4thace reviewed Struck Down, Not Destroyed by Colleen Dulle
Scandals in the Church do not destroy faith
5 stars
I deeply sympathized with this account by a Catholic a couple of generations younger than myself who has seen the kinds of things that have happened in our church. It must be hard to be a professional reporter on the Vatican beat while at the same time professing that as your faith. While you benefit from understanding on a closer level the structures that come up, you also get an uncomfortably close view of the ways in which shady people take advantage of their privileged positions. There is a tension between what it says in our holy books and traditions, and what actually goes on out there in the hierarchy. Chapter by chapter, the author focuses on different subjects in the Catholic church mainly from the last few decades and explains how difficult an insider view makes it to shrug off some of the abuses and shortcomings. The author is …
I deeply sympathized with this account by a Catholic a couple of generations younger than myself who has seen the kinds of things that have happened in our church. It must be hard to be a professional reporter on the Vatican beat while at the same time professing that as your faith. While you benefit from understanding on a closer level the structures that come up, you also get an uncomfortably close view of the ways in which shady people take advantage of their privileged positions. There is a tension between what it says in our holy books and traditions, and what actually goes on out there in the hierarchy. Chapter by chapter, the author focuses on different subjects in the Catholic church mainly from the last few decades and explains how difficult an insider view makes it to shrug off some of the abuses and shortcomings. The author is an extraordinarily grounded person, however, able to recover from disgust and disillusionment by talking with sympathetic voices among the ordinary faithful and those people within the hierarchy, priests and leaders of orders, who oppose some of the worst aspects of the institution. To see how slowly reform comes to a church founded millennia ago can be disheartening. The most harrowing parts are where she describes the effect of the worst practices on the most vulnerable who had been looking to the church for some enlightenment in this world, but used and denigrated instead. The worst times in the institutional church may have been centuries ago when it exercised temporal power like other nations, yet there is still something like that old high-handedness that manifests within its structures even today. Individuals who vie for power do so now through money and pronouncements and pressure tactics. And yet by the end of the book you get a to understand the residue of optimism persisting among people who live out the tenets of their faith.
I learned a lot from this little book and was able to get a glimpse into a side of my church that I would not normally be able to access as an outsider. I hope this author continues to use your gift for incisive and heartfelt writing to open up those parts of religion which are a mystery to most of us. I listened to this as an audio book narrated by the author. I felt it was an excellent piece of Lenten reading portraying an honest view of the church in the world.