UNITED STATES
Crux
Kathryn Jean Lopez April 24, 2017
CRUX CONTRIBUTOR
In his new book ‘Hurting in the Church: A Way Forward for Wounded Catholics,’ Father Thomas Berg says he wants priests to listen to the experiences of hurting Catholics. He says the book is an invitation to a kind of Church-wide self-examination: Where have we failed in charity? Why is our day-to-day, interpersonal living of that Christ-like gift of self, agape-love, so languid at times, so passive, so anemic?
“If the Church has ever succeeded in her mission, it was every time she was able – in the lives of faithful and committed Christians – to embody the self-sacrificing love exemplified by her Divine Spouse,” Father Thomas Berg writes in his new book Hurting in the Church: A Way Forward for Wounded Catholics.
What many know of the Church today, however, “are the times her members have failed in that great task, the times we have failed to correspond to the mandate of our Savior” to love one another “as I have loved you.”
He writes as a former member of the Legionaries of Christ, who, among other things, asks “forgiveness for the ways in which, in my ignorance, I myself contributed to propagating the cult of personality surrounding [Marcial] Maciel [founder of the order], and to perpetuating the web of deceptions in which we were all trapped.
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