I spend a lot of computer time reading and contributing to a blog called Calculated Risk. It’s a finance and economics blog, although people tend to wander very far from the topics, especially when business hours have ended. Many of the contributors are highly educated, articulate, and funny. They can be good electronic company.

Some of them are professed atheists, and a few of those are bitter opponents of religion in general and the Catholic Church in particular. I find myself crossing metaphorical swords with them, because when someone attacks faith, it provokes that sort of response in me. I don’t enjoy arguing, but sometimes it can’t be helped.

It doesn’t help that sometimes the things people do, even when they’re members of a church, or the Church, are indefensible. For instance, I can’t excuse or explain away some of the actions of bishops and priests, generally known as the Scandal. I don’t even try, except to point out that the Church is addressing the problem forcefully, and that it is a much smaller problem than it was decades ago. Still, the inexcusable can’t and should not be explained away.  The Holy Father has taken the lead in expressing contrition and asking for forgiveness.

But how can one explain to people who are afflicted by spiritual blindness why people remain Catholics, and in a way perhaps invisible to nonbelievers, continue to flourish in the Catholic Church? How to describe the ineffable transmission of God’s glory and grace in the sacraments, in prayer, in simple but receptive silence? It’s not easy to do.

The way to heaven is not only hard, it is very often obscure. Babylon, the earthly city in which we live, is not particularly generous with road signs and maps.

FROM HERE TO BABYLON

I saw a line of crucifixes
On the long highway
From here to Babylon that was
And is and yet to be

A darkened sky and grizzled sand,
A sentence for dissension,
For many miles the crosses stand.
A human vivisection

Not Jesus Son of God who rose
Already crucified –
Whose bleeding injuries are those
In hands and feet and side?

There will be the wounded host,
The short whip turned around,
The crown, the robe, the whipping post
Deep rooted in the ground

The hearsay of redemption spread,
A rumor spreading still,
Slowly, word by whispered word
And syllable by syllable