Boccaccio’s Jew

This week’s post on the Church by Arturo Vasquez is a "reproduc[tion]... in its entirety" of a post by Leon J. Podles — Boccacio on the Church — and I deem it meet, right, and salutary to offer the same:

A Jew decides to go to Rome to see what the center of the Church was like. He investigated the papal court. He realized that:

“Not only did they indulge in normal lust but without the last restraint of remorse or shame even in sodomy and to such an extent that the influence of whores and minions was of no little importance in currying favor. Various other attributes he found them to possess besides lechery. They were gluttons, swillers guzzlers in general and devoted to their bellies like brute beasts. Investigating further he saw they were all avaricious and greedy for money.”

People have asked me how I can remain a Catholic after I discovered what was going on in the clergy. Well, the Jew, after seeing the corruption of the papal court tells a Christian:

“For all I can judge it seems to me your Shepherd and consequently everyone else with him do their utmost, exercise every care, wit and art at their disposal to ruin the Christian faith entirely and ban it altogether from the world, instead of striving to be its foundation and mainstay. Yet when I notice that their aim is not fulfilled, but that your religion continually grows and becomes more bright and clear, it seems to be very evident that the Holy Spirit is its foundation and support, so it must be the truest and holiest of all faiths.”

So the Jew becomes a Catholic.

A lawyer who represented abuse victims and saw the depths of corruption in the Church nonetheless became a Catholic. Like Boccaccio’s Jew, he decided that God must be at work in a Church that survives the determined efforts of the clergy to poison it.

"Abuse in the Catholic Church" was the talk of the town the year she received me, an unworthy sinner, and to be honest, I never gave the matter any thought. It was not only that personal failings of priests or even the hierarchy have no bearing whatsoever on the eternal truths of the religion they profess, I also suspected that the hysteria of 2002 had far more to do with American litigiousness than it did with sacerdotal pederasty.