Carlo Carretto - on the church.

I read this today and it resonated so much with me I thought I would type it into my blog.

Here is the mystery of the Church of Christ, a true, impenetrable mystery.

She has the power to give me holiness, yest she is made up, all the way through, of sinners - and what sinners!

She has the omnipotent and invincible faith to renew the Eucharist, yet she is made up of weak men groping in the darkness and fighting daily against the temptation of losing their faith.

She carries a message of pure transparence, yet she is incarnate in a mess of dirt, which is the dirt of the world.

She speaks of the sweetness of the Master, of his nonviolence, yet in history she has sent armies to disembowel infidels and to torture heretics.

She carries a message of evangelical poverty, yet she often seek gifts and alliances with the powerful.

We have only to read the Inquisition trial of St. Joan of Arc to convince ourselves that Stalin was not the first to falsify charges and corrupt judges.

We have only to consider what the innocent Galileo was made to sign under threats to be convinced that the...personnel of the Church, although they make up the Church, are often evil and fallible personnel, capable of making errors as great as the earth's path around the sun.
It is useless to want anything else from the Church except the mystery of infallibility and fallibility, sanctity and sin, courage and weakness, credibility and the lack of it.

People who are dreaming of something different from this reality are simply wasting time and keep going back to the beginning again. Moreover they show they have not understood humankind.

Because that is human, just as the Church shows us to be, in our wickedness and, at the same time, in our invincible courage, which faith in Christ has give n us, and the love of Christ has us live.

- From 'The God who Comes' by Carlo Carretto