“What can the third fall of Jesus under the Cross say to us?” asked Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger on Good Friday in 2005. Over the course of his meditations for that year’s Way of the Cross, the Cardinal had considered the various forms of suffering that believers endure in a fallen world hostile to the message of the Gospel. But in his reflection for the Ninth Station, he turned his attention to another kind of suffering: that inflicted on Christ and His flock from within the Church itself. “How much filth there is in the Church,” Ratzinger exclaimed, “even among those who, in the priesthood, ought to belong entirely to Him! How much pride, how much self-complacency! Christ’s betrayal by his disciples, their unworthy reception of his body and blood, is certainly the greatest suffering endured by the Redeemer; it pierces his heart. We can only call to him from the depths of our hearts: Kyrie eleison—Lord, save us!”

Thirteen years later, in his letter to the people of God, Pope Francis made reference to the filth of the Ninth Station as he acknowledged the “magnitude and the gravity of the damage done to so many lives” by clerical sexual abuse. “I make my own the words of the then Cardinal Ratzinger,” he wrote, “when, during the Way of the Cross composed for Good Friday 2005, he identified with the cry of pain of so many victims.” This interpretation of the cardinal’s words had been confirmed several years earlier by Ratzinger himself when, as Pope Benedict XVI, he had been asked by the journalist Peter Seewald if that Good Friday “filth” was, in fact, a reference to clerical sexual abuse. “It was involved,” Benedict replied. “As Prefect of the C.D.F., one hears of so many things.”

The journey of Our Lord’s Passion, which we follow devotionally in the Way of the Cross and liturgically in the sacred Paschal Triduum, confronts us with the truth of our capacity for treachery and self-deception, of our willingness, even enthusiasm, for causing harm to others—in a word, our sin. But at the same time, it confronts us with the deeper and far more mysterious truth of the justice of God. And both should be borne in mind when we consider the recent death of Theodore McCarrick, a name now permanently and quite rightly associated with the “filth” of Cardinal Ratzinger’s Way of the Cross and the “damage done to so many lives” described in Pope Francis’ letter. Though eventually laicized in 2019, McCarrick avoided sanction for decades of his life as a cleric and, in his latter years, was unable to stand in two separate criminal trials due to his advanced dementia.

The McCarrick case is an indictment of the protectionism which, through the actions and omissions of our shepherds, has been permitted to fester within the Church. But it is also a disquieting reminder of what procedural justice looks like in so many cases of sexual abuse: incomplete, impeded, or even entirely absent. Policies and procedures fail; individuals act out of malice or self-protection; years, even decades, pass before memories can be confronted and the words to describe them found. Evidence, once it is finally given, is simply not sufficient for a criminal court. Truth is cast down into the filth, and seems incapable of getting back up.

What, then, can the third fall of Jesus say to us, twenty years after the Good Friday on which Cardinal Ratzinger first posed the question—twenty years in which the Church has come to know and understand in ever graver ways the nature of that filth of clerical abuse which he decried? Perhaps it can remind us that even when the mechanics of earthly justice fail, and fail utterly, there is still a deeper and yet more necessary justice to be sought and found.

Justice is, after all, the virtue of giving what is due—in other words, of being in right relationship with others. It is a virtue of relations, not of transactions; it exists first and foremost between persons, rather than within legal systems. The victim-survivors of a perpetrator like McCarrick may never see their day in court. But they can still be returned to right relationship with God, with the Church, and even with themselves. They can recover their faith in divine goodness, recover their trust of the people around them, and find peace with the ongoing effects of what they have endured and of the way it has shaped them. There is no victim-survivor excluded from such a work of justice, and no fellow member of the Church incapable of helping him—in however small a way—to pursue it. Perhaps it would benefit us all within the Church if we did not see our efforts to combat abuse as a bureaucratic exercise ordered towards damage limitation. Restoring relationships between the abused and the Church requires a very different, authentically ecclesial response.

None of this, of course, replaces our responsibility to seek penalties for crimes, sanctions for perpetrators, and legal protections for the vulnerable. But it reminds us that God is still at work even when, in the darkness and complexity of a fallen world, these all seem impossible to obtain. Beneath the filth of Calvary we find the body of Christ; come Easter, that body will show us the wounds by which we, and all the injustices we have endured, are healed.