The Church of Christ

We're guaranteed infallibility, not impeccability.  And we make it through to the end of time--but it ain't often pretty:

...Without doing complete justice to these various works, I'll simply point out what they reveal, without pulling any punches:

• A Church fraught with internal dissent, division, and confusion.

• A Church with many weak leaders who sometimes openly reject the Faith, many leaders who seem indifferent or confused, and with a few strong leaders who routinely face opposition and even mockery from those who should be supporting and defending them. This includes popes succumbing to internal pressures and personal weaknesses and bishops jostling for position and prestige instead of focusing on the words of Jesus.

• A Church in which serious moral rot is evident in often alarming amounts and ways. This includes spiritual laxity, acceptance of pagan ideas and practices, arrogance, jealousy, infighting, immodesty, hypocrisy, adultery, and sexual perversion. The absence of charity is equalled (or informed by) a failure to consider the spiritual and physical well-being of others.

• A Church whose members often display doctrinal confusion, indifference and even overt syncretism, and whose understanding of theological basics and doctrinal fundamentals is often sorely lacking.

• A Church beseiged by false teaching from both within and without, including forms of spiritualism, as well as extreme beliefs ranging from disgusting libertinism to hyper-legalism. There seems to be a perpetual wave of false teachers from within, openly assaulting Church authority and attacking orthodox doctrine, including overt attacks on the divinity and person of Jesus Christ. Others are so obsessed with external laws that they seem to completely ignore the need for conversion and inner transformation. And some insist that moral codes and limits are not necessary at all (faith, they insist, is all that is needed, not works); they even go so far as to promote practices that can only be describes as demonic in origin.

• A Church in which liturgical abuse is often present, including failures to treat the Eucharistic liturgy with reverence and a failure on the part of many Catholics to receive the Eucharist while in a state of grace and with proper respect.

• A Church filled with Catholics who openly disregard Church teaching on nearly every subject, refuse to admit their sins (however public they might be), pursue a way of life that can fairly be described as idolatrous, and yet shamelessly present themselves for Holy Communion and declare themselves to be Christian.

It is, indeed, a difficult thing to consider and contemplate. But we must, if we are honest, admit that these books—the twenty-seven books of the New Testament, to be specific—do indeed reveal a Church filled with deeply disturbing problems, immoral behavior, liturgical abuse, failure of leadership, failure of obedience, and much else besides