The real enemy

It's Friday afternoon. I procrastinated with my latest proposal assignment, and so instead of being finished at 5:00 PM, I'll need to continue working for two hours or so. Or three, if I continue to waste time writing about my random thoughts and observations, rather than about IT quality assurance.

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Now it's Saturday morning, and my proposal assignment is in the red team's hands. My biggest problem now is the ever-growing pile of forms and paper that the first week of school always produces. I'm ignoring it for now. Maybe it'll go away.

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I took a walk after some morning housework and miscellaneous tasks, not including the paperwork, which sadly remains, having failed to deal with itself. Hope springs eternal. Anyway, I listened to music, as I often do.

In 1992, Sinead O'Connor, appearing as the musical guest on "Saturday Night Live," performed Bob Marley's "War." At the end of the song, she held up a photo of Pope John Paul II, said "Fight the real enemy," and tore the photo in half. I was actually watching the show at the time, and remember feeling vague shock, but I didn't think it was a big deal otherwise. Then, like now, pop stars tended to do and say shocking things. But of course, it was a huge, controversial, scandalous big deal. Sinead O'Connor was vilified, for years afterward. Even Madonna took a shot at her.

Hindsight is always 20-20, isn't it? When the first revelations of sex abuse in the Catholic church were made public in 2002, certain priests and bishops were exposed and punished, but I don't remember anyone even suggesting that the Pope (John Paul II or any other Pope) might bear some responsibility. Of course, I wasn't really a practicing Catholic at that time, so I wasn't paying much attention. I was a full-time working mother of an infant. I wasn't paying much attention to anything.

Now the scandal has re-emerged, and this time, it seems to go all the way to the top. Cardinal McCarrick, once-beloved Cardinal-Archbishop of Washington, resigned from the College of Cardinals amid revelations of his apparently habitual sexual misconduct; and his successor Cardinal Wuerl is accused (probably correctly) of covering up hideous abuse by priests when he was a bishop in Pittsburgh. And of course, Pope Francis has been accused of protecting abusive priests when he was a bishop in Argentina.

I returned to the Church, after a long absence, in 2010. I've been a faithful Catholic since then. The horrible crimes of priests and bishops and maybe even Popes (I can't have been the only person who wondered if Pope Benedict's resignation had something to do with with misconduct by priests under his supervision when he was a bishop in Germany), though horrifying and heartbreaking, have not shaken my faith. The Church is a hospital for sinners, not a museum for saints, and priests are sinners like the rest of us. And the sins of priests don't alter the truth of the Church's teaching, not one bit. But something has to change. The Church has to suffer now, probably for a long time. Priests and bishops will have to stand trial, and some will probably go to prison. Cardinal Wuerl should certainly resign, and maybe Pope Francis should, too. And I love Pope Francis. It's a sad and confusing time to be a Catholic.

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The Sinead song that made me think of her SNL performance was "The Emperor's New Clothes." And that's a whole other subject, for a whole other day. The ground beneath our feet is no longer solid, if it ever was. But I did fight my way through the pile of paperwork, including enrollment forms for my eighth grader's last year of religious education. Shit's going to get real, but we already know how the story ends. The gates of Hell will not prevail.