Triduum Sacrum – Good Friday

Triduum Sacrum: Good Friday of the Lord’s Passion

Isaiah 52:13 – 53:12; Psalm 31; Hebrews 4:14-16; 5:7-9; John 18:1 – 19:42

“What is truth?” Pilate asks.

If you want to know, read the 600 page deposition of Bishop Howard Hubbard.

Truth can be very painful and make us uncomfortable. It can fill us with a sense of shame and disbelief. Truth challenges our self-image. And so we resist the truth by denying it. We keep secrets within our families, deny the history of racism and genocide at the foundation of our nation and have kept secrets within our Church.

Three times Pontius Pilate emphatically declares, “I find no guilt in this man.” So why was Jesus crucified?

Truth, as painful as it can be, calls us to conversion, a fundamental change. Why did Pilate falter? Why do we? Declaring the truth is only the first step. Without heartfelt reflection on the truth nothing changes within us. That is why Jesus was crucified.

By fully speaking the truth, Bishop Hubbard told the story of every diocesan bishop of the past decades.

By fully speaking the truth, he shined an uncomfortable and shameful spotlight on the Diocese of Albany.

By fully speaking the truth, he held up to us a mirror that we might reflect on human failure.

In speaking truth Bishop Hubbard reveals to us that Christian hope is found in the embrace of failure…our failure. That is why Christ crucified is at the heart of our faith and why the crucified Christ is rejected by our world bent on success, lies and violence.

Please understand, I am not out to exonerate Bishop Hubbard or his actions and decisions. I do not know what I would have done in the circumstance, none of us do. I also know that today claiming not to be a mandated reporter no longer will or should be accepted as a reasonable excuse. Sacrificing the innocent to law, to self-image, to avoid scandal; is itself scandalous.

These words are very difficult for me to speak since I have known Howard for most of my life and have great esteem for him and always will. I have come to understand that each one of us is far better and good than our worst failures.

Nor do I wish to minimize in any way the unimaginable pain and suffering of the victims of clerical sexual abuse in our Church. They are the innocent Suffering Servant of Isaiah in our midst. They have grown up among us, unnoticed. They have borne harsh treatment. They have been buried in unmarked graves of Canadian residential schools and Irish Magdalene laundries.

Their wounds like those of Jesus, marking even the Risen Christ, are eternal.

Striving, maybe clumsily, to hold both victims and clergy, people and bishops in one embrace, I am struggling to point out a path toward healing that can only be revealed by fully telling and encountering the truth.

Unlike Pilate, we must ponder and reflect. Who are we as Church? Who do we want to be? How are we together with the Holy Spirit to move forward?