Now Is the Acceptable Time

Every November during the month of the dead, as the year drew to its close with the feast of Christ the King, my childhood pastor gave the same sermon.  The details would vary, but the gist was as follows.—

Many Christians, including many Catholics, spend time and energy on the fruitless question of when Christ will come again—fruitless, because Christ promised us that no one would know the day or the hour (a fact to which the many false prophesies of the end times testify.  Why, then, does Church devote readings to the end of the world?  Because we will all witness the end of the world: if not the end described in Revelations, the (for us) equally significant individual ends of our lives.  Christ will come again to judge the living and the dead; of more concern to us should be the fact that he will particularly judge each of us.

—That was the gist of Father’s annual homily.  He always managed to be edifying rather than terrifying, and there would be an uptick of confessions the following couple of weeks.

The homily stuck with me, through college and after.  And it came to mind, late one Saturday night some couple weeks ago, when I came to the end of Archbishop Viganò’s explosive “testimony.”  A great deal of commentary has been spent on the accuracy of the archbishop’s accusations: on how the factual details might be verified or falsified, and on what his motivations might be if they are not what he states in the letter (a desire to cleanse the church, and to put his own soul right before death).

But that Saturday night, on first reading the document, I was struck more by the tone of its conclusion.  After strong words calling for the resignation of those who “covered up McCarrick’s criminal behavior,” Viganò calls for “[a] time of conversion and penance” and for the reporting of all cases of abuse “to the media and civil authorities;” he even calls for the pope’s resignation.  Throughout the jeremiad, however, there are words of hope.  He invokes St. John Paul II’s famous words: Do not be afraid; he quotes St. Ambrose to the effect that “the Church is ‘immaculata ex maculatis.’”  He concludes as follows (emphasis in the original).

Read the rest at the Register.