Somehow in this corrupt and disappointing institution, there is at least one really great priest.

Obviously, there are many.  But today I met with a man who cannot be explained.  This crooked Church filled with crooked sinners (like me), a Church which can legitimately be prosecuted as a criminal organization under the RICO statues in the diocese of Altoona-Johnstown, has produced, in spite of everything, one really great, humble and holy priest.  I have met him, and I know him rather well.  I will not name him, because he would not want me to.  But he’s the real deal.

But … “are grapes gathered from thornbushes, or figs from thistles?” (Mat. 7:16)

The church in a shambles.  Cologne Cathedral, 1945.

Humanly speaking, an organization that appears as corrupt or at least as incompetent as the Catholic Church should not be able to put forth anything but thistles.

In other words, there is no human explanation for this.  Likewise, Cardinal Newman points out that there is no human explanation for the Church in history.

There have been many kingdoms before and since Christ came, which have been set up and extended by the sword. This, indeed, is the only way in which earthly power grows. … But the propagation of the Gospel was the internal development of one and the same principle in various countries at once, and therefore may be suitably called invisible, and not of this world.

He points out that not only did the Gospel spread without force of arms, on the efforts of an original rag-tag group of misfits we call apostles, but it sprang up as a group of local churches from community to community; local groups answering to a central authority that eventually stepped in and took the hollowed out shell of the Roman empire and made use of it; and you, as a Pagan, might be shocked that people you’ve known all your life are suddenly, even secretly, Christian and that an invasion and transformation of a worldly empire has taken place; and the empire replaced by something not of this world … and all of this, right under your nose.

How did this happen?  And how can a merely human institution produce saints?  The best human institutions can do wonders.  The Marines can produce a few good men.  The best colleges can produce great scholars.  But no one can produce a saint.  Even the family – the greatest of all earthly institutions – cannot produce saints, not even by trying.

How, then, do we find a few holy men and women here and there walking among us?

Seriously, the Church, especially the stump of a thing that calls itself “Church” in most of our parishes, by any human standard of judgment, should not be capable of this.