Dealing with tests of faith

Excellent Catholic blogger Amy Welborn wrote an outstanding post addressing an L.A. Times column by one of its former religion reporters, William Lobdell, who says that covering the Catholic Church during the abuse scandal helped lead to his decision to drop out of RCIA. Ultimately, he writes that the scandal, plus other tough faith questions that he couldn't answer, led him to pretty much lose his faith altogether.

The questions that I thought I had come to peace with started to bubble up again. Why do bad things happen to good people? Why does God get credit for answered prayers but no blame for unanswered ones? Why do we believe in the miraculous healing power of God when he's never been able to regenerate a limb or heal a severed spinal chord?

. . . My soul, for lack of a better term, had lost faith long ago — probably around the time I stopped going to church. My brain, which had been in denial, had finally caught up.Clearly, I saw now that belief in God, no matter how grounded, requires at some point a leap of faith. Either you have the gift of faith or you don't. It's not a choice. It can't be willed into existence. And there's no faking it if you're honest about the state of your soul.

These are questions all of us have struggled with. That is one reason why Welborn's responses are appreciated. Among them:

(H)is justifiable anguish and shock (and God help us when we are not anguished and shocked by these things) could be shared by any Christian during any era, any place. Christianity has never been pure in the human sense, always been a difficult, challenging mix of mostly sinners and a few saints. . . . For years, I had online conversations with a friend about the current scandals. I told him over and over that I really didn't understand how the current scandals could be a deal-breaker for one's Catholic faith, and say, the papal history of the 10th century or the bad Renaissance popes was not. Or, as discussed in comments below, in my Ursulines in Montana post, the way that clergy, especially bishops, sometimes treated founders of new religious orders of women from the post-Reformation era on. Or how the Franciscans battled each other for their legacy in the middle ages.

and

(F)aith is hard. Does anyone really think that faith is easy in the face of the innocent suffering of a child? Or the ravages of Alzheimer's? Or the existence of evil? Or, as we're talking about here, the ironies, paradoxes and counter-witness of the Church?

and

But in the end (at least to me) what is even harder than faith is making sense of reality without God and making sense of what happened 2,000 years ago in Jerusalem, period. It is too late at night for me to ramble on about this (thankfully), but simply put - one's faith in Jesus Christ is faith in Jesus Christ. It is more than a challenge, because that whole "Jesus Christ" thing involves this other thing called "Incarnation" which means that, nonsensically, the God became human as a baby, grew up, and was executed by those he had created out of love. The whole thing is almost impossible from the start, and once you throw in the rest of the billions of us, with all of our sins and blindess, it gets crazier still. And even more painful because of how many of us (all of us, perhaps?) use God as a cover for our sins.

There is a lot more to delve into on the original post, and there is an excellent discussion in the comment box. I know several people who left the Catholic Church after the scandals broke. I see their disappointment, but never understood how that could be seen as the reason to just abandon the Catholic Church altogether. To me, it always seemed a weak argument. I think that the doubts of faith were in play long before and the scandals gave them an "out," a dealbreaker as Welborn says.

As she says, faith is hard. Our goal is heaven, not to have a comfortable life here. And an understanding of redemptive suffering is key. Witness the struggle between scientism (which says everything must be proved by science to be real) and faith these days. But having faith in God, in Christ, is not a weakness. I know a man who has been in a hospital for the past year because of skin sores resulting from years of paralysis done by a drunk driver in 1989. Yet you talk to him and, while he is often frustrated by his condition and rightfully has many questions about why this happened to him, he still firmly believes that God is Love. He is firmly against embryonic stem-cell research to cure his condition, too. Is he weak for holding on to his faith and letting his trials strengthen his faith? Why doesn't he just abandon his faith since it hasn't cured him physically (as Lobdell asks)?