Free The Silence We Keep: A Nun's View of the Catholic Priest Scandal by Karol Jackowski

tortured, and condemned mystics forheresy and women mystics for witchcraft, even burning at the stake women who heard “voices from God,” like Joan of Arc. Anyone who hears and obeys exclusively the voice of God is asking for trouble in the Catholic Church. These are lives not dedicated in holy obedience to the voice of the Church Fathers, but dedicated in holy obedience to the voice of God heard in prayer and in one another, a divine voice we’ve been taught to mistrust and keep silent.
    While crime and corruption entered the priesthood in the Middle Ages, so, too, did mysticism. Obedient to the voice and vision of God alone, mystics have always been a powerful influence in the Catholic Church. The soul of religion was kept sacred in their hands. It’s the lives of those touched by God that saved the soul of Catholicism in the Middle Ages. And it’s the lives of those touched by God through this scandal that continue to save the soul of Catholicism. The Catholic Church always was and always will be the whole people of God, faithful Catholics in and out of the pew who hold firm to what they know in faith and prayer to be true.
    Even as the priesthood of scandalous clerics continues to self-destruct as it did in the Middle Ages, the priesthood of the people—good priests and sisters among them—will continue to be drawn by the voice of God in the Gospels, in prayer, and in one another, the Christian community. The darkness we know in Catholicism today bears all the divine power of a rebirth in mysticism, the likes of which we haven’t seen since the Middle Ages. Taking religion back into our own holy hands is the first step. Moving closer to God in our hearts, our homes, and our families is all it takes for a rebirth of mysticism. Priestly people have always saved the soul of Holy Mother Church. That’s another unbroken tradition revealed throughout the history of the Catholic Church, and never more clearly than when we look at what’s happening in the priesthood now.

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Priesthood Now
    G IVEN ALL THAT HAPPENED in the Middle Ages (and not just what made it into history books), the fact that there still is a Catholic priesthood is proof in my mind of the hidden presence of God in the church and the survival of the Jesus Movement. It’s a miracle. And we are watching it all fold and unfold right before our eyes. Something so painfully right appears to be emerging in the Catholic Church from all of its old infallible wrongs. Only a loving God could write so straight with such intrinsically crooked lines. What we’re seeing today in the priesthood are those wheels of the gods that grind exceedingly slow, but exceedingly fine, giving us a new hope that the end of the wrong is in sight. This appears to me to be the end of Catholic priesthood as we’ve known it. All around us the high and the mighty of business and industry are being brought down by their own deadly sins, and Church Fathers appear to be lined up closely behind them.
    For as much as we’d like to cling to divine comfort in knowing that priesthood today is nowhere as bad as it was in the Middle Ages, I’m not sure that’s true. I felt I was in the Dark Ages when I read on the gossip page of the New York Post ,
WHICH American cardinal recently disclosed to insiders a confidential letter he received from a bishop urging the cardinal to resign for the good of the church? The cardinal is being urged to quit before his much-gossiped-about homosexual indiscretions are uncovered by the media….WHICH ranking priest of a major diocese predicted over a boozy dinner the other night that if the media outs this particular cardinal, “then the dominoes will really start to fall?” 1
    Even though gossip is not always true, reading gossip about the Church Fathers in the New York Post is reminiscent of the darkest ages of Catholicism. But this is Holy Mother Church they’re talking about “over a boozy dinner,” not some clerical sex scandal from the tenth