I attended a mass this morning. Yes, Catholic mass.

On purpose. Not despite her current scandals but because of them.

I attended during a week when every news source decried the sexual abuse of children by priests and covered up by hierarchs—when the face of the Catholic church burned with shame.

The apostle Paul wrote that when one part of the body suffers, the whole body suffers. James encouraged us to grieve with those who grieve. As a member of the one body of Jesus Christ, the church universal, I’m not given the option of seeing the sin and wickedness, the suffering or the grief of the Roman Catholic church as if we are not co-members of one family. To willfully turn away from bleeding brothers and sisters is itself a grievous sin of abandonment. Their scandal is my scandal because at stake is the Word of God who we proclaim.

So I went to mass.

A certain Fr. Calhoun was serving—a kindly 79-year-old priest. I wondered briefly if or how he might address the clergy scandals, but immediately, our songs, prayers and Scripture readings drew my eyes and heart up to the One greater, more ancient and more beautiful than the mess of his church.

We stood for the Gospel reading—the words of Christ, the Word of God—whose poignant message challenged the priesthood and its traditions. Thus says the Lord,

Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you hypocrites; as it is written: “These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. They worship me in vain; their teachings are merely human rules.” You have let go of the commands of God and are holding on to human traditions… You have a fine way of setting aside the commands of God in order to observe your own traditions.

Every plant that my heavenly Father has not planted will be pulled up by the roots. Leave them; they are blind guides. If the blind lead the blind, both will fall in the pit… Don’t you see that whatever enters the mouth goes into the stomach and then out of the body? But the things that come out of a person’s mouth come from the heart, and these defile them. For out of the heart come evil thoughts—murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, slander. These are what defile a person, but eating with unwashed hands does not defile them.

My mind was drawn back to earth, to the church, to our scandals and the anguish of the faithful—to the offense against the little ones and to the world that associates Christianity with hypocrisy and its clergy with the systemic sexual abuse of children and attending cover-ups.