A Refreshing Rereading of An Old Dichotomy

Thanks to a priest-friend for an interesting piece called "Why I Hate Religion, But Love Jesus."  It brings up the famous opposition, or at least tension, between faith in Jesus and organized religion…and, one may conclude, the Catholic religion in particular.  I call it "refreshing" only in the sense that content is brought up again when the curly arrow button (or its IE equivalent) is clicked.  It's more like a "rehashing" of a claim that apparently people haven't tired of making.

Well, it is also refreshing because of the speaker's candid admission of his past (at about 1:30)--his former use of pornography, and his subsequent conviction of organized religion (his congregation?) as unable/unwilling to deal with him in that wounded condition.  "The Church [should not be] a museum for good people but a hospital for the broken."

Thanks be to God for the gift of sacramental reconciliation, the proper remedy for sin; yet like gratitude is due for the many bodies of people who provide an "external forum," outside Confession, wherein people can speak freely about the shameful practices and attitudes that bind them.  I speak here of any two, three, or four letter group whose last letter is A.  These do not expect participants to adhere to an organized religion, yet welcome all such.  They invite people to discover and embrace God, to examine their lives, and to address past and present wrongs as a tried-and-true way to be able to live comfortably and vibrantly without returning to the destructive practices and attitudes of their past.  And they welcome increasingly-liberated members to stick around for the next person to come through their doors in need of such a way out.

Anyhow, Another blog presents a reliable riposte to the above video, concluding with a fantastic commercial from "Catholics Come Home."  Yet I would invite the patient reader nonetheless to consider how "the Church"--that is, the patient reader himself--can become a healer, albeit a wounded healer, for the many who are hurting.