, then why is there Purgatory? Did St Augustine spend time there? Is Bruckberger there, in hell, or in heaven? I have no idea. I have my own struggles; I do my best; I can't judge; I've made my own decision to become a Catholic, and one point I was making yesterday was that those who want to remain Protestant are buying into a whole bargain, one that overall I like less and less.