The Church’s holiness and the scandals within
By Roberto de Mattei | 19 February 2025
As theologians explain, the Church founded by Jesus Christ is the Kingdom of God in this world, the fulfilment of the Redemption, the perfection of the work of the Holy Spirit, the most glorious manifestation of the Holy Trinity, Whose glorification is the ultimate purpose of the Church and of all creation. The holiness of God, One and Triune, constitutes the reason of the holiness of the Church, which is by nature intrinsically holy, pure and immaculate, even though it is made up of sinners. This holiness is witnessed to by its members. No matter how great the corruption within the Church, there will always be in it a sufficient number of saints who keep the true faith and lead a life of perfection. The holiness of the Mystical Body does not require that all its members be saints, but that there be saints and that their holiness appear as the fruit of the principles and rules of holiness that Christ entrusted to the Church (Corrado Algermissen, La Chiesa e le chiese, Morcelliana 1942, pp. 3-15).
Unfortunately, this supernatural dimension of the Church is foreign not only to those who fight against it but sometimes even to those who defend it. The Church has always had its detractors and its defenders, but today there is the risk that even these latter may consider it on a par with a business or a political movement.
Pope Francis, for example, often appears as a political leader rather than the successor of Peter. But beyond the questionable exercise of his government and the representation made of it in the media, he remains the legitimate Vicar of Christ, the 266th pope of the Catholic Church.
The legitimate successors of the Apostles are the cardinals who surround him and who will be responsible for electing his successor. But the controversies surrounding the figure of the reigning Pontiff also extend to the Sacred College, due to the errors publicly professed by some cardinals and the moral scandals that, rightly or wrongly, involve some of them. Scandals and errors have accompanied the life of the Church since its origins, which has equipped itself with ecclesiastical tribunals capable of evaluating accusations and imposing the appropriate ecclesiastical penalties on the guilty. One troubling fact is that, nowadays, the media’s convictions and acquittals are decreed before those of the ecclesiastical tribunals, overturning that tradition of discretion and justice which has always characterised the internal workings of the Church.
The international press has given prominence in recent days to the case of the Peruvian cardinal Juan Luis Cipriani Thorne, archbishop of Lima, who, according to the reconstruction of the matter by the Spanish daily El País of 25 January, followed by statements from the cardinal and from the Vatican press office, has been subjected to measures by the Holy See restricting his public activity, place of residence and use of the cardinal’s insignia. This is because the pope seems to consider him guilty of serious crimes in moral matters and has sanctioned him penally, but without anyone knowing the evidence on which these sanctions are based. For now, Cardinal Cipriani has declared himself innocent and has protested the lack of respect for the legal rules. Like Cardinal Cipriani, the Peruvian archbishop José Antonio Eguren, involved in the recent events that led to the suppression of the Sodalitium Christianae Vitae, has decried his having been subjected to a process in which his rights were not respected, implying that the Holy See proceeds on the juridical level using practices unworthy of the Church of Christ.
The risk is that the moral abuses of which these prelates are accused may be overlaid with equally serious juridical abuses. This could raise a fog of uncertainty around the numerous scandals that in the last few years of the pontificate have struck the college of cardinals, starting with the case of the American cardinal Theodore McCarrick, dismissed from the clerical state by Pope Francis in February 2019, for the sexual abuse in which he was involved.
A month later, in March 2019, the archbishop emeritus of Santiago de Chile, Ricardo Ezzati Andrello, who was appointed cardinal by Pope Bergoglio himself in 2014, had to resign as archbishop for having covered up reports of the sexual abuse of minors. At the same time, in France, Cardinal Philippe Barbarin was given a suspended sentence of six months in prison for not having reported sexual abuse committed by a priest in his diocese. Although in January 2020 the sentence was overturned on appeal, Barbarin submitted his resignation as archbishop of Lyon, which Pope Francis accepted in March 2020.
On 24 September 2020, Pope Francis accepted Cardinal Becciu’s renunciation of the “rights connected to the cardinalate”, including the right to enter a future conclave. Becciu was involved in the scandal of a real estate investment in London. He has always declared himself innocent, but in December 2023 a Vatican court, made up exclusively of lay judges, sentenced him to five years and six months in prison, with a lifelong ban from public office, for financial crimes including embezzlement, money laundering, fraud, extortion and abuse of office. No penal consequences, however, seem to have come from the case of Cardinal Óscar Rodríguez Maradiaga, archbishop of Tegucigalpa, coordinator of the group called to advise the pope in governing the Church. In 2017, the Honduran cardinal found himself at the centre of accusations of financial mismanagement, including receiving enormous sums of money from the Catholic University of Honduras, where he was chancellor, but he resigned as archbishop of the diocese only in 2023, at the age of 81.
Doctrinal and moral scandals now pervade the entire social body of the Church, disfiguring its image. Anyone who frequents ecclesial communities knows the sad situation in which many of them find themselves. The picture is one of opportunistic and cowardly parish priests; business-minded bishops, ignorant of theology and canon law; superiors of religious orders more intent on organising lobbies within their own congregations than on the good of the faithful; religious men and women, now disenamoured of the Church, who trample on their religious vows. Not to mention the state of disrepair exhibited by ecclesiastical buildings not maintained with robust state or European funding, but above all what is striking is the sloppiness and indifference with which the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass is celebrated, increasingly distant, not only in form, but also in spirit, from the apostolic one.
Is this a reason to lump everything together and toss the visible Church into the sea with contempt? That would not be the course of Our Lady, who at the foot of the Cross redoubled her love for the wounded Body of Our Lord. The Church on earth is Christ himself, surviving in a mystical way. The history of the Church reflects his life. The whole life of the Son of God was a Via Crucis, and such is the life of the Church through the troubled events of history. And just as in the life of Jesus, Good Friday was followed by the triumph of Easter Sunday, so too the members of the Church will one day participate in his glorification. For this reason, Jesus said to his disciples: “He that shall persevere to the end, he shall be saved” (Mt 24:13–14).
The wounds inflicted on the Church by its internal members must therefore nourish our perseverance and our trust in the indefectibility of the Church. The more it is mortified, the more our desire to exalt and glorify it must grow.
Magnanimous hearts trust in the final triumph of the Church, destined to shine, holy and immaculate, not only at the end of time, but in a historical future that Providence will certainly realise according to its mysterious designs.