It's out there if you're looking:
Sooner or later, everybody struggles with disillusionment. It might be because your bishop or priest is a screwup, a disgrace or a pervert. It might be because you entered the Church, brimming with zeal and love for Jesus and the Faith — only to discover that the nun who seems to run your parish (there’s only a priest there every other week) resents the Church, belittles the Faith, and treats you like an ignorant hick because you take seriously and delight in the Church’s teachings.
Or maybe you have a hero who lost his faith or sinned gravely. Maybe you are a student who took the Faith for granted and are now at a Catholic university where the prof delights in deconstructing the Faith (he calls it the “fundamentalism”) of freshmen who take Church teaching seriously.
Maybe you are somewhere in middle age and have begun to wonder, “Is that all there is? Work, buy, consume, die? I thought there would be more.”
In sum, maybe you are facing the fact that some hope you had, somebody you deeply believed in, some cause to which you gave yourself, some supposedly self-evident truth about the universe isn’t so true after all, and the glow of promise you felt in your younger (and what you are tempted to call your “more naïve”) days has dimmed, leaving you asking whether the Faith is a cheat and a fraud. You are struggling with disillusionment, disappointment, and the whole complex of disorientation, discouragement, fear, doubt, anger and depression that goes with it. What do you do?
That's our buddy Mark Shea and he's just getting warmed up.
If Google has brought you to this post, then God might just be wanting you to read the rest of Mark's.
Go now and do something about that disillusionment.
My problem over the years hasn't been disillusionment with God: it's been disillusionment with the Catholic Church which has lurched from a child abuse scandal to advocating for ObamaCare despite the obvious endgame that they are now protesting - that it was always going to wind up paying for contraceptives and abortion.
The Church has been hijacked by Jesuits with a Marxist agenda. My wife just completed a five year doctoral degree at a supposedly Catholic university where she was forced to sit down and shut up lest her disagreement with their ultra-left-wing political views get her kicked out of the program. And yes, they EXPRESSLY told her that. She was forced to read a book of Marxist cant authored by Jesuits which extolled the virtues of the Marxist rebels in South America as part of her curriculum.
If the Church REALLY cared about disillusionment then they would rein in the Jesuits which are contradicting Church teachings and practicing politics in the name of the Catholic faith.
He doesn't address that, and these days it seems, that would be the more common problem that Catholics are having.
Posted by: Jim B | Thursday, July 19, 2012 at 10:03 AM