Lord, have mercy

I don't know much about life in a mega-church, but there have been moments when I've thought it would be grand to worship God with ten thousand others, to hear some Mormon Tabernacle-like Choir, to listen to astounding preaching, and to leave something stadium-sized, thrilled by the spectacle.

There are no megas anywhere close, so I don't have the choice. But if there were, I think I'd pass. Churches pass momentum one to another with regularity around here anyway. For a decade or so, Cottonwood Heights will put on an addition or two to accommodate growing crowds; then, once the preacher takes a call out east, Third Church will have the pastor who lights 'em up, packs 'em in, and gets the raves. 

I can imagine how grievous it was for Willow Creek, in Chicago, to suffer the accusations against their mega-pastor, Bill Hybels. It was, after all, his preaching that built that sprawling campus. 

Somewhere in the ancient past, I may well have met Bill Hybels, not as one of America's most famous pastors, but during his first year of college, when the two of us went to the same school. That he chased women has to be a horror to thousands of Willow Creek parishioners. That he did it persistently and often, make it worse. That he used his righteous stature is a horror. 

But somehow--and I'm not in any way exonerating him--his sins don't touch the scale of what a Pennsylvania grand jury reported last week: 300 priests abused children, and just as many, maybe more, let the abuse go, protecting their own, the abusers.

Sometimes I envy Roman Catholics too. Sometimes I wish my own tradition was more sacramental, less preachy. Sometimes I am convinced evangelicals (one of whom I am) are destroying their witness by deadly self-righteousness. There are times I walk into a Catholic church and am awed, shushed by magnanimous beauty. 

Just up the hill from where I'm sitting stands the most beautiful church in the county, an awesome church largely penniless Luxumbougian Catholics determined to build when they came to the region, choosing the highest hill in the whole county. Those pioneers emptied their pockets to put up the stones of St. Mary's Roman Catholic Church because, traditionally at least, they saw--and still see--the church as the means of grace, the place where holy men keep the actual body and blood of our Lord.

It's a special piety that, I suppose by upbringing, I don't share. A Protestant pastor isn't really a means of grace. Bill Hybels was a great preacher, but no one in his mammoth congregation considered him the only one divinely chosen to give people the spiritual nourishment worship should bring.

A new grand jury report claims that over 300 Pennsylvania priests were guilty of criminal abuse of children.

Priests were raping little boys and girls, and the men of God who were responsible for them not only did nothing; they hid it all. For decades. Monsignors, auxiliary bishops, bishops, archbishops, cardinals have mostly been protected; many, including some named in this report, have been promoted.

It's impossible for me to understand all of that, but I have no doubt it would be even more difficult to have to read that paragraph if I were Roman Catholic. Three hundred priests raped children. More kept it quiet.

All of us who confess the name of Jesus suffer at the truth that grand jury discovered. But I sense in the despairing words of my own Catholic friends that, for them even more than me, the news from Philadelphia is devastation that goes well beyond words. 

For all of those victims, and especially the children, I will pray.  Lord, have mercy.