Ross McCullough:
Sr. Perpetua,
Your note reminds me of the story about the old cardinal and patristics scholar who died in the house of a prostitute, with a large sum of money in his wallet. Everybody said he was a saintly man, and here he is discovered in a particular indelicacy. The defense came quickly: he had a ministry to the outcast; he often brought them money; and after all he was discovered clothed on a sofa, hardly disreputable.
Was he there for her body or her soul? What an exact ambiguity for the Church! So easy to accuse him of corruption; so easy to think he is a martyr falsely accused. Did he himself know entirely why he was there?
The world laughed at him for visiting her for her body, but it would have vilified him for importuning her soul. To pay her for sex would have been mere hypocrisy on his part and gainful employment on hers; to make her hate herself would have been damnation for them both—damnation in a world without hell, to be sure, but still damnation.
And perhaps he was a hypocrite. Can we really know? But even hypocrisy has a direction: Was he a good cardinal falling into fornication or a fornicator rising into his cardinalate? Hypocrisy is just a mismatch, and any change that is not immediate and total will produce mismatches—changes for worse and changes for better.
Are we to be a Church without hypocrisy, then, or are we to be a Church whose hypocrisy runs in the right direction? I sometimes feel as if the only progress lies in throwing a line too far forward and then dragging ourselves up by it as best we can. For some deep reason, that is more effective than methodically constructing the virtues like a mason or a geometer. This is the great mystery of vows—clerical, monastic, marital—and it is why their centrality in our lives should not be neglected? It is impossible to advance if you have to fight your way step-by-step into the uplands; you must commit yourself by great leaps and let your failures be here and there lapses in your commitments. Claim the city whole, do not take it house by house; make your vices fight you slowly back for it.
But the field will never be swept clean, and we should hold on to such men as the cardinal.