Our Lord saw fit to entrust his Church to human beings, and perfection is not one of our attributes. My experience of people who want perfection in a pastor is that they go from parish to parish, thinking for a while that Fr X is The One, then experiencing "betrayal" and disillusion before they move on. Some people also go from denomination to denomination, in the same spirit. It's the essence of Protestantism, really. The worst situation is when Fr X is weak and needy and allows such people to become an inner clique with inappropriate influence in the parish.Another visitor comments,One advantage of a one-parish town is that the parishioners are loyal to the parish, first of all. The current pastor may have some uncongenial ways, but someday he will be gone and they will still be there at St Stephen's, hoping for better times. And ideally, working to make things better. A parish is not a one-man band.
I have known a lot of Catholics and non-Catholics in my life, some bad, some good, some holy. Bad people are not always easy to spot. Good people are sometimes difficult to identify, too. Holiness on the other hand is an altogether different animal. False holiness can sometimes trick people but true holiness is unmistakable. It is difficult to describe but once you have met an heroically holy person, you know what it looks like and you never forget it. Truly holy people have an air of happiness, peace, courage, humility and some je ne sais quoi that is incredible and otherworldly. They foster a desire to become more holy yourself.When I've been tempted to dwell a little too much on the latest kerfuffle at the Vatican -- likely misunderstood and misreported in any case -- I remind myself that, like my local parish and diocese, the important thing is to focus on the day-to-day effort.I have found that truly holy people attract and encourage other holy people and that if someone finds a truly holy person repugnant, there is usually some jealousy or darkness of their own heart involved. There are all kinds of people in the Church and out of it that pose as holy, think of themselves as holy, and want to point out those who are not holy enough. Unfortunately, those folks cause many good people to lose hope and/or faith and sometimes prevent otherwise curious people from joining the Church. Heroic holiness is not impossible, we are all called to it.
We must look for it, we must value it and we must strive to attain it ourselves. If we are doing that, I think we would find we are too busy fixing ourselves so that we do not have time to be fixing our less holy brethren. What does this have to do with your blog? The great exhortation of Our Lady of Atonement folks in their advertising was “Experience the beauty of Holiness.” Yes, holiness is beautiful. The ugliness of false holiness is most clearly illuminated when seen side-by-side with real, true holiness. Perhaps this is why holier-than-thou displays are so repugnant to all sides of the equation, because truth = holiness and holiness = truth.
