One of my favorite parables comes from the Decameron, the second story of the first day: Abraham, a Jew, at the instance of Jehannot de Chevigny, goes to the court of Rome, and having marked the evil life of the clergy, returns to Paris, and becomes a Christian. Abraham, curious about the Christian faith of his friend, believes he must see the pope in Rome himself before he could ever convert. He there encounters such a carnival of obscenity and sin that he returns with the unshakeable faith that only God’s true Church could survive being run by such wicked men. (For more recent struggles in the Church, see Christopher Caldwell, page 49.) Abraham declares,
I tell thee, so far as I was able to carry my investigations, holiness, devotion, good works or exemplary living in any kind was nowhere to be found in any clerk; but only lewdness, avarice, gluttony, and the like, and worse, if worse may be, appeared to be held in such honour of all, that (to my thinking) the place is a centre of diabolical rather than of divine activities. To the best of my judgment, your Pastor, and by consequence all that are about him devote all their zeal and ingenuity and subtlety to devise how best and most speedily they may bring the Christian religion to nought and banish it from the world. And because I see that what they so zealously endeavour does not come to pass, but that on the contrary your religion continually grows, and shines more and more clear, therein I seem to discern a very evident token that it, rather than any other, as being more true and holy than any other, has the Holy Spirit for its foundation and support.
It is a mercy that such conditions are almost unthinkable to a Catholic today, when we have been blessed by many personally devout, even sainted popes for several lifetimes. (For our symposium on the lifetime of our late Pope Francis, see page 23.) Yet the parable is still helpful because today’s Catholic also knows that his Church is the church of history (Connie Marshner discusses that history on page 15) and that the actions of all Her popes and emissaries since Her founding are carried with Her, and accounted to Her. She is a Church of the greatest saints and the greatest sinners, yesterday, today, and tomorrow, and is free from the bondage of relevance that beleaguers every other human institution. (Read Aaron James on the life of one of the Church’s complicated musical children on page 54.)
Saint John Henry Newman’s comment on the desolation of Hippo, the city of Saint Augustine, is a description of the position of every member of the Church: “He needs no dwelling-place, whose home is the Catholic Church; he fears no barbarian or heretical desolation, whose creed is destined to last unto the end.”
